While the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce is set to host a “Cool School” next month to teach businesses how to attract young employees, there’s an interesting conversation taking place on a Wake Forest fan forum at Scout.com about the following question: Would you move to Atlanta, Charlotte or Nashville? There were pros and cons for each city, and it was mentioned at least once that our downtown could be more of a “hotspot,” but here’s a representative quote:

[The] main problem with atlanta is traffic, and it is MUCH worse than in Charlotte or Nashville. Charlotte and Nashville are very much alike - mid-sized cities, lots of young people, most important city in the state, and a large redneck-focused industry in town (NASCAR and music). Charlotte has the banks, which is nice - lots of good jobs there, and it’s very stable. But Nashville has better “out of town guest” appeal.

Nashville is easily holding its own in the discussion. It wasn’t that long ago, say 10 to 15 years, that Nashville would have been a distant third in this inquiry. I don’t see any need to cancel the Cool School, but at least we know we’re doing something right.

• The Scene’s Bruce Barry makes a sound argument that statistics and data alone do not make the case for efforts to keep the Preds in town. I am in favor or amending the lease to secure the team’s future in Nashville because there are intangible benefits to having–and keeping–a major-league professional franchise.
• I agree with Metro Council Emily Evans that the decision to use public resources to lure–and retain–sports franchises has already been made (in the mid-1990s). I respect and understand the objections of those who oppose subsidizing franchises under any circumstances, but I believe Nashville answered that question long ago. We’re not at a point, in my opinion, where abandoning that choice makes sense.
• Same sex adoption opponents: Would you really rather have Rob Briley care for your children than Keith Durbin?
• You are now free to not wait in line as long: Southwest is modifying its open-seating policy. This looks like a good idea and a nice balance between open and assigned seating. No more standing in line because one person with an “A” boarding pass starts the queue 90 minutes before departure. Ding.

… the more they stay the same? That’s a familiar axiom, but I hope it doesn’t ring true this time around. Nashville’s two most prominent elected officials, Mayor Karl Dean and Vice-Mayor Diane Neighbors, have ushered in new (and welcome) approaches regarding the Metro Council. Dean’s promise is to have a better working relationship with the city’s legislative body, and Neighbors’ is for shorter council meetings.

The Scene’s Jeff Woods labeled Neighbors’ early approach to running council meetings the “Best New Political Idea” in this week’s Best of Nashville issue:

“You don’t need to be sitting there for an hour-and-a-half of presentations on a public hearing night and not have yours to come up until 11:30,” says our new vice mayor, Diane Neighbors. She figures she can save time by asking council committees to tackle more of the vetting of proposed ordinances. And all those pointless memorializing resolutions? No need to take up time with those on Tuesday nights, Neighbors says.

Michael Cass reported on Dean’s initial efforts to reach out to the council last week:

Mayor Karl Dean went to the Metro Council chamber Tuesday to set a tone of cooperation with a group his predecessor was sometimes accused of neglecting. Speaking at the council’s first meeting of the new term, Dean said he would “look to you for guidance” as he tries to understand the needs of Nashville’s neighborhoods and build on the city’s recent momentum. I commit to working closely with each of you from the beginning,” the new mayor said in a brief speech. “My goal is to be accessible. While we may not agree on everything — and we shouldn’t — we should be able to sit down and talk about anything.”

I think both of these moves are welcome approaches that will promote responsible government, and I hope they continue. I think there’s a decent chance they will, but I’ll also be curious to see if they still pass muster six months from now. Here’s hoping they do.

Lisa Robbins makes a good point in this week’s Nashville Scene, the annual Best of Nashville issue, under the entry “Best Political Tragicomedy: Li’l Bob and The Blog Ranters:”

Take heed, future candidates. Send a memo to supporters: “If you wouldn’t shout it on a street corner holding one of my signs, don’t post it online!” It’s sad to watch a candidate flame out at the end of a long career playing the criminal-loving-tax-crazy-liberal-from-Massachusetts card. But the mangy dogs barking taunts in the background? You gotta laugh at that.

How much of a difference, either way, did the Clement commenters make in the overall election? Probably not that much, but judging from the generally representative vitriol that Robbins quoted in her piece, they can’t have helped Bob’s cause.

This raises interesting questions: How much can a candidate rein-in this kind of activity online? How long until one candidate resorts to having anonymous posters slamming himself or herself online, to make it appear that his opponent is the one slinging the digital dirt? [H/t to Sean for steering me to this week's Scene.]

What is it with politicians of all stripes and the third person? Former mayoral candidate Buck Dozier is yet another to refer to himself as though he were someone else:

Dozier says both Clement and Dean “have asked me for their support. Nobody’s offered me a job or anything like that. I want to make sure the city’s in good hands. We’ve got a lot at stake in the next decade.” Dozier acknowledges his endorsement may not mean that much. “Most people will make up their own minds regardless of what Buck Dozier does.”

When Buck finds out what Buck is going to do, he’ll let you know. Or maybe not.

Did Bill Purcell’s relatively early announcement that he would not seek a third term (a possibility which, to be fair, may not have been legal under the city charter) throw a wrench in the mayoral race, too? Reading this Nashville Scene article written one year ago, I can’t help but wonder:

District Attorney Torry Johnson was at the YMCA working out earlier this week when a curious voter asked him the question everybody wants answered: is he or isn’t he running for mayor? Johnson’s answer hasn’t wavered, whether he’s talking to constituents or impatient reporters: he’s still trying to decide.

He says the office of mayor is “interesting” and “intriguing”—the kind of position he’d be willing to make sacrifices for. At the same time, he’d been planning to run for district attorney last spring when Mayor Bill Purcell announced he wouldn’t try for a third term, leaving the field open for three candidates who leapt into the void. “The announced candidates said they were in practically from the minute Mayor Purcell’s announcement reverberated through the city,” Johnson says. “I’d been focused on the DA’s race up to that point. Only then did people start talking to me about being mayor. So I’m coming at this a little bit differently.”

According to a source with knowledge of the DA’s inner circle, Johnson is almost certain to run. The same source says Johnson’s closest confidants put the likelihood at 90 percent.

Here’s hoping no one had money on Johnson as a 90-percent “sure thing” last summer. There’s a funny thing about the near certainty of 90 percent, too: That 10 percent still keeps coming back around and winning out oh, about one out of every 10 times.

As often happens, I wholeheartedly agree with Liz Garrigan and her column in this week’s Nashville Scene:

The [mayoral] field is too fragmented, and it amounts to some bad juju for Dean and Briley. So, gentlemen, we know it’s not fair to ask one of the two best candidates in the field to abandon your pursuit. But politics is rarely a fair game. Once Briley’s TV is up and there’s a clear sense of your respective support, one of you needs to get out and throw your support behind the other. Do what’s best for your city. You wouldn’t have to make a pact with the devil—only with one another.

Look, guys, I’ve spent time with both of you on several occasions this year. I think you’re both smart, intelligent people who will lead this city in the direction I’d like to see it go. I wish you were in separate races because I’d likely vote for you both under those circumstances, but unfortunately you’re not.

I fear, as Garrigan does, that neither of you can win while both of you are candidates. If you are genuinely as inclined to act in the city’s best interest as I firmly believe you are, lock yourselves in the same room (leaving your staff members and consultants behind) sometime in the next week or so and figure this thing out. One of you needs to do the right thing for Nashville and leave the race. Whichever one of you does will earn a lot of respect–and future viability–by doing so. Both of you may suffer politically in the long run if you insist on charging ahead in futility.

Good insights here from pundits north of the border and south of Kentucky. First, from an unnamed author at TSN, Canada’s answer to ESPN:

You have a franchise in Nashville that has shown signs of not being long-term viable but it is not so destitute that it is an absolute foregone conclusion it can’t stay there and, more importantly, there are potential legal roadblocks to re-locating the franchise in the short term.

This is a pretty-fair take on the Preds’ vital signs, and I’m grateful to see it written by someone from Ontario. There’s been plenty of piling on, much of it exaggerated and some of it deserved, about how Nashville hasn’t supported hockey. The truth is that the Preds’  attendance and financial picture aren’t too far below a fair share of NHL clubs, but support, especially of the corporate variety, does need to increase (and soon).

Randy Horick, sports columnist for the Nashville Scene, reiterates a fact that has been easily overshadowed by all the drama that has ensued since the Preds’ sale possibility emerged in May:

If ticket sales push the attendance average above 14,000, the lease is unbreakable. And that means that, in effect, the real owners of the Predators are the residents and corporate leaders of the Nashville area. The next move literally is up to us.

I’ve quickly tired of this undulating pattern of good and bad news about the Predators’ fate, but I have not tired of watching my favorite team take the ice. Say what you will, this team does not have to go anywhere, and there is plenty that those of us here Nashville can do to see that that is exactly what happens.

I’ve been meaning to weigh in on Jeff Woods’ column from last week’s Nashville Scene, the one where he takes the Campbellites (better known as the Church of Christ) to task. This is the column where Woods omits the words “from forty years ago” after “typical Christer:”

It is a loose network of independent churches with no creed, so it’s hard to generalize about its beliefs. But in addition to the standard conservative Christian articles of faith, the typical Christer thinks a church piano is the devil’s instrument, it’s wrong to celebrate Christmas as Jesus’ birth—and, oh yes, everyone but members of the Church of Christ is going to spend eternity in hell. [Emphasis on "typical" added.] Some church members dispute that last tenet as a mite judgmental, so we asked Dozier to explain.

“That isn’t true” that the Church of Christ thinks everyone except its own members is going to hell, Dozier says. “Probably years ago there were some who may have said that, unfortunately. They’re all dead, I think. We don’t believe that now.”

That’s good, because heaven would be a sparsely populated place if only Church of Christ members went. There aren’t many in the world—something less than 2 million. Nashville, though, has been blessed or cursed with a lot, depending on your point of view.

As a Church-of-Christ preacher’s kid’s kid with zero plans of preaching from the pulpit, I have plenty of frustration for, irritation toward and disagreement with the denomination, one I stopped attending in the fourth grade. Having attended a denomination-based school from grades one through twelve, though, I take issue with Woods’ use of the word “typical.”

In my experience on the Lipscomb campus, I’d say plenty of the students didn’t espouse at least the latter two of those beliefs, though some of the faculty did. There weren’t too many would-be dorks among the student body looking to champion the cause of accapella music, either, now that I think about it. To say that the beliefs Woods describes are representative of the typical church attendee today, I think, is inaccurate.

I won’t be voting for Carolyn Baldwin Tucker or for Buck Dozier this summer–unless, and Heaven help us if it happens, Dozier winds up in a runoff with Clement as his only opponent–but it doesn’t have much to do with their feelings about instrumental music. I personally just don’t think either candidate is representative enough of the more cosmopolitan and progressive community Nashville has become since the “typical Christer” started letting go of some of his or her exclusivism.

The Nashville Scene’s notorious Fabricator reports that Kroger is finally seeing the light when it comes to preventing gays and lesbians from brainwashing the general public:

“We’re not going to be playing any Elton John, George Michael, Melissa Etheridge or any other openly gay performers.”Most stores in the chain pipe in a selection of popular songs interspersed with promotional announcements, and until now there has been no sexual orientation test for the music. “Before, we only focused on having songs that most people like—kind of a middle-of-the-road approach,” the Kroger source says. “We’ll still do that, just without anybody who’s a known homosexual…”

“I don’t see what the big deal is about this,” the Kroger source says. “There are a million songs out there. And a lot of performers aren’t going to be missed. It’s not like we were playing a lot of Frankie Goes to Hollywood or Culture Club anyway.”

Asked if this newfound concern for prevailing social norms extended to performers who are known to use illegal drugs, the spokesman backpedals. “We’ll still play songs by those people because we don’t want our stores to go completely silent,” he says. “Performers like Charlie Daniels and Tom Petty may sing about dope, but at least they’re sexually straight. As far as we know.”

Holy cow! Does this mean Boy George is gay? The 80s are officially ruined for me now.

If I can be serious for a moment (we’ll see), Kroger’s decision to ban Out and About is silly, in my opinion. I’ve just scanned the entire current issue, and despite being an avid weekly reader of the Scene, I definitely find more material that would be likely to offend someone or be inappropriate for children in a typical Scene issue than I do in Out and About. One of these publications features several pages of racy chat line ads and personals classifieds, and one of them doesn’t. Care to guess?

An audience member at Tuesday’s PRSA meeting asked Tennessean senior editor Deborah Fisher about how the paper’s reporters are responding to all of the changes taking place in print and online. With reporters being asked to post breaking news stories during the day and post blog entries and the paper preparing to shift to an around-the-clock news room and begin training some of its reporters to record video as well as write articles, the workload is changing and increasing quickly for a staff that Fisher acknowledged is not making any major increases to its staff. She also shared her perceptions of how the newsroom is adjusting to what she described as a “somewhat chaotic” process of publishing news both online and in print:

“I don’t know that we have gotten a lot of negative responses [from veteran reporters on staff]… When they begin receiving comments and story leads, they see the power of posting online. It helps eliminate the restrictions of the print cycle…

“In terms of breaking news, reporters realize that [online story posting] doesn’t take a whole lot away from print reporting. It’s also like writing a draft where reporters can crystallize their thoughts. One of the places where we do struggle with online updates is when the reporter is still working a story and needs time to keep following leads and make phone calls to investigate tips. It’s more of a distraction than a time issue.”

Another attendee asked Fisher about perceptions that few of the paper’s reporters either grew up in the city or have a thorough understanding of the local community. Fisher responded:

“Deep community knowledge is really important. We have a lot of staff who have been there a long time. In any market, you’re going to have people come in and come out. The Tennessean, in contrast to other papers I’ve been at, has a large amount of people who have been here a long time…Reporters can come in to a situation and learn the lay of the land. We do a lot to help them know who’s who in the community.”

The Nashville Scene and others have made an issue in recent years of reporting about increasing frustrations in the newsroom, departures of long-term reporters and a loss of this kind of community knowledge on the paper’s staff. It can safely be said, I think, that modern journalism looks very different than it did 10 or 15 years ago, and that the skills required and demands made on reporters are as intense and as varied now perhaps as they have ever been. From what I have witnessed in print and online, it seems that the evolution of The Tennessean is definitely a work-in-progress, but I am hoping that its increasing focus on breaking local news and frequent online updates will ultimately lead to a stronger and more relevant newspaper.

As happens more often than not, I agree with Liz and her ode to Councilman Eric Crafton in this week’s Scene:

We do conduct our business in English and always have. Not once, as editor of a newspaper that makes frequent requests for public information—and roots around daily in the recesses of government offices for documents and other city goings-on—have we encountered an arrest record, a legal filing, a personnel file, an interview with a bureaucrat, or any other manifestation of municipal business in a non-English format. Well, except for the usual Metro-mangling of the English language—e.g., “let me have him to call you,” “you can quote me per beta,” or the classic plea for secrecy, “I need this to be unanimous.” (And there’s always the Metro Council favorite: “I have a qwerstion….”) …

That said, you have accomplished wonders in uniting some of the city’s most fragmented factions. There could not be a more widely assorted, contradictory cast of characters who find your intention repulsive. The Scene and Bishop David Choby…on the same side? Liberadio! and the Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce? Bizpigs and African American clergy? The list of multifarious hand-holders who have come together for what may be the first and last time goes on and on—a testament to how spurious and ill-motivated your scheme truly is …

Here you are, assuming that others who find themselves needing to learn a new language don’t have the same willingness and eagerness you did. It’s unfounded. No doubt when you were in Japan you tried to speak the language the best you could, but you probably needed a little sympathetic assistance from time to time—a stranger recognizing your effort, and reaching to meet you halfway. That’s all your mob of critics is saying.

Instead, by saying you’ll back the effort to put the measure on the August ballot, you’re assuming the worst of people in (or off) the same boat. And by trying to create a law where none is required, you’re diluting the good nature of Nashville’s citizens.

The last point here is the one that bugs me the most. This is a great place to live with a lot of kind-hearted people in it. We’re consistently named the nation’s friendliest city (although occasionally not to the homeless), and there are wonderful and amazing things taking place here as people continue to discover and explore Nashville. Yes, we have problems, but our ability to communicate in English is not one of them. How does this help us when we have bigger problems, including Dickerson Pike, to tackle?