Comments on a tragedy

This is a first. Just this week, we added a "comment" function on the bottom of our stories posted on the Web site. And just this weekend, we got our first story tips on those very comments. The tips have led to information about a fatal car crash at West High School late Saturday night involving four West High students.

Reporter John Upton and photographer Glenn Moore are now at the scene, where a memorial to student Mike Ucci has been set up at the school's flag pole and counselors are on hand to talk to grieving students. A candlelight vigil is planned for 7 tonight.

Thank you to all the citizen journalists who have provided information and to the thousands of Internet users who are visiting our Web site.

Tracy Press, personified

I got this e-mail today and almost deleted it before I read it.

Just wanted to say Hi to everyone over there, my name is Tracy Press! Bet I am not the first one to write to you to point something like this out. I am English (I live in the county of Essex) and just found out there is a newspaper with my name on it so wanted to say Hi. Thanks for reading this.
-Tracy Press

I asked her/him to send a photo! (It's a her, I see.)

Private time, public business

Got a funny call at home this weekend from an advertiser who told me there was a mistake with her ad in Saturday's paper, and she was sure I would have caught it, being the editor and all.

I explained that editors are responsible for what's in the news pages, not the ads, and then my husband (the publisher), intervened and whispered, "Tell her, we'll refund her money for the ad."

Now comes the funny part. I told her about the refund, and here's her response:

"Just get that Suzanne Tucker to give up her e-mails, and you can keep your 273 bucks."

Of course, it's probably going to cost us more than that, if we have to take Vice Mayor Tucker to court to get her to give up her e-mails written to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory regarding a proposed bio-agent laboratory a mile from Tracy.

We've asked her, informally and formally, for the e-mails, buoyed by our belief that we have the law on our side. The California Public Records Act, for one, requires “writing containing information relating to the conduct of the public’s business prepared, owned, used or retained by any state or local agency” be made public no more than 10 days after it is requested.
The California Constitution also includes a section that reads, “the writings of public officials … shall be open to public scrutiny.”

In case you've missed our stories about Tucker and her elusive e-mail, here's the latest story.

As always, feel free to comment.

All the news that's fit to wear

While I'm on the "what to do with newspapers" bandwagon, here's an artist who makes jewelry out of old newspapers and sells them on NewspaperJewelry.com. She uses the Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Tampa Tribune and other newspapers with "interesting patterns," she told Editor & Publisher. And she sells the earrings, cufflinks, necklaces and bracelets for anywhere from $49 to $2,500.

Now that's the kind of recycling I like to see!

A taker!

Here's Laurann Dong of Tracy wearing her just-folded newspaper hat. Looks good, but did she use the Tracy Press?

Photo by Diane Dong

Not so funny!

I read the comics while I rode BART back from the city today and didn't notice our mistake until I got this e-mail:

Hello Cheri, I was really disappointed when I opened my Tracy Press to the comics page this morning. The comics in today's paper are not today's comics. I don't know if they are tomorrow's or maybe even Saturday's, but they were not today's. This is OK with some comics, as they are not serials. But for comics such as my favorite serials, Baldo and For Better or For Worse, it is not so good. It is like skipping a chapter in a book. ... What comic strips will you put in the paper on the day that these comic strips are from? Will you repeat them again?

Yes, the humans have erred . Apparently, we got our days mixed up and printed Friday's comics today (Thursday). So that means we'll print today's comics tomorrow (Friday).

Confusing and embarrassing. Our apologies to Zits, Baldo, Dilbert and the whole comics gang.

Meanwhile, I love hearing from comic-strip aficionados, some of the most passionate newspaper readers out there.

This reminds me that when "Fox Trot" ended syndication recently, we had to choose a replacement quickly. We're trying out "Mutts," because it supposedly appeals to a similar, young demographic. Plus, we didn't have any other animal comic strips.

All comics comments accepted here!

What a newspaper's good for

Ever make a pressman's hat out of a folded-up newspaper? If you make one and send me a photo of someone wearing it, I'll put it on this blog — and in Our Town.

I haven't tried this with our tabloid-sized TP, so I'm not sure if a Tracy Press hat would fit a modern-day pressman.

If you want to try it, here are some instructions from the Salt Lake City Deseret News.

Another word of the year

Somebody asked me recently if he was going to be "plutoed." Huh, I asked? Then I saw the same word when I read that the American Dialect Society chose its word of the year — plutoed.

To pluto is to "demote or devalue someone or something." Remember what happened to the former planet Pluto last year?

I like it! We'll see if this word appears in the Tracy Press sometime soon.

By the way, the American Dialect Society chose "truthiness" last year as its top word, which Merriam-Webster declared as its 2006 word of the year a month ago.

Other words considered by the society of wordsmiths: murse (man's purse), flog (fake blog) and macaca (an American citizen treated as an alien).

News vs. advertising

I’ll come right out with this one: I’m not a fan of ads that masquerade as news.

I think readers deserve to know the difference between commercial newspaper space and the space we devote to news. That’s why whenever there’s a question as to whether an ad looks too much like news, we put the words “Paid Advertisement” on the top of the ad.

Or we should. This week, a two-page spread for “Golden State quarters” from a company called the World Reserve Monetary Exchange accidentally lost its advertising disclaimer when it was resized in our production room. To make matters worse, the entire package mimicked the news so much, with its headlines, graphics and bylined story, that it confused some readers, who thought our newsroom staff had written the copy.

One man said he thought we’d been duped into believing what we wrote — that we had only 48 hours to get a piece of a private hoard of never-circulated quarters.

Another, a local coin collector, said we should know that we can buy the same Golden State quarters from the U.S. Mint for less than what this private company charges. And he was pretty sure that anyone who bought the novelty coins wasn’t going to get rich, as the ad suggests.

So I did what any good journalist would do and called the 800 number on the ad to find out more about what the World Reserve Monetary Exchange was selling — the rolls of quarters, “available only to Californians.”

The woman who answered the phone first asked for my ZIP code, to prove I was a California resident. While she checked to see if 95376 is truly in California, I pulled out my calculator. If I bought a roll of 25 quarters for laundry next door at the Bank of America, I would shell out $6.25. But these special quarters, the woman on the phone told me, would cost $21.10 for a roll, including processing and postage. She preferred to sell me 10 rolls, she said, and I’d better hurry with my decision, because the offer was only good for another 48 hours.
I made a mental note to check on that offer after two days.

Now, I’m no expert on the value of coins — circulated, never-circulated, golden or not-so-golden — and I haven’t the faintest idea what would happen to those values if I were to bury a roll of these special quarters for my great-great-grandchildren.

But I do know about ethics. Which brings me back to separating news from advertising. The Society of Professional Journalists, an organization that urges conscientious journalists to seek truth and report it, tells us that we should always distinguish news from paid advertising — “and shun hybrids that blur the lines between the two.”

I’m sorry that we didn’t do that Wednesday on pages 12 and 13 of the Tracy Press. Professional integrity is the cornerstone of credibility in a newspaper, and I’m afraid we lost some of our value this week