Seeking "stakeholders"

If you've been on a "stakeholder committee" for the city of Charlotte (or Mecklenburg County, for that matter) and would be willing to undergo a short interview about your experience, please e-mail me today at mnewsom@charlotteobserver.com I'm writing my Saturday op-ed column about the stakeholder experience. (An aside, I got plenty of reaction to the uptown retail column of last week, but with no access to e-mail for most of the week I couldn't do a follow-up column. Maybe next week?)

And yes, our e-mail at the Observer is finally back in full this morning. I noticed that without e-mail I did a lot more walking around our office – is e-mail part of what's making Americans obese? And I noticed that once it was restored in a sort of circa 1993 version, 85 percent of what was in there was Viagra spam, Pfizer spam, "Russian girls" spam, press releases from GOP congressional PR folk and some over-the-transom op-eds offered by PR firms. Ugh.