Comments on all things journalism and answers to questions from readers about news coverage and operations at the Tracy Press.

Saturday, December 31, 2005

Hubris, Wi-Fi and "community character elements" in 2005

Just read this on SFGate: Hubris is the word of the year, just as it could have been 24 centuries ago.

The Greek term for "excessive pride or self-confidence" was chosen by 41 percent of 2,300 SFGate readers who participated in an online poll. "Disaster" finished second.

My word for '05 is Wi-Fi. Not only is it a new listing in the Associated Press stylebook for wireless networking, but when I got my laptop and started traveling to other towns where we now own newspapers, Wi-Fi in offices and coffee shops became my lifeline.

I noticed other words dropped into conversations for the first time this year: intelligent design, insurgency and Katrina, God rest her soul.

Locally, streetscape was bantered about, as downtown roadwork continued in 2005. The term identity theft became more mainstream as more people experienced it. And Community Character Element, in the vernacular of Tracy’s new General Plan, found its way into numerous news stories. Who coined that mushy mouthful?

My favorite dictionary site lists the most-looked-up words of 2005, including xenophobia and ubiquitous. Now those are great words.

Word Spy lists fun words that plugged into vocabularies in 2005, such as podcasting, vodcasting and podcatching.

Pupperware and puggle are words worth looking up, if you're a dog lover like me.

Meanwhile, with this wicked wind in Tracy today, the satellite on my roof may go the way of my lawn furniture, which means my Wi-Fi will die and Mother Nature will get the last word.

So blogmates, send your words of the year and feel free to take over this conversation!

Hi Cheri,
Hubris is a great word, I'll add it to my vocabulary. Have a great new year!

Posted by: Ed Gable at January 3, 2006 02:32 PM


Friday, December 30, 2005

One more look at 2005

The year 2005 is almost over, and in these waning hours of the old year, we've come up with a list of the TP's Top 10 news stories. What do you think of our choices? Did we miss anything big? Do you have any predictions for 2006 in Tracy?

Here's our Top 10 for 2005, in no particular order.

1. Sheriff in shackles
Former San Joaquin County Sheriff Baxter Dunn pleaded guilty to mail fraud charges and served jail time during the year. The high-profile corruption case forced Dunn and three co-conspirators, including former Supervisor Lynn Bedford, to make plea bargain agreements with prosecutors in January. Monte McFall, a former court marshal, went to trial and was convicted in March, and now he demands a new trial.

2. Downtown digs
Tracy’s downtown facelift was mostly completed in 2005. Central Avenue was torn up in the spring and repaved in time to show off a new streetscape for some of the city’s big events in the fall. Crews from Granite Construction didn’t find any tunnels leading from the buildings that once housed old saloons, but they did find at least one basement entrance that served to keep speculation alive that a secret passage under Central Avenue had existed at one time. The project won’t be complete until the Grand Theater and old City Hall are restored. Work on those projects will continue through 2006.

3. Major medical work
Sutter Tracy Community Hospital opened its new outpatient surgery center and emergency room in December 2004, but the hospital’s $24 million expansion continued through 2005 with a new maternity wing in February and more recently the new parking lot that takes the place of what used to be part of Beverly Place between Tracy Boulevard and Bessie Avenue.

4. West’s speedstersIn June, the girls on West High School’s track team became the first since 1994 to shatter Southern California’s dominance in California state track and fields events. The team ran away with the state title. The team, led by Olympic hopeful Brittany Daniels, beat Long Beach Wilson High, 48-43, for the California Scholastic Federation’s Division I crown.

5. Hate-mongering Kansans
A high school math teacher’s remarks about homosexuality caused a minor controversy at the school, but it was enough to draw the attention of Kansas minister Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church with protests against gay rights groups, other churches and the United States of America. The congregation came to town to protest at local graduation ceremonies and at churches.

6. Water, water In July the South San Joaquin Irrigation District completed a new $126 million water treatment plant and pipeline that will bring water from Woodward Reservoir to Tracy and three other cities. The pipeline took about 16 years to plan and a couple years to build, but it was encouraging for district and city officials, who were pleased to find a way to make inter-agency cooperation the key to a valuable public works project.

7. Tough Little Leaguers
Tracy’s National League All Stars represented their city well in the Little League World Series. Tracy’s top youth baseball players made it to the Western Regional Tournament in San Bernardino in August but lost the title game.

8. Hurricane’s helpersHurricane Katrina may have been a big story for New Orleans and for the nation, but Tracy people got involved, too, and not just in fundraisers for disaster relief. Tracy people went out to the disaster site to help victims, and San Joaquin County also welcomed people who had to move away from their homes.

9. Campus here or thereSan Joaquin Delta College’s plans for a Mountain House campus seemed to hit a snag when it came down to negotiations with one of the new town’s developers. The city of Tracy stepped in and offered the college the city’s community park site on 11th Street at Chrisman Road. That apparently brought everyone back to the negotiating table, and in October, the college and developer were able to confirm plans for the Mountain House campus.

10. Half-million-dollar houses
How could we get to the end of the year without construction of new homes in Tracy as a top story? It turned out that a slow-growth measure from 2000 finally took hold in 2005, and by the end of November, the city had issued permits for only 373 new houses. December’s numbers aren’t in, but we could see the fewest new homes built during the past year since 1996. At the same time, the city also saw unprecedented home prices. The real estate market started to cool off by the end of summer, but median-priced homes reached $540,000 in October, compared with $430,000 for the same month in 2004.

Sunday, December 25, 2005

Merry Christmas, everybody!

Thanks for visiting my blog. Merry Christmas to all!

Posted by cmatthews at December 23, 2005 11:14 AM

Comments

Best season's greetings, too!

And it's good to be back in Tracy.

Posted by: Amadeo at December 24, 2005 12:27 PM

Merry Christmas to the Tracy Press, best wishes for a prosperous 2006.

Posted by: JimF at December 26, 2005 01:47 PM

Thursday, December 22, 2005

But what about the names on Our View?

A longtime Tracy Press subscriber called to say my comments on the gutless letter-writer sparked a thought: Speaking of names, why doesn't the TP sign its own editorials?

I'm asked that question often. Actually, we do put our names on every editorial. Our Voice represents the voice of the publisher and the editorial board, and each of those names is listed on the Voice page.

That's not unlike most professional newspapers in the country, which publish unsigned editorials.

At the Tracy Press, our Associate Editor Jack Eddy, a member of the editorial board, is paid to pen most of the editorials. But he takes several weeks of vacation a year, so some of the editorials are written by me (editor) or Bob Matthews (publisher) or Sam Matthews (publisher emeritus). Regardless of who is doing the writing, each editorial represents our views as an editorial board.

What if we can't all agree on a position to take?
The publisher decides.

Saturday, December 17, 2005

No room for bogus letter-writers

Last week we published a letter to the editor that likely was written by someone other than the person named on the letter. If there’s no Jimmy Briggs in Tracy who wrote about the Tracy High School football program and said the coaches should step down, the real writer should be publicly lambasted for his gutless dribble.

Only a bottom-feeding coward would spew forth an opinion and allow it to be printed in 20,855 papers under a phony name.

With that said — and yes, I feel better — we caretakers of the Voice pages admit we should have checked out this so-called letter-writer with more than a cursory glance at the information he listed. A coach who knew that a Jimmy Briggs had never played football for Tracy High, as he wrote that he did, tipped us off that the name might be bogus. Sure, he used a real address on Chrisman Road, but as it turns out, the man who lives there is perfectly happy with the high school football program and has never written to the editor.

Tracy used to be small enough that almost every letter was hand-delivered and signed by someone we knew. Even today, we know many of our contributors and their well-penned prose. I can spot a K.L. Vosburg letter, for instance, from 10 feet away. His satiric letters on random topics appear on my desk every week typed on a manual typewriter, with no spell-check but lots of white-out — if you can remember what that is.

Scott Hurban is another prolific writer who fills our e-mail inboxes. In fact, you can set your clock to his letters. As soon as one publishes, up pops another. Politics, religion, economics. He’ll tell you what he thinks.

Then there’s Earl Jess, Clif Schofield and Tom Benigno. We know their distinct writing styles and their messages that are as unique as they are.

Those writers — and lots of others — make the letters section what it is, the prime forum of democracy in a newspaper, where anyone gets to have his say. But some people don’t follow the rules, and their letters face either the dreaded delete key or the shredder. Anonymity finds a home on Web blogs and bathroom doors, but it doesn’t make it into credible letters sections.

Which brings us to our recent conundrum. What if people lie about their names? Well, that’s a crime, for one thing.

California Penal Code 538a: “Every person who signs any letter addressed to a newspaper with the name of a person other than himself and sends such letter to the newspaper, or causes it to be sent to such newspaper, with intent to lead the newspaper to believe that such letter was written by the person whose name is signed thereto, is guilty of a misdemeanor.”

Such a crime, we’re convinced, was committed again this week. Someone picked a name and address on 21st Street out of the phonebook, we surmise, and used it at the bottom of a scathing letter about West High School athletics, submitted for publication.

This time we reached the person who lives at the address listed before the letter ran, and when he insisted that no one in the household had written a letter — zap! No letter.

So now, armed with our newly polished policy of verification, we’re determined to track down letter-writers before they go to print, unless we’re sure they are who they say they are. I know that someone skilled at falsifying identities can trick us, but the chances of that happening diminish with added checks and balances.

Meanwhile, Jimmy Briggs, if you read this and you really did write the letter we published Dec. 9, come on down to the Tracy Press at 10th and A streets with your photo ID. Otherwise we’ll have to assume you’re a pretender with something to hide. Otherwise, we'll know we were duped.

And for the record, we apologize to Tracy High and to our readers.

Thursday, December 15, 2005

"We vote for Sudoku"

Got 10 phone messages in the first few hours and lots of blog comments (see below) in response to my plea in the paper for opinions about whether we should run a numbers puzzle, like Sudoku. Here's a sampling of their comments:

• "I enjoy playing Suduko very much and would like to see it in the Tracy Press."• "I'd like to see the numbers puzzle in the paper every day. I'd also like to buy the hand-held game."

• "I'm a 10-year subscriber of the Tracy Press, and I'd love both of the puzzles mentioned, in addition to the crossword."

• My brother and I love it. We vote for Sudoku."

Posted by cmatthews at December 15, 2005 04:35 PM

Comments

I definitely vote for Sudoku. It's a blast to play. I'm addicted to it. Please be sure to post some easy ones.
Thanks, Linda

Posted by: Linda Somma at December 15, 2005 05:43 PM

I do the harder Sudokus that are in the Chronicle and would be happy to see them in the Press. I don't know Kakuro. Maybe give us several weeks of alternating daily between Sudoku and Kakuro and then see if one is preferred over the other or if we like the mixture. One suggestion is to print the puzzles at least 4 inches by 4 inches in size so they could be done without having to copy them to a larger puzzle grid. Simple ones can be done in the size you printed but more difficult ones need more space to pencil in possible numbers as one is working.

Posted by: Sylvia Ahn at December 16, 2005 11:13 AM

I'd love to see Tracy Press feature Sudoku. I'm not addicted, but like to do them when I have the chance. As for Kakuro? Don't know since I haven't tried it yet. By the way, I also like the Word Warp very much and so does other members of my family.

Posted by: Desiree Hirsch at December 18, 2005 11:22 PM

Sunday, December 11, 2005

Sudoku, anyone

A reader recently wrote this tiny note at the bottom of a survey she returned to the Tracy Press:
"Can you add Sudoku to the paper?"

I wondered when readers would start to ask for this newspaper puzzle, a brain game (pronounced soo-doe-koo) that's been described as the "Rubik's cube of the 21st century."

I read that some Chicago White Sox players competed in Sudoku between games in the World Series to get their minds off baseball.

I've also heard it's addictive — just fill in the grid so that every row, column and 3X3 box contains the digits 1 through 9.

What do you think? Should we should add it to the paper? Would you play?

Universal Press Syndicate is selling a puzzle that's called Kakuro, described as a cross between a traditional crossword and Sudoku. Just like Sudoku, you fit the numbers 1 to 9 into a grid of squares so that no number is repeated within the defined area. And just like a crossword, there's a grid of filled blocks and clues to solve.

"A Kakuro player's best tool is logic," according to Universal. "Similar to the logic used in Sudoku, you'll also need a bit of math, because in Kakuro, there is a second hurdle: Not only must the numbers not repeat within a clue run, they also must add up to given totals — these totals replace the word clues found in a traditional crossword."

Here's what USA Today has to say.

To check out the samples: Universal Press Syndicate.

The Sudoku puzzle that King Features Syndicate offers for newspapers runs every day and gets harder toward the weekend.

Posted by cmatthews at December 11, 2005 12:09 PM

Comments

Cheri,
I read your blog and yes — add Sodoku.

I buy the Valley Times every morning when I get to work for the daily Sodoku.

Have you tried one yet?
Tom

Posted by: Tom at December 14, 2005 05:40 PM

Hi:
Yes, please add Sudoku.

It is definitely addictive. I'm already playing the crossword in the Tracy Press every day but have to get my Sudoku on line.

I've not tried Kakuro yet, but it sounds great too.

Cynthia

Posted by: Cynthia at December 15, 2005 07:52 AM

Cheri,
My Mom, daughter and I were on a trip to Norway this past summer, and our tour guide had the whole bus play Sudoku, fastest finisher winning a prize. My daughter Stacey won! She loved the game so much we had the guide sent us these puzzles by mail. When Stacey saw this first in the Stockton Record, she was so excited. Please put it in the Tracy Press. I'll save them for her to do when she comes home from college.
Maybe you could challenge the high school students in a contest of some sort like the tour guide did.

Posted by: Carolyn at December 15, 2005 09:08 AM

Given the choice between the traditional crossword and Sudoku or Kakuro, I would still choose the crossword. I like Sudoku. Can you do both? I am not familiar with Kakuro.

Posted by: Alegra at December 15, 2005 09:11 AM

Yes, I would like to see Sudoku and Kakuro in the Tracy Press. Don't know if it would be daily, but that would be the best way to go

Posted by: Gene at December 15, 2005 09:47 AM

I would love it if we had this puzzle in the paper!!

My mom got me hooked on them. She and her friends are all addicted to it. The 60+ crowd is like that, I guess. You can't control them. ha ha.

Thanks!
Denise

Posted by: Denise at December 15, 2005 09:51 AM

Yes, please add Sudoku, and we will play it.

Posted by: Lynn at December 15, 2005 10:57 AM

PLease add Sudoku. My 8-year-old granddaughter and I play the easy ones together. Her confidence level and problem-solving skills and reasoning have grown so much from the first puzzle to where we are today, and this has carried over into all aspects of her life. It also is a great vehicle to bond a wonderful relationship.

Crosswords are great, but they can't forge what I now have with my granddaughter because of her age knowledge bank and skill level in relationship to mine.

Posted by: Julie Galeazzi at December 15, 2005 12:12 PM

My vote is for SUDOKU! But I wish you had put an example of Kakuro in the paper because I'm not sure how the two differ.

Also KEEP the traditional crossword puzzle, of course.

Posted by: Amanda at December 15, 2005 02:20 PM

Oh, I didn't read your whole blog. Kakuro actually seems cooler now...

Posted by: amanda at December 15, 2005 02:22 PM

I've been hooked on Sudoku since September and have added several friends and students to the "addicted" list. It would be terrific to have it daily in the TP — but then, or course, at our house we would have to go without clean clothes, scrubbed bathrooms, a mowed lawn, dinner any time soon! But it would be worth it!

Posted by: Karen Tietmeyer at December 15, 2005 06:48 PM

I vote for Sudoku.

Posted by: Alicia at December 16, 2005 06:54 AM

I love this puzzle! Please add my name to the list of those who would like to have it appear in the Tracy Press (and if you could include strategies that would help us novices, that would be even better!).

Posted by: Barbara Noble at January 9, 2006 10:08 AM

hi, if you're into kakuro you should check this online kakuro version

Posted by: online sudoku at February 23, 2006 07:03 AM

You guys are the 22615 best, thanks so much for the help.

Posted by: Caty Tota at August 14, 2006 06:47 PM

Sunday, December 04, 2005

Keep biomedical research in the light

The Coalition of Journalists for Open Government has drafted a letter to the U.S. Senate in opposition to a bill that would significantly hamper the ability of the public, the press and even Congress to oversee efforts to protect the population against bioterrorism and pandemic outbreaks.

The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions has already passed S 1873, the Biodefense and Pandemic Vaccine and Drug Development Act of 2005. The bill would create a new Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Agency (BARDA) within the Department of Health and Human Services. However, this agency would be excluded from the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act, the Federal Advisory Committee Act and large portions of federal acquisition regulations.

Under this act, records of this agency or meetings of any advisory committees created to further its work would simply not exist.

As the American Society of Newspapers Editors puts it, under these unnecessary and overbroad secrecy provisions, the public would be prevented from participating in its own defense against bioterrorism and pandemic such as the Avian Flu.

The legislation has received significant criticism by those few people and organizations who are aware of its existence, with the secrecy provisions opposed even by those who advocate for the creation of the agency itself. However, the legislation could come to a floor vote in the Senate at any time.

Clearly, rapid research and vaccines for bioterrorism and pandemics need to progress as quickly as possible to protect the America public. S. 1873 takes a step in that direction; however, excluding an entire agency from FOIA will reduce the ability of the public and Congress to hold the new agency accountable and to ensure that important health information reaches the public.

The Freedom of Information Act already exempts from public release information that would threaten national security. A sweeping exclusion for BARDA is not needed for this purpose.

Sunday, November 27, 2005

Hold news in your hand

News streams out of every room in my house — on TV, radio or computer. When my Dad visits from out of state for Thanksgiving, I tell him he can read almost any newspaper in the country from my laptop on the kitchen countertop, with its wireless Internet connection.

But he insists on walking the half-mile down our dirt road every morning at 7 to get the rolled-up Tracy Press in the newspaper tube. He’s used to a morning paper he can hold with his coffee.

Call it habit, he says.

With all the news about the demise of newspapers — declining circulation, competition for advertising and rising costs — it’s good to see newspapers consumed as well as they are. I often hear from people who tell me they read every word of the Tracy Press, and if the paper doesn’t get delivered on time, they call to complain — bitterly.

While I hate it when our delivery fails, I love to hear how much people care.

We’ve recently started a new weekly newspaper that serves Manteca and Lathrop. With newspapers across the country laying off some 2,000 workers this year, we keep hiring. Call us optimistic or call us crazy. We’re betting the farm that we’ll be around, in some form, for another 107 years.

Meanwhile, I get feedback from a lot of readers in response to this blog.

One former Tracy resident described how his mother sent him two weeks’ worth of the hometown paper when he left home, and he’d sit down for an hour or more and read everything from club notes to classifieds, describing it as his voyeuristic peek into the lives of the people he once knew and loved.

“Don’t forget the comfort factor,” he commented. “I read two or three papers on the Web each day, but the Web will never replace the comfort of a turned newsprint page.”

That made me wonder why other people read the newspaper when they could just fire up a computer to get some news. I googled “reasons to read newspapers” and found this list of 10, written by newsman Tom Rouillard and posted on Tim Porter's excellent media blog. Take a look, and maybe you have some of your own to add):

• The newspaper has never burned my lap (Macs run hot).

• The flight attendant has never told me to put my newspaper away.

• I can read my newspaper while standing, while eating, while riding a bus.

• I can give my newspaper to someone else when I am done.

• I can read the A section while my wife reads the metro section.

• My newspaper’s battery never dies.

• If my newspaper gets wet, I can buy another for about a buck.

• I can recycle my newspaper at the curb.

• If I drop my newspaper, it doesn’t break.

• I can read my newspaper during a lightning storm.

I’ll add this one, from the lyrics of Mick Jagger:
• Old habits die hard.

I learned that from my Dad.

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

Governor sued over records

Last November, California voters approved Proposition 59, which strengthened public access to government records.

Now the California First Amendment Coalition and two newspapers have filed suit against Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to force disclosure of records of meetings between his top aides and people outside the governor's office, including lobbyists, campaign contributors and representatives of special interests.

"The public interest in seeing who attends meetings with the governor's top aides is even greater than seeing who the governor is meeting with," said Peter Scheer, executive director of CFAC.

The newspapers that have joined the lawsuit are the San Diego Daily Transcript and San Jose Mercury News.

Friday, November 18, 2005

A reporter's web of deceit

"Before she was fired Oct. 17 for plagiarism and fabrication, former Bakersfield Californian reporter Nada Behziz signed her name to 96 stories. A Californian investigation shows more than a third contain a variety of serious problems including plagiarized material, misattributed quotes and information, factual errors or people whose existence could not be verified — including seven physicians and a UCLA professor."


That's the lead of a Nov. 16 story by Gretchen Wenner, Bakersfield Californian staff writer.

When it came out, newsrooms were buzzing across the state. The first e-mail comment I saw said only, "whoa." Then there was this: "Oh my God."

Tonya Luiz, our managing editor, followed with this e-mail, "I don't get it. I don't understand what would prompt a reporter to fabricate such a web of lies in these post-Jayson Blair times. But to be so sloppy about it is even more curious."

And so it goes.

Someone asked me, "Has the Tracy Press ever had a problem with plagiarism?"

Yes, we have. We had a columnist years ago who was fired when a copy editor "googled" some of his sentences and found them word-for-word on a Web site, written by someone else.

Other than that, no. We've had our suspicions at times, but nothing positive.

Our policy is that every reporter does original reporting. Any material published elsewhere must be attributed. Sources are never to be fabricated.

I'm lucky in Tracy to have readers I can rely on to tell me if they think a story is "off" somehow. I get calls when people think they weren't quoted exactly or when we get something wrong. I've asked to see reporters' notes on several occasions. Most of the time, I've found reporters to be honest and careful with their work.

One thing I learned from the Californian's experience is that every reporter should undergo a thorough background check before being hired. It would have been easy to find the lies in Nada Behziz's resume with just a few calls. She said she had a degree from San Francisco State, but she didn't graduate. And her work experience didn't add up, either.

The editors in Bakersfield found out too late that she had a history of lying. What a nightmare.

Wednesday, November 16, 2005

In newspapers we trust

friend recently e-mailed me the comments of her journalism professor in response to questions about the future of newspapers, especially with the news of Knight Ridder being for sale.
Is the end of newspapers near?

The professor said she thinks the future of newspapers may lie in the smaller community newspapers, which provide news that folks can't get anywhere else — and news they can trust.

My friend, who is also a newspaper reporter, said this, "I'd never thought of it in terms of trust, but that's really what it is. That, and accessibility (i.e. being able to get in touch with the local paper to pitch a story and then see it in print the next day), the interplay and the fact that the community knows who's behind the scenes. That it's not some Wizard of Oz type of thing where they don't know who's behind the curtain."

I like that, of course. What do you think?

Friday, November 11, 2005

Dictates from the journalist's bible

I just heard from the Associated Press that the preferred term for newspapers to use when referring to people with significantly subaverage intellectual functioning is "mentally retarded."

The Associated Press Stylebook occasionally sends out new entries, for words like U.S. (now acceptable to abbreviate as a noun) and fundraiser (all one word, rather than hyphenated).

This time, I was curious and e-mailed AP Stylebook Editor Norm Goldstein in New York about it. In our efforts to be polite and politically correct, we've danced around the term "retarded" for many years. Why the change, I asked him?

Here's his response:

Thanks for your interest in AP style.

The question had come up in the past, mostly from editors who faced the same editorial problem you cite. After some research and numerous discussions, we agreed that “mentally retarded” seemed to be the most useful description in most cases – as long as it is used accurately and is clearly pertinent to the story.

We based the definition on that of the American Association of Mental Retardation, which defines mental retardation, in part, as “significantly subaverage intellectual functioning.”

AP also uses similar terms, such as “developmentally disabled,” but we don’t consider this as clear a description.

We avoid the derogatory “retard” in all cases.

(As for a “previously preferred term,” we had no “official” guideline, which prompted this new Stylebook entry.)

Norm Goldstein/AP Stylebook editor

Friday, November 04, 2005

Media relations and the schools

The Manteca Unified School District has proposed a new media relations policy that would require the news media to register at school offices immediately upon entering school property when school is in session.

At first glance, that may sound reasonable. In fact, most of the time, reporters and photographers already politely check in at the office when they visit schools.

But a closer look at state law shows that this proposed policy is in violation of the California Penal Code. Members of the news media are among those who are specifically exempt from the requirements to register at the school before entering.

Why is this important? The public has a First Amendment right to know what's happening at public schools, and when the media's access is restricted, the news is restricted.

I just attended a meeting with the Manteca school superintendent, two board members and six other representatives from the Sun Post, Stockton Record and Modesto Bee. We media folks argued our case for access, but the school representatives defended their proposed policy.

The school board will vote on the matter later this month.

Friday, October 28, 2005

Torn over an award

Richard Alan Hannon, a photographer for The Advocate of Baton Rouge, La., was honored today with the AP Photo of the Year award.

"I'm torn over getting a check for one of the saddest photos I've ever taken," he said at the podium.

Later, I spotted him standing alone and decided to go talk to him.

I was struck at how much he reminded me of Glenn Moore, our Tracy Press photo editor. He said he had been on assignment shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit. He had waded in deep water to get to the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans, where he watched evacuees who were not allowed inside. He shot the photo of the dying woman on the other side of a glass atrium.

He never got her name. He's pretty sure he saw her die.

I told him that the policy at our newspaper is that we won't run photos of people in accidents if we find out they've died before we go to press.

He said his paper has the same policy. But when the editors saw the photo, they thought it was too powerful not to run.

I'm glad they broke the rules.

Behind the scenes of the police log

“If you don’t want it printed, don’t let it happen.”

That’s the motto of a newspaper in Colorado and, as Michael Gartner writes in his new book, “Outrage, Passion & Uncommon Sense,” the motto that good editors of good newspapers have lived by for generations.

I’ve said it myself to people who call demanding that their names be left out of the police log that we publish every day.

Of course, just because something appears in the police log doesn’t mean it happened, just that someone reported to the police that something happened. And the arrests that we list are just that — arrests for suspected felonies, not convictions.
At any rate, some people simply don’t like seeing their dirty laundry in print.
Others, on the other hand, relish reading about the woes of others, if only for their entertainment. They skim over the items until they find something they can take to their friends every day at coffee.
Like the one about the man who walked into the police station waving a videotape that he claimed contained evidence that someone had stolen from him. Turns out the videotape showed people stealing, all right. They took the man’s marijuana plants from his backyard.
Another was from a man who called to say he’d found another man’s underwear under his bed. Huh?
Sometimes I’ll get a call from someone who says, “Why do you print that stuff, anyway? Why don’t you just print the serious crimes?”
My stock answer is this: “Because the stupid stuff appears to represent most of what the police deal with every day — and what our taxes are paying for.”
Besides that, I don’t think it hurts to know a little of what goes on in the lives of the people who share our town.
I posted an item recently asking readers what they thought about the police log.
The first person to comment was a commuter on the Altamont Commuter Express train, who said “it’s part of what makes Tracy still feel like the small town it used to be — it adds character.”
Kind of like our Poker City history.
Another comment was a confession from a man wh searches through the log in the hopes that no relatives will be mentioned.
That reminds me of the reader who told me she regularly scans the log for her ex-husband’s antics.
The block captain for a Neighborhood Watch group in town wrote that he’s keenly interested in what’s going on in the log. He has some questions, too.
“The reports always begin, ‘Tracy Police Department officers responded to 210 calls for service Monday.’ How does the report get edited down to the five or 10 items readers see?
“Does someone who works for the Tracy Press go through all 210 calls and decide what to print? Does the public have access to all of this information? Does the PD withhold certain information from these reports?”
Here’s how it works: Every day, the reporter who covers the police beat (Denise Rizzo, unless it’s her day off) goes to the lobby of the Tracy Police Department and flips page-by-page through the dispatcher’s daily log, taking notes on her reporter’s pad.
“I pick out items that typically identify crime trends, such as thefts from cars … or humorous and out-of-the-ordinary items,” she said.
She reads every item but chooses just a sampling, usually about 20 items. Then copy editors cut her column to fit the space on the news page.
If something is especially interesting or shows a crime spree, reporters can get more information from officers and turn it into a story.
If someone younger than 18 is arrested, the name will be blacked-out in the report. Other than that, everything is public information unless there’s an active investigation.
That means anyone can go down to the PD and read the log in its entirety — but only reporters get paid for it.

Posted by cmatthews at October 28, 2005 09:27 PM

Comments

What you say is true to a point. Yes, the information is available to the public but they would have to go down to PD to read it.

And if you cover a story that alleges that an incident occurred shouldn't good reporting follow up on the case to see what the outcome was?

My particular incident, covered by the Press in a lengthy Police Blotter article, had me arrested for brandishing a firearm.

What it didn't tell is why and what the outcome of that incident was.

In point of fact I was assaulted in my own home and defended myself with my handgun.

But the press never followed up on the story and to many people I had committed a criminal act.

No one from the press bothered to contact the court system or myself to learn that all the charges levied against me were totally dropped.

So, as you can see, simply printing the "facts" can cause harm.

Rarely today am I questioned by anyone on this as it was quite some time ago. But when it happened it caused me no end of trouble with people who had a mistaken impression they were dealing with someone who, in their eyes, was a criminal.

Dave Hardesty

Posted by: Dave Hardesty at October 31, 2005 09:36 AM

Thanks for answering my questions, Cheri. I would like to see all of those calls in the Police Log go online somewhere. Maybe then the log could be blogged.

Posted by: Jim Freeman at November 4, 2005 10:52 AM

Thursday, October 27, 2005

'Outrage, Passion & Uncommon Sense'


Michael Gartner won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 1997 when he was editor and co-owner of The Daily Tribune in Ames, Iowa, a paper about the size of the Tracy Press. I met him shortly afterward when I took an editorial writing course at the Poynter Institute in Florida.


Today when I took my copy of his just-published book, "Outrage, Passion & Uncommon Sense," to get his autograph, I was stunned. He looked at my nametag and said he'd met me eight years ago.


I was only the student in his class who was an editor and also part-owner of a daily newspaper. He had taken me aside and lectured me about how I should be bold in my writing and never be afraid to show my passion.


The message he gave today at the Associated Press editors conference in San Jose was similar.


"Editorials are bland and boring today," he said. "That's too bad."


He went on to blame the large chain newspapers and decline of competition. Editorial writers are just too afraid to offend readers today, he said. They have no balls.


That's not how it was with Horace Greeley, Henry Watterson, William Allen White and Vermont Royster, the four greatest editorial writers in the history of this nation, he wrote in his book.


"They all reported thoroughly, wrote gracefully and argued passionately. They knew intimately their town — or their nation, or their world — and they were neither blind boosters nor common scolds."


You always knew where they stood, he said.


So tonight, thoroughly inspired, I'm staying up all night to read Gartner's book.

Sunday, October 23, 2005

Outside the public's eye

We ran two stories on Saturday, one on a new diversity committee and another on a school bond discussion, that mentioned school district committees that are closed to the public.

At first glance, you might think that this is a violation of the Ralph M. Brown Act, California's open meeting law enacted in 1953 to safeguard the public's right to attend and participate in government meetings within the state.

We thought so. A Tracy Press reporter was assigned to cover a meeting in which the specifics of a survey and an upcoming school bond to fix Tracy High School were discussed. He was told the meeting was closed to the press.

Tracy Unified School District Superintendent Jim Franco said the meetings are not covered by the Brown Act, because his staff has appointed the members, not the school board. He's instructed the committee members to stay mum if reporters call them outside the meetings.

We called California Newspaper Publishers Association Attorney Jim Ewert, who vertified that the meetings can be closed, as long as the committee's membership doesn't include a quorum of school board trustees. The committee's roster lists about a dozen residents of Tracy, along with trustees Gregg Crandall, Joan Feller and Gerry Machado, with Bill Swenson as an alternate, which means it's just short of the four elected officials that make a quorum.

Do you think the district has found a way to sidestep the Brown Act and meet privately? Or is this a legitimate way to discuss important issues before presenting them to the public?

Just thought I'd put the question out there.

Thursday, October 20, 2005

Trashing of Judith Miller

If you've been following the case of Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter who spent 85 days in federal jail for protecting a confidential source, you might want to read this report written by Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition.

Also, just read that Maureen Dowd has finally commented on Miller in her column, titled Woman of Mass Destruction.
"She never knew when to quit. That was her talent and her flaw. Sorely in need of a tight editorial leash, she was kept on no leash at all, and that has hurt this paper and its trust with readers. She more than earned her sobriquet 'Miss Run Amok.'"

If you Google "Dowd and Miller," you can find the column. Otherwise, you can go to New York Times and sign up for a 14-day free trial (just remember to cancel it later if you don't want to be charged for a subscription after 14 days).

I wrote about Judith Miller's case last summer in a column.

With all we know now, do you have any thoughts to share?

Wednesday, October 19, 2005

Who reads the police log?

A reader told me yesterday that the first thing she looks for in the paper is the Police Log, which runs daily on the Vitals page. I'm pretty sure it's not because she's looking for her name in the list of arrests.

Do you have questions about the log? I may write my next column about it.

Saturday, October 15, 2005

Comments from a reader

This is from Amadeo, who responded to my printed column before I had a chance to post it. (I have inserted my comments in italics.)

"Welcome to the blogosphere. It is always a welcome sight to have real journalists acknowledge and accept the existence of the new medium. Because then with the guidance and good examples real journalists bring to the table, the better the medium becomes.

"I have a few points to bring out, though.

"First, in your latest Editor’s Notes, you invited us all to read your blog, but you did not provide us with your URL, so we may have a difficult time looking for it. Was it given at some earlier issue?"

From Cheri: Aha! I've discovered two advantages that the Web has over the printed newspaper: We don't run out of room here, as we did with that column (the last line, which included that very-important URL, was cut off on the page), and when we make mistakes, we can easily correct them on the Web, whereas, I can't go back and add that line to my column in the newspaper.

"Secondly, the blog now provides archives starting from April 2005, so I am supposing that your previous Editor’s Notes, have also been posted as blog entries. Thus, you really have been blogging for a while, since April at least."

From Cheri: Well, no. I really did start this blog on Oct. 3, 2005. I posted some of my previous columns as blog entries and used the dates they were published, going back to April. I probably broke some blogging law doing that.

"Thirdly, your concerns or fears, if you may, in the move by Yahoo! to lump blog entries with mainstream news, are all well taken. And everybody, both news consumers and those who report news, should proceed with great caution. The blogosphere, with its very loose definition and restrictions, is now one big black hole that is growing exponentially as we speak.

"However, the very determinable reason why the blogs gained prominence and general acceptance was precisely because mainstream media was viewed as wanting in certain areas, and they are said to have filled the void. Any thoughts on this?

"Again, welcome, and here’s wishing you success in your newest endeavor. As new Tracy residents, we’re looking forward to entries in your blog."

From Cheri: Does anyone out there have any thoughts on Amadeo's point about blogs filling the void of mainstream media?
I'd love to hear from you.

Friday, October 14, 2005

AP Photo of the Year

The Associated Press had thousands of photos from which to choose for its Photo of the Year, and it's not surprising that a photo showing the devastation wrought by Hurricane Katrina was selected for 2005.
This emotional image of a woman being tended to by another evacuee at the Louisiana Superdome was captured by Richard Alan Hannon, a photographer with The Advocate of Baton Rouge, La.
We ran the photo in the Sept. 2 Tracy Press.
View image

Moments after Hannon took the photo on Sept. 1, police carried the woman away and said she died.

If you can't beat them, join them

I’ve been blogging for almost two weeks now. Only a few people, mostly those I know and have bribed with coffee, have commented. But I’m out here. Web-logging to my heart’s content about all kinds of topics — obituaries for pets, objectivity, mistakes in stories, multi-tasking media maniacs, mucking horse stalls.

Mucking stalls?

You’ll have to read the blog’s archives.

Later this month when I go to a national editors conference, that will undoubtedly be a topic of heated discussion. No, not my stalls or even my blog. The blogs of others.

Like Yahoo.

Yahoo Inc. announced this week that it will feature the work of self-published Internet bloggers side by side with the mainstream news. The heated part of this discussion? Yahoo’s blogs-with-news will undoubtedly further blur the distinctions between (1.) the free-for-all, make-up-the-rules-as-you-go online journals known as blogs (Yahoo calls them “grassroots journalism by everyday people”) and (2.) the news (online, on air or in print), written and reported by journalists who work for professional news organizations.

The scary part about this is that Yahoo isn’t a professional news organization, and its bloggers aren’t trained reporters whose work is fact-checked and edited, with an eye on accuracy, libel and privacy laws, ethics and other standards we consider primary to publication.

Bloggers pretty much agree that it’s OK to write just about anything, regardless of the truth, as long as they admit it and provide some hypertext links to the world outside of the blog. They also don’t keep their opinions to themselves, as journalists are taught to do (except when we write columns and editorials, which are separated from the news and clearly labeled).

Along comes Jeff Jarvis, former-newspaper-journalist-turned-newspaper-critic, who climbs on his high horse to applaud Yahoo and declare that “You don’t need to have a degree, you don’t need to have a paycheck, you don’t need to have a byline. If you inform the public, you are committing an act of journalism.”

I prefer the more moderate words of Bill Keller, New York Times executive editor, who is quoted in Business Week as saying, with regard to blogging, “Most of what you know, you know because of the mainstream media. Bloggers recycle and chew on the news. That’s not bad. But it’s not enough.”

While bloggers have broken legitimate news stories and brought forth some decent, unfiltered content, readers need to recognize the difference between news and blogs, just as they separate news from opinion and fact from fiction.

That’s not easy in the chaotic world of the Internet.

Which brings me back to my own fledgling efforts at blogging. I see the blog as an interactive extension of my Editor's Notes column (not news) and as a conversation with you (faithful readers) about the Tracy Press and the news industry and whatever else comes to the mind of a small-town newspaper editor with a laptop.

You’re welcome to join me in the blogosphere. I’ll watch for your comments and post them!

• Cheri Matthews, editor of the Tracy Press, can be reached in the traditional ways, by phone or by e-mail, or at www.tracypress.com/weblog/cmatthews/.

Thursday, October 13, 2005

Staying objective

Earlier this year, our newsroom wrote an ethics policy for ourselves, which includes such items as this: Journalists will not publicly announce their likes and dislikes via bumper stickers, decals, personalized license plates, license-plate frames or articles of clothing used or worn on the job.
We take our objectivity seriously, and so, obviously, do other newspapers throughout the country. Read about how papers like the one in Clovis, N.M., stayed objective in its coverage, even with major economic loss at stake.

By Bob Gorman
Watertown (N.Y.) Daily News
When Cannon Air Force Base was included on the Department of Defense's
base closure list issued May 13, banners reading "Keep Cannon" sprung up everywhere in Clovis, N.M., including in front of the Clovis News
Journal.

But you weren't going to find one inside the newsroom. Despite a page
one editorial begging the community to rally behind state government
efforts to keep the base open, News Journal Editor David Stevens didn't want the rah-rah spirit permeating his staff's stories. Thus, he issued a "no banners in the newsroom" edict.

"When you write about what is going on in the community, every story is like a pep rally," said Stevens. "But we have tried to be that objective observer. We have tried to write about the plusses and minuses of Cannon."

Small and medium-sized newspapers around America faced the same
challenge to their credibility during this summer's Base Realignment and Closure process. Turn the lights out at Atlanta's Forts McPherson and Gillem and you register a blip-less economic loss of $671,000 a year to the Southeast's metropolitan monster. But shutter Cannon in rural New Mexico and you rip $212 million and 7,000 jobs - one-third of the economy - out of a region where the largest city, Clovis, has a
know-all-your-neighbors population of 32,000.

"We prepared two (newsroom) budgets, one with Cannon and one without,"
said Stevens. "And there is a dramatic difference."

How do journalists remain objective when the loss of a military base
will lead to a radical drop in population and business, and eventually
newspaper sales?

You just do it.

Ellsworth Air Force Base near Rapid City, S.D., is not just home to half of America's fleet of B-1B bombers. It is South Dakota's second largest employer behind state government. But when the Department of Defense recommended sending all 29 bombers and $278 million in annual payroll and business to Dyess Air Force Base in Abilene, Texas, Editor Peggy Sagen of the 29,618-circulation Rapid City Journal immediately sent a reporter to Texas to see what Dyess had that Ellsworth didn't.

The Journal's stories showed that Dyess had plenty going for it.

"We took some heat from the community," said Sagen. "The chamber (of commerce) called the publisher to complain, but he backed us. He just said 'Write the news.'"

The DoD report was like a sucker punch to community newspapers. The Groton Naval Submarine Base has been a part of the New London, Conn., economy since 1900. After it survived the base closure round of 1995, no one expected the DoD to go after it 10 years later, said Lance Johnson, editor of The Day in New London. Yet on May 13, there was Groton, one of America's best known and historic military bases, on the chopping block again.

Reaction by the 41,113-circulation paper was swift. That afternoon it printed a six-page broadsheet special edition with wire and local stories about the BRAC process and the history of Groton.

Johnson said that as the pending closure of Groton began to sink in, depression in the community — and the newsroom — sunk in as well.

"There are 8,500 jobs on the base and about 30,000 jobs connected to the base." said Johnson. "It's $3 billion — 10 percent of the economy. The Navy is connected to the arts, charity. A part of our history would go away."

Like the subs built at nearby General Dynamics Electric Boat, The Day's management decided to go deep. During the next three months its reporters wrote "a couple hundred substantive stories" said Johnson, about the internal battle within Navy ranks over the value of subs versus surface ships.

The Day's persistence led to the leak of an internal Navy memo that showed "the numbers were cooked," said Johnson. The Navy's sub training center in Groton hadn't been factored in, and thus moving all of Groton's assets to the sub base at Kings Bay, Ga., as the DoD recommended, would end up costing the Pentagon more rather than saving it money over the years.

The summer of discontent ended Aug. 24 when the BRAC commission removed Groton from the closure list. The Day's Aug. 25 headline "Too Good To Close" mirrored the information the staff dug up.

Ellsworth was also removed from the list. The Rapid City Journal's headline, "Flying High," stood above a photo of local leaders clinking glasses of champagne.

Cannon, on the other hand, was given a reprieve but left on death row. The May 14 News Journal headline, "BRAC Attack," had given way to Aug. 25's "Saved – For Now."

The BRAC commission gave the DoD until December 2009 to find a new mission or close the base. In the meantime, the F-16s that roar over the nearby desert are on the way out. How soon the Air Force and its payroll will be leaving Clovis is not known.

The Air Force might just "keep a night watchman there for three or four years," said Stevens.

Taking flak from the rank and file along with the Pentagon doesn't give Stevens much confidence that a new military presence will be assigned to Cannon. But he is clear about how the Clovis News Journal, circulation 8,697, will cover the renewal or death of Cannon Air Force Base.

Said Stevens, "This newsroom, as long as we have one, is going to be objective."

Tuesday, October 11, 2005

An obit for a dog

This is a first for us. An obituary submitted for a dog. As much as I love dogs, our obituary section in the Tracy Press is reserved for people. However, I sense that this was one very special bassett hound whose family is grieving. So here's his obit here, written by his family in Tracy.

Steve Warn
Sept. 1, 1994 - Oct. 6, 2005
Steve Warn passed away at home surrounded by the family that loved him. He was a best friend to Aaron Taylor, Mike, Kathy and Daisy. He loved peanut butter toast, short walks to roll in smelly things and having his belly rubbed. He will be missed and never forgotten.

Sunday, October 09, 2005

Imagine this mistake

I just read that a Gannett newspaper in Wisconsin is being sued over a mistake it made in a banner headline that read: "Former gas station owner may have been 9/11 plotter." Actually, he was only an "applauder," according to federal officials.
Before I make a smug comment, though, I must remind myself that we've made some bloopers in the Tracy Press, too.

We're human. We goof up, and when we find out about it, we run a correction.
Sometimes we're not sure how we made the mistake. Maybe we got the wrong information from a source, or in a hurry to make deadline, we misstated or misrepresented something.
Our most recent correction was this: "Concerning a Page 4 story in Thursday’s Tracy Press titled, 'Trustees dress for success in front of cameras,' Tracy Unified Board Trustee James Vaughn disputed the assertion that he has worn sweat suits to board meetings."
The story was about how appearances mattered during the first school board meeting to be aired on cable Channel 26. The reporter mentioned that the school board member has worn sweatsuits to board meetings in the past but that he was sharply dressed in a button-down shirt and necktie for the first televised meeting.
When the story ran in Friday's TP, Vaughn called and demanded a correction, saying he has never worn anything so casual to a board meeting since he was elected last November. He said that we could ask anyone if they've ever seen him wear sweatsuits to a board meeting.
We did, and they hadn't.
We stand corrected.

Saturday, October 08, 2005

Multi-tasking media maniacs

Do find yourself reading a newspaper at the same time that you're watching TV and listening to tunes on your iPod? Or talking on your cell phone while checking your e-mail on your laptop and listening to talk radio?
A recent study out of Ball State University shows that you're not the only one. Consuming media is now the No. 1 activity in America. We spend more time watching TV, talking on the phone, reading magazines and newspapers and surfing the Internet than anything else. And a third of "media time" involves multiple media feeds.
I'm really happy that newspapers are in the mix.

Friday, October 07, 2005

Metaphor of mucking stalls

Here's how I'm learning how to be a good blogger. My son's e-mail just traveled across the country to tell me this:


"About the your editor's blog. It's been four days since you last wrote something. I think you should write something (one, two, three para's) at least every other day. Think of it as a fun chore. The comments can be as off-the-wall as you want, remember. I know you're busy, but even a few sentences will do. And don't think too hard about it. Write whatever comes to mind. Just plop it down. Like mucking stalls, it might be annoying/tedious at first, but
you'll start to see the tedium as calming and even enjoyable. Catharsis is what blogs are truly about."

Posted by cmatthews at October 7, 2005 01:53 PM

Comments

Nice web site, what are you going to do with it?

Posted by: Tom Benigno at October 12, 2005 06:42 AM

Hooray for you for including a blog in the updates to your website, it is looking much nicer. I agree with your son, blog something every day or two, at least!
:)

Posted by: Jim Freeman at October 12, 2005 08:45 PM

If it wasn't for our children we might never succeed.

Posted by: Mike McLellan at October 13, 2005 04:47 PM

http://www.special-ringtones.net/tones/ real ringtones. motorola ringtones: Best free samsung ringtones, Cingular ringtones and more, Ringtones for free . [url]http://www.special-ringtones.net/ring/[/url] [link=http://www.special-ringtones.net]tracfone ringtones[/link] from site .

Posted by: mp3 ringtones at September 25, 2006 03:05 AM

http://www.special-ringtones.net/mp3/ ringtones site free. Best free samsung ringtones, Cingular ringtones and more, Ringtones for free . from website .

Posted by: funny ringtones at September 25, 2006 03:05 AM

http://www.special-ringtones.net/mp3/ ringtones site free. [URL=http://www.special-ringtones.net]qwest ringtones[/URL]: Best free samsung ringtones, Cingular ringtones and more, Ringtones for free . [url=http://www.special-ringtones.net]nextel ringtones[/url] from website .

Posted by: funny ringtones at September 25, 2006 03:05 AM

Saturday, October 01, 2005

Calling foul on the sport of cussing

Editor's Notes

I promised to take a cursory look today at cussing in the newspaper.

It all started with a story we ran recently about three high school football players. We wanted to write a slice of their life, let them use their own words to describe what they do in their free time. We didn’t want to censor them. We didn’t want to be stodgy.

We let them swear in print.

Before and after we published the story, we discussed among our editing ranks whether to include conversation that contained a four-letter word used by George Carlin. You remember his “Seven Dirty Words” comic monologue and the words he said would infect your soul, curve your spine and keep the country from winning the war?

Those seven words were from 1973, of course, and this is now, when we would argue that the range of acceptable vocabulary has stretched just as the rules of polite society and forbidden speech have blurred.

Shouldn’t we thus embrace the youth with their verbal vulgarity?

Editors who have mentored me for years said no, in no uncertain terms. Not by quoting them verbatim.

And so did readers. One wrote me a letter to say the whole story was tasteless.

“These boys deserve nothing less than a public apology.”

Another said that the newspaper should have taken the high road when quoting them.

“Kids will say things that aren’t always appropriate, but as the adult present, the Press should realize what should and shouldn’t be put in the paper.”

Even if the story had been about an adult, several callers and e-mailers agreed, the crude expressions added nothing. They should have been paraphrased or, better yet, zapped.

Suffice it to say that I was wrong to allow a story to run that had so much potential to offend readers of all sensibilities, from the mother of one of the boys, to the boys’ coach and athletic director, to the superintendent of schools.

After several sit-down discussions, our editorial policy, from this day forward, will be to err on the side of caution when it comes to language. We’re putting a lid on those seven dirty words and other polluters.

That doesn’t mean that we are going to shy away from accurate reporting or edit in euphemisms. We’ll simply weigh the newsworthiness of expletives against concerns about community standards.

And in the future, when reporters raise red flags about the intemperate remarks of their sources, teen or grownup, we’ll remind them of the story of the three young football players — and of our cursory look at cussing that led to a policy about dirty words.

Posted by cmatthews at October 1, 2005 05:03 PM

Comments

Hi Cheri,

I am not so sure it was a mistake to run the article - while I understand the feelings of the parents, maybe there wasn't anything else to print from the interview - unfortunately, it didn't sound like the boys had anything intelligent to say. I think that the parents need to talk to their sons about the language they chose to use in an interview, and not blame the Tracy Press for printing it.

Posted by: Karen Robey at October 15, 2005 06:28 PM

just letting you know - your site is fantastic!

Posted by: dustin chapman at November 24, 2005 10:35 PM

Saturday, September 17, 2005

This is cool!

I started out in journalism with a new electric typewriter, the only one on my dorm floor. Here I am, exactly 30 years later — a newspaper editor with a laptop and a blog.

I'm no expert at this blog stuff. Ask my son, who first defined the term for me. But here I am, dipping my toe in the scary waters of weblogging. I'm the first to try this in our newsroom, and if all goes well, I'll have some company here.

Like Editor's Notes, my column in the Tracy Press, this is where I'll offer spontaneous commentary about the newspaper, why we do what we do and what we think about it. With this blog, I hope you'll join the conversation.

Let me know what you think!

- Cheri

Words: When do we cross the line?

Editor's Notes

Words can be such delicate matters.

Just in the last few weeks, a handful of words that we've used in the paper have come under fire. They've offended some newspaper readers. They've also sparked passionate discussions about what words should or shouldn't be off limits in the Tracy Press.

The first word came up shortly after Hurricane Katrina released its wrath and drove people from their homes along the Gulf Coast. The wire services described them as evacuees, survivors, victims - and refugees. The Rev. Jesse Jackson and President Bush both took issue with the term refugee, calling it racist when used to describe so many black Americans.

Like other editors, I scrambled to my dictionaries to find out if the word refugee truly excludes Americans in their own country or could reflect racism. I didn't find the definitions to be so narrow.

Still, there are many ways to describe those displaced, and we will avoid the word refugee, keeping in mind the sensitivities of some readers. But like The Associated Press, which provides most of our national news, we'll reserve the right to use it to capture the scope of this disaster on a vast number of our citizens.

Meanwhile, no policy can cover every situation, and in our newsroom, we openly discuss potentially controversial content and words as they come up. Sometimes they are direct quotes. Sometimes they're the reporter's words or an official's description.

Last week, we ran a police log item that described a rape report in which a man was accused of pulling out his penis and telling a 13-year-old girl to orally copulate him. A reader e-mailed us to say she was offended that we had chosen to report something so titillating and sensationalistic in nature.

So we asked, did we cross the line? Did we sensationalize the news?

To me, a report of a rape is far more serious than the theft of two golf putters or a few broken car windows. So I don't think we overplayed the item. However, in retrospect, I think we should have used less graphic words. We could have told the story by writing that the man was accused of exposing himself. He had also demanded oral sex, and I can't think of a way around those words.

It's always been a delicate balancing act to report what's relevant while keeping a certain level of civil discourse, especially in coverage of crime and the courts. As society's mores have become more tolerant, certain words and terms have gained acceptability. Yet we still don't all agree. What one person considers tasteless or vulgar is accurately descriptive or even commonplace to another.

Should community newspapers take the path of least resistance? Should we generalize rather than risk losing readers? Should we shy away from words that describe the human anatomy? I don't think so. But as journalists, we should talk about the words we use and always ask ourselves - before we publish - whether they're necessary to tell a story.

And we should always consider our readers' sensibilities.

Next column: Teenagers and profanity.

Saturday, September 03, 2005

Bush bashing is no laughing matter

Editor's Notes

A reader called this week to tell me she’s canceling the paper. She’s tired of our Bush-bashing at a time when we should be pulling for the president.

I had to think. As a community newspaper, we don’t write often about President Bush, except when he flew into the Stockton Metropolitan Airport for a Republican fundraiser in 2002. However, he appears often in wire stories on our “national” pages, and his name comes up all the time in editorials.

Turns out she was talking about our Voice pages — the opinion section of the paper. Specifically, she was miffed at our editorial cartoons. How could we draw such things?

Like most editors, I can barely draw a stick figure, so I buy cartoons from a company called Cagle Cartoons, which serves newspapers all over the world. I like the service, because it offers a wide selection of images that can be downloaded from a Web site. They’re timely, and they represent a broad range of styles and diversity of perspectives, which is what we aim for on the Voice pages.

This week, for instance, we have dozens of Hurricane Katrina cartoons from which to choose. The disaster isn’t funny, but it’s in the news, and it gives cartoonists a graphic metaphor for which to make political or social commentary. One cartoon shows looters running with overflowing grocery bags, and the line, “Natural Disaster: The Second Wave.” Another shows the Grim Reapers holding a scythe with the word “War,” and another one with a chainsaw that says “Katrina.” A cartoon titled “Hurricane Katrina’s Effects” shows a distressed man in a storm with an oil can (“Oil Prices”) flying overhead.

Sometimes I don’t understand all the cartoons, especially when I’ve crawled into my cave and haven’t followed what’s happening outside of Tracy. I always recognize Bush in the cartoons, though. His caricature, usually a big-eared monkey in a cowboy hat, isn’t hard to spot.

I asked Brian Davis of Cagle Cartoons if people ever complained about cartoonists’ characterizations of President Bill Clinton, when he was in office. He was a Democrat, after all.

“People complained about that, too,” Davis said. “If you’re in power and you’re making the news, you’re going to get picked on. When Clinton was president, people asked us to send more liberal cartoons.”

Readers often say that the editorial cartoons aren’t even-handed, and my response is that they’re not supposed to be. They are potent opinion pieces. Like news stories, they are done on deadline, but unlike news, they aren’t supposed to be objective or even polite. They’re supposed to ram home a point to make readers think. And often, they exaggerate or use satire to
do that.

Cartoons can also have inspirational moments, like Daryl Cagle’s drawing of a crying boy sitting in a child-sized space shuttle — a cartoon he submitted the day of the Columbia shuttle tragedy. That day, Gary Varvel planted a half-mast flag on the moon for his cartoon. Jeff Parker drew a moving image of Columbia landing at the pearly gates with six stars and one Star of David in the night sky to represent the fallen astronauts.

More often, editorial cartoons are provocative, edgy and highly political. Some fall to the left, and some fall to the right.

I e-mailed some of our cartoonists to ask them how they’d rate themselves in terms of political leanings. And how do they portray Bush in their cartoons?

Cartoonist Sandy Huffaker wrote that he’s not about to pin a label on himself. Liberals, he asked? What do they stand for, anyway?

And conservatives? Weren’t they the guys who didn’t like to spend money?

As for Bush, he draws him looking like a mouse holding a smiley-face balloon labeled Iraq. He wrote that he’s probably the worst president ever — “for sure, if Iraq fails” — and he added, “I kind of like him personally, though.”

I don’t think anyone aims to be disrespectful to our commander in chief. But we recognize the value in offering a diversity of opinions and exercising our American freedom of the press.

The Poynter Institute, a school for journalists and media leaders, has a cartoon by Rob Rogers (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) on its Web site that shows a big-eared Bush at a press conference saying, “The newspaper was a mouthpiece for radicals inciting anti-American sentiment in Iraq … We HAD to shut it down!”

The next frame is a drawing of a big-city newspaper office and a “closed” sign over “The New York Times.”

I tried to paint that picture to the reader who called to cancel her subscription. At the end of the conversation, she had one more comment, and I quote: “Cancel my cancellation.”

It was a very good day.

For a great Web site devoted to editorial cartoons, see Cagle Cartoons.

Saturday, August 20, 2005

Not the last word on obituaries

Editor's Notes

When I started out in journalism, I used to joke that I wouldn’t mind writing obituaries at The Washington Post — if only I could work at The Washington Post. But I didn’t get to the Post, and even if I had, I would have found out quickly about the dying art of obituary writing. At first, the obit job was relegated to newsroom clerks. Then, at most newspapers, obituaries moved out of newsrooms and into the advertising departments.

How sad.

At their best, obituaries are gifts to families and to readers. They are stories about the lives of ordinary and extraordinary people in our midst. They offer a sense of history. They are news.

At their worst, they’re just death notices. Or revenue sources.

We still treat obituaries as news at the Tracy Press. Call us old-fashioned, but consider this: Have you ever gone out of town for a week and returned home, drawn to the stack of newspapers you haven’t read — not for the front-page headlines, but for the obituaries? Have you ever cut out the obituary of a relative and put it in a Bible to be read, over and over?

Age turns many of us into serious readers of obits, but so does connection with a community. Odds are you wouldn’t read the Vitals page if you didn’t think there was a chance you’d recognize a name.

I thought writing obituaries would be easy — entry-level journalism. But I was wrong. It’s painful to talk to people at times of great stress. It’s not easy to sum up a life with complete accuracy.

Every so often, obits open windows on how dysfunctional families can be. I recently found myself explaining to the mother of a woman who had died that I take obituaries very seriously. Yes, we get our information from funeral homes, which charge families for filling out the forms they fax to us. But we always try to talk to family members or close friends to verify the facts and make sure we don’t leave anything out.

The mother, obviously grieving, wondered why we had included memorial information in the obit that was given to us from her late daughter’s boyfriend. He had lived with the woman for more than a decade, but he wasn’t her husband. He shouldn’t even be listed.

That reminded me of the people who had listed only half of the survivors, leaving out an entire side of the family tree. It wasn’t because they were forgetful; they preferred an exclusive survivor list. I found out after the obituary published, so I wrote a new one — an accurate one — to run the next day.

So obit-writing can get complicated.

Alas, over the years, I’ve seen cultural shifts in the obituaries. “Significant others” and then “partners” shocked readers when they started showing up. So did the obituaries for babies who had died at birth. More than once, we’ve had requests to name favorite pets. Or to tell short anecdotes. Or to rerun the obit because they forgot something.

We try to comply.

Of course, some people think we’re ogres because we have a certain style in which we write our obituaries. They’ve wanted us to use euphemisms, such as how someone “leapt into the arms of Jesus” or “rode his Harley to the hereafter.” We prefer the simple word “died.”

Mostly, we consider obituaries to be an integral part of the newspaper, and we are deeply committed to running free obituaries for anyone who has ever lived in Tracy.

And now that I’m a seasoned editor, I can finally write obituaries whenever I want.

It’s not bad to have the final word.

Saturday, August 06, 2005

The truth about journalism

Editor's Notes

I used to think that journalists were labeled as cynics because of our training. Professors and editors teach budding reporters to sneer at public relations wizards and propagandists. Pity the poor PR students who learn to spin the news for their future clients.

But that’s a little harsh. Most of the time, press releases, calls and tips lead to good stories. But not always.

A few weeks ago, a local woman called the newsroom to see if someone would write a story about her plight: Young mother suffers from brain tumor.

My cousin died after suffering from a brain tumor diagnosed when she was just her age. I know about brain tumors.

Brain tumors don’t usually become newspaper stories, though, unless the story is unusually heart-wrenching. In this case, the story is that a 25-year-old woman has a malignant vascular tumor on the right side of her brain. Doctors give her three months to live, but Medi-Cal, her only health insurance, will pay only for standard surgery, one that could destroy her ability to form new memories.

“I would rather die than not be able to remember my children,” the woman told reporter Malcolm Maclachlan. Her children are 1, 5 and 8 years old.

An alternative surgery, she said, would allow doctors to enter her brain through her ear rather than her skull. It could leave her deaf in one ear but wouldn’t harm her memory. Because it is considered experimental, she said, Medi-Cal won’t pay the full cost.

She needs $17,983 for her portion.

“They might as well have told me it was a million,” the woman told Maclachlan.

She’s a high school dropout and too sick to hold a job, she said, and her husband, a West High graduate, supports the family on his $11-an-hour job at Home Depot.

The story passes the heart-wrenching test. However, good journalists are trained to talk to other sources. It’s one way to sort out the truth. Or not.

Maclachlan called Les Brooks, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Health Services, which oversees Medi-Cal. She confirmed that the woman who talked to us has been treated for migraines and back pain but said her department lists no brain tumor in the woman’s records.

“What information we have is very different,” she said.

Dr. Khanh Do of Tracy Family Practice said he has treated the woman at his office for the conditions Brooks identified. But when Maclachlan showed him the medical forms that the woman provided — with his name scrawled at the bottom — he said the signature was not his. And he said he didn’t know about a tumor.

At this point, the reporter went back to the woman and told her that the medical professionals have contradicted her story. But she stuck by her claims.

Who is telling the truth?

Sylvia Drew Ivie, project director with the California Endowment, a private group that gives grants to community-based healthcare centers, said it’s not entirely out of the question that doctors would try to limit care to a destitute Medi-Cal patient.

As a managed care institution that takes Medi-Cal patients, Tracy Family Practice could be under tremendous pressures to limit costs.

Ivie’s own husband died in March of a brain tumor, she said, and navigating his care was incredibly difficult, even though they were fully insured, middle-aged and well-versed in medical matters. So for someone like the woman who called us — young, uneducated and, perhaps, heavily medicated and suffering memory loss from a tumor — navigating the Medi-Cal system could be nearly impossible.

But too many details don’t match up. The woman said she had a CAT scan. Patients with brain tumors are usually scanned using magnetic resonance imaging, or MRIs. A neuroscientist who commented on the woman’s description of the surgery option said it doesn’t make sense. She also said she only has four pages of medical records. I had more pages than that for an impacted wisdom tooth.

If the woman falsified medical forms, possibly with the goal of getting out of welfare obligations, she could face charges. A check of San Joaquin County Superior Court records shows she already has convictions on charges of driving under the influence of alcohol and narcotics.

So amid the waving red flags, I ask myself: Am I ethically obligated to report this woman to legal authorities? No. Should the reporter testify against her, if it comes to that? Never. Will others be duped by this woman? Maybe.

Call me a skeptic, but for now, her plight is a warning to others and a reminder to ourselves that the truth is worthy of pursuit.

And that’s the story.

Saturday, July 23, 2005

Bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo tops banned words list

Editor's Notes

Our city editor recently handed a list of about 100 banned words to the reporters at their weekly meeting.

First they groaned. Some muttered under their breath. A few argued.

How in the world were they supposed to write about a feasibility study without using the word feasibility? How could they cover a City Council meeting without facilities, mitigations, allocations, implementations and infrastructure? How could they ever quote another public official?

New rule: No sentence will stagger under the weight of bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo. Reporters will throw out all those tired, poor, wretched words, yearning to be rewritten.

Take vehicle, for instance. Why write about a vehicle found in the canal when you can be so much more specific by calling it a car or a pickup? Same goes for juveniles. That’s cop talk: Call them teens instead. And in case you find yourself writing the word utilize, don’t. Trade it for three letters — use.

Every reporter who takes a beat at a newspaper knows that it has its own language to be translated. Sources from school officials to cops, lawyers, politicians, coaches and bureaucrats use languages steeped in jargon, and if reporters aren’t careful, they’ll pick up the same shopworn vocabularies.

Thankfully, some public agencies are starting to recognize the problem. Contra Costa County supervisors, for instance, took a brilliant anti-acronym stand last month and banished alphabet soup like EIR (Environment Impact Report), ABAG (Association of Bay Area Governments) and RFP (Request for Proposals) from all speech and written materials. Only commonly used acronyms such as FBI or BART are acceptable.

Supervisor John Gioia of Richmond said he was inspired by the board of commissioners in Kitsap County, Wash., which fines anyone $1 who uses bureaucratic acronyms. The money goes to charity.

“I think it’s important for government officials to speak in English,” the Kitsap board’s chairwoman said.

In the same way, we think it’s important that people understand what government is up to, so our job at the newspaper is to make what we write more understandable. We need to avoid clichés (like the plague), and jargon (like best practices), which are ho-hum to readers.

So the list of banned words is an attempt to strive for language that’s fresh, never arcane. Strong, active verbs. Meaningful nouns. Rarely used adjectives and adverbs.

If you see any of the following words in our copy, feel free to point them out to us. (Note that this is just a partial list, because I don’t want your eyes to glaze over completely.)

Banned: Action plan, assess, at-risk, benchmarking, capacity, continuum, empowerment, extrapolate, incentivize, initiative, joint resources, leverage, paid personnel, residence, stakeholders, sustained injuries, juveniles.

If you have any nominations of your own, send them my way to add to the banned word list. And if you have any pristine, unsullied replacement words, ship them over, too.

Saturday, July 09, 2005

We stand with reporter Judith Miller

Editor's Notes

Some people are having a tough time with the Judith Miller case. They lament that this confrontation between the press and government isn’t anything like the last big fight, the one in 1971 to publish the Pentagon Papers.

Regrettably, they’re right; this case involves what could turn out to be a political hack manipulating the media and putting a CIA agent in danger — which is a federal crime.

But who is in jail? The journalist who didn’t even write a story. And something’s terribly wrong with that picture.

To give you some background: A former CIA consultant criticized the Bush administration, and, presumably, one or more high-ranking government officials tried to discredit him by telling journalists that his wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative. A syndicated columnist and a Time magazine reporter wrote the story about the outing of the CIA agent, and a federal grand jury investigating the case demanded the identity of the sources.

Columnist Robert Novak must have coughed up the information, because he wasn’t held in contempt of court, as were Time’s Matthew Cooper and New York Times correspondent Judith Miller, the two other reporters who had received the leak. After a federal judge ordered them to testify, an appeals court affirmed the order, and the Supreme Court let it stand.

Time Inc. then handed over its reporter’s documents to a special prosecutor, and Cooper agreed to testify. Then on Wednesday, Miller, who had promised not to reveal her source, and kept her promise, went to jail.

Journalists are supposed to be watchdogs of government, trained to bare our teeth at anyone who would take away our legal rights and abilities to keep the public fully informed. Unfortunately, on the federal level, we don’t have complete protection, as Miller’s incarceration sadly shows.

Sure, we’ve had more than a few journalists who have abused their privileges and humiliated the rest of us. But we have to ask, as Miller did, “Do you want to hear from authorized government spokesmen, authorized corporate spokesmen alone, or do you want to hear what’s really going on inside an organization?”

In Tracy, we rarely write stories using confidential sources, and we’ve only twice had to fight to keep our reporters from turning into investigators for the government by being forced to give up their notebooks or provide witness statements. But it happens often in Washington, especially with administrations determined to operate in secrecy and federal prosecutors who find themselves threatened more by those who wield pens and notebooks than by what could happen to our democracy without them.

Judith Miller made a personal choice of conscience in defense of the First Amendment and its principles. She stood her ground, and for that, I stand in awe.

Saturday, June 25, 2005

When hate comes to town

Editor's Notes

Two weeks have passed since the traveling Westboros burst into town, waving their signs of hatred at our high school graduates and yelling at our church-going citizens.

Thankfully, the picket signs and T-shirts are gone, along with the out-of-town media and counterdemonstrators. Unlike Topeka, Kan., home of the anti-gay Rev. Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church for the past 14 years, Tracy can sigh with relief that its residents don’t share Phelps’ extreme wrath.

Two weeks have passed, but we’re still talking about the pickets — and our response to them.

A reader asked why we put a photo of the protesters above the graduates on the front page of the June 13 paper. A school board trustee remarked at the last meeting that the demonstration was a “non-issue” and that we should have covered it as such.

Most people are surprised to know that we debated for weeks how we would cover this spotlight-seeking group. We knew we wouldn’t ignore them, because as journalists, we are responsible for reporting what’s happening. But we didn’t want to overplay — or be played by the players.

At first, we tried to bolster the understanding of what was coming to town with research and learned that the Westboro folks are publicity hounds who know how to get free airtime and newspaper space. In our reporting, we tried to reflect that research — that Phelps’ followers are mostly family members; that they not only target gays, but all Americans; that they rarely spur violence; that 30 extra Tracy police officers and a handful of sheriff’s deputies and California Highway Patrol officers would be assigned for crowd control during the two days of protests; that counterprotesters would far outnumber the protesters.

We know that it was our original reporting of West High’s Gay-Straight Alliance that drew the attention of Phelps in the first place. And later, when we talked to local ministers, we reported that even the most conservative refused to take Phelps’ side, and that’s what led to the public protests at the churches.

But we didn’t create the Phelps family and its anti-gay, anti-American sentiment. And unlike what one letter-writer has asked of us, we can’t print just the positive news in town; that’s the job of the chamber of commerce.

Still, what’s a local newspaper to do when hate comes to town?

We did what other newspapers do when faced with demonstrations by the white supremacist Aryan Nations or rallies by the Ku Klux Klan. We covered the attention-getting protests and the community’s response to them, betting on the public benefit, and we tried to keep our own biases at bay.

And now we take notes of the lessons learned — that events such as this can provoke individual thought and reveal shared attitudes. That some churches will pass the collection plate to help pay for the extra police protection that the city provided. That the effect of blatant hate can backfire on its instigators.

The Westboro crew got us talking about what was once considered taboo and maybe, just maybe, it brought us closer as a community. And that’s news.

Friday, June 17, 2005

Truth: on the record or off?

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Saturday, June 11, 2005

Grappling with all those grads

Editor's Notes

On June 9, 1939, stories in the Tracy Press told how the fire department extinguished a threatening grass fire, preparations were completed for the 16th annual Holy Ghost celebration and the town’s high school seniors received their diplomas. Individual photos of the 95 graduates, with names like Silva, Parker and Bettencourt, appeared on Page 6.

Grass fires still threaten Tracy in the windy city, the Portuguese community still has its annual celebration and high school graduation is still front-page news in the local paper.

But for the first time in 65 years, we aren’t running the photos of all the high school graduates, which amount to nearly 1,200 students, including those from Tracy, West, continuation, charter and private high schools.

I guess you could say Tracy has finally reached that milestone of being just too big.

While some people have said, “I wondered when you’d cut back,” a few parents have expressed their disappointment in our diminished graduation section, which published Thursday. “I can only assume this is a cost issue on the paper’s part,” a parent wrote in an e-mail with her canceled subscription.

It’s never been a moneymaker to print the special graduation section, with its hard-to-come-by content and labor-intensive production. Tracy’s Johnson Studio has always been accommodating and generous, but local photographers aren’t always contracted to take the senior portraits. Yearbook companies are often less than eager to share the photos, while some have gone out of their way to ship us what they had, even from other states.

Then there are the seniors who somehow missed having their photos taken, which can come as a surprise to parents who look for them in the grad tab. And, of course, there’s human error on our part, which has led to mistaken identities and missing seniors.

Most daunting these days is what used to be the easiest: getting the names of the actual graduates, which schools have become more reluctant to release. Last year, a parent actually sued the school district over the list of graduates provided to us — and threatened us for printing it.

That’s when I knew this wasn’t the Tracy of 1939.

We’ve always considered the grad tab to be a community service that required lots of staff and volunteer help. It was a labor of love, not so different from working on our own school yearbooks. Tom and Sam Matthews recall the hours spent engraving all the photos of the graduates back in the hot-metal days of letterpress printing. A generation or two later, my staff will remember shifts spent scanning senior photos, inputting names and trying to match everything together by deadline.

As for readers, I know they will miss the grad tab. I’ll certainly miss my annual search for familiar faces in the black-and-white photos of smiling graduates, just as I miss recognizing people I know in the grocery store.

But I take comfort in the fact that today’s graduations at Peter B. Kyne Field are still newsworthy events. Whole families will fill the grandstands. Graduates will sit on folding chairs under the bright, June sun. Valedictorians will give speeches about looking to the future. Reporters will jot notes into their tiny notepads. And photographers will try to capture the image of a graduate as he throws caution to the wind — and mortarboard into the air.

Thankfully, the pomp and circumstance hasn’t changed at all.