I've met Todd Metcalf, he's a great person and very good at what he does. That doesn't make him news. Again, as in the piece below, also by Paula Rhoden, we have a puffy, uncritical profile more suited to a slick Chamber of Commerce magazine than a newspaper. I'd really like to know the thought process behind this assignment.
Then there's the headline, an assertion completely unsupported by the text. That's a high-school mistake, guys.
This profile of Yavapai County Community Health Services by Paula Rhoden is done well enough -- for a magazine. I'm not clear at all what makes it page-one news. The public-information angle makes a certain amount of sense as a B1 feature. But there's exactly zero information from any outside perspective on how well the agency is doing its job or handling its budget, things voters need to know to evaluate this public service. I would like to know that the Courier is looking out for the community. Uncritical puffery bodes otherwise.
Lorin McLain's introduction of Joe Place is meant to highlight policy changes for the facility intended to make a difference in its success. The answers are pretty vague, however -- not necessarily the fault of Lorin, of course.
I interviewed Joe last week, and information I got is at odds with some of this. I plan a followup with him this week for the Read It Here piece.
Now here's what really ropes me off: Why can't the Courier figure out how to write the theatre's name? People are so frequently writing this wrong, and the Courier should be helping, not making it worse. It's not plural possessive as we have in the headline (Elks'), it's not singular possessive as we have in the photo caption (Elk's), its a simple plural: Elks. This ignorant apostrophe-tossing is just ludicrous. Lorin apparently got it right, everyone else messed up.
Update, May 9: Joe has never conducted a symphony or managed a theatre. His relevant experience is entirely church-based, as a musician, music director and producer.
This alert by Mirsada Buric is proactive, well targeted, well placed in the paper and, we hope, timely. I'd be awfully surprised if the tactics and target areas remain the same after this morning, of course, and if the reader is expecting a scammer to mention Walter Cronkite and she doesn't, the reader may decide to go along with the gag anyway. But what can you do?
Don't be fooled by the headline, the meat in this agenda report by Paula Rhoden is way down, where we find out that the county wants to spend another $42,000 of your money to further study what we already know about the Verde base flow.
Joanna Dodder follows up on her April 22 piece, turning in what looks remarkably like some real investigative reporting. I'm liking this. I hadn't heard that the Queen Bee and Mal Barrett were involved in getting Townsend to back out of running for the Senate, and the connection to Assessor Hambrick is all new to me. So far it seems to be all about appearances, and small-town life inevitably involves a lot of cross-connections, but it sure doesn't pass the smell test. I have to wonder how many prominent people in town have known about this and kept quiet, which did no favors for Mr Hambrick, whether he's dirty or not.
Just what the people of D-H want: another new plan. In wandering this fog of numbers I find that the public open space along the riverbed offered in the previous plan has mysteriously disappeared in favor of a private park for the gated enclave. Who'd have thought?
Here is the second Goodman column in a row (the last was on April 25) that the Courier has run full-length and largely unmolested. It originally ran as "Hoisted on His Own Pizza" on May 3.
The following will be real inside baseball, so if your eyes glaze over feel free to move on. I'd like to highlight a few of the specific changes to the text, to illustrate what I mean by arbitrary edits and introduced errors.
Goodman: "A for abstinence, B for be faithful, and C for condoms only if you belong to a high-risk group that flunks A and B."
Courier: "A for abstinence, B for be faithful, and C for condoms if you belong to a high-risk group that flunks A and B."
Here it appears that the copy editor wanted to tighten the paragraph a bit to eliminate what we used to call a tail-break in my shop, half a word on a line by itself. This also helps fit the copy into the available space. The way to do this is to substitute a shorter word or eliminate one. The editor's blue pencil chose 'only,' a nice, short word. But it also removed an important nuance from Goodman's sentence. The editor could have eliminated 'George' a little earlier in the graph without harm. In context the specific choice seems to be an attempt to 'correct' Goodman's thinking.
Goodman: "Joining a dishonor role that includes anti-child predator predator Mark Foley and anti-homosexual homosexual Ted Haggard ..."
Courier:"Joining a dishonor role that includes anti-child predator Mark Foley and anti-homosexual homosexual Ted Haggard ..."
In this example we may have a similar tail-break situation, and again the editor could have elided "Randall" farther down for no foul. Instead s/he arbitrarily deflated Goodman's perhaps too-cute but nonetheless intelligible parallel construction in favor of gibberish. Perhaps s/he didn't understand the sentence.
Goodman: "The $1.5 billion that has been thrown into teaching abstinence-until-marriage has made no difference in delaying the onset of sex."
Courier: "The $1.5 billion Bush has thrown into teaching abstinence-until-marriage has made no difference in delaying the onset of sex."
The bosses have decreed that no passive construction shall be left unmolested, and the copy editor dutifully applied the blue pencil. But an active construction requires a subject, so s/he had to invent one, in this case "Bush." Perhaps Ms Goodman reserves her displeasure exclusively for the Current Resident on this score, but she didn't write it that way, and the change injects a nuance that she expressly avoided.
Goodman: "... abstinence-only earmarks on AIDS prevention funding are undermining success."
Courier:"... abstinence-only earmarks on AIDS prevention money are undermining success.
I have no clue why the copy editor made this change.
The editor writes what no rational person will dispute. But what should we do about it? Close the forest early, maybe? The Courier could assist in moving public opinion to support an always-unpopular Forest Service decision. No position.
Among the many cool people at yesterday's Blogfest I met John Kamin, the Courier Web editor, who told me that he's working on a new version of the paper's onlne presence that will refocus on the free site, eliminating the registration hassle and design complaints related to the subscription site. Soon we'll be able to see the entire paper unhindered in one place. I don't know that this was John's idea -- I should have asked -- but it's all good and warrants a special cookie. Good meeting you, JK!
John's put up some summaries and links to other local bloggers on his blog, and promises more. (According to my notes, Sadie is aka Sadira Conley.) Check 'em out.
I'm still bushed and brain-dead from last night's gig. I'll try to get some new stuff up after dinner.
Mike thinks that if you discover the game is rigged, you should not only stay in it, you're a coward if you walk away, nyah nyah. Did he have a previous career as a carney barker? I dunno. Blindingly stupid stuff.
Originally "Profiles in Cowardice" from Thursday, carried more or less verbatim with a couple of edits to stamp out the evil passive voice and make the piece look up-to-date.
Sorry, unnamed Courier editor, Cindy Barks already turned this story in, and she wrote it better. What works is to consider stating an opinion before sitting down to write an opinion piece.
I know, it's as hard for you to admit you've been wrong all along as it's been for the Queen Bee, perhaps harder, since you've devoted so much ink to trashing the concept and the people who've advocated it for so many years. There's opportunity here, though, if you don't dawdle too long, to get out in front of the issue and help make it happen.
Five short ones today: Lou Harris agrees with me that it was evil, Dorothy Williamson wonders what the parking garage is for if not this, Bill Sonsin warns that our Congresscritter isn't convicted yet (well, not much), Glen Brose nails the tried-and-true method we can expect to see used here to kill off bus service, and non-scientific type Don Wallace thinks Terry Lovell should get another 99 climate-crisis-deniers together and smack down Al Gore. (Here's a clue, Don: he can't.)
This is a nice little love-letter for the former supervisor, perfectly suited to a very-small-town paper. I'm sure there are some people out there who think of GB fondly and long for a return to his reign as king of the Supes. No one should have to deal with cancer, particularly with our horrible health-care system. Not sure why it's page-one material, though.
Which reminds me, we heard awhile ago that Bob Bell was getting surgery, but not whether he got better.
The death penalty can always be expected to cause a certain amount of breathless drama, and I wonder whether this was a factor in Mirsada Buric's court-beat story. The coverage is fine, I just tripped over the lead and fell flat on my face.
"The David Aggas trial scheduled for summer appears on track, unless the state settles his death penalty case stemming from ...."
"The death-penalty trial of David Aggas appears on track for summer unless the state settles his case, which stems from ...."
This story by Cindy Barks puzzles me. We have a contract with a company to take our recyclables at cost to us of $30 per ton. We put that contract out for a new bid and the same company wins it at $10 per ton. There's no indication in the story of whether the specification in the contract has changed. Excuse my cynicism, but it's difficult to believe that the company is giving up two-thirds of its revenue on this deal without some balancing factor.
When they removed glass bins around town, requiring us to take our glass to the transfer station instead, City staff created a recent history of arbitrarily cutting back on recycling services without public input. In covering this story, answering a couple of basic questions would either inform the reader of what we'll be giving up in the deal or assure us that we're not.
There's a cute juxtaposition of this story with a an evocative photo by Jo Keener showing PV residents dealing with tons of trash. Page-one irony, perhaps?
