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

Thursday, February 22, 2007

Anonymous Postcards from Tracy, California

Someone just gave me a link to PostSecret, a blog that describes itself as an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets on one side of a homemade postcard. Some of the cards are funny or touching, while others are just silly. But the site — and the concept — is interesting.


We have our own experience with postcards here at the Tracy Press. We've gotten handmade postcards from the same person almost every week for probably 10 years. The postcards are handwritten, sometimes with words and graphics clipped out of the paper and glued to the postcard. Then the whole thing is carefully covered with wide tape, so it looks laminated.


We’ve never used the postcards as letters to the editor, because they're never signed. But we know something about the writer, who is a faithful reader of our editorial page. He/she finds many of our writers to be too conservative and isn't a fan of President Bush or the former Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Tracy.


A few months ago, someone else in town got one of the mystery postcards at home and called the police, reporting it as hate mail. We’ve never called it hate mail, even though the writer doesn’t seem to like us much and calls us conservative yuppies. (By the way, postcard-writer, we've endorsed Gore and Kerry for president, never Bush.) We look forward to the next installment, carefully crafted from a Tracy Press reader.


Here's one of the recent postcards:





Saturday, February 17, 2007

Here's to readers


This week was one of the biggest news weeks I can remember, with a missing man whose car plunged into the canal, a police shooting of a man on a bicycle, the funeral of a 17-year-old killed in a car accident and an explosion and fire that consumed six apartments on the night of Valentine's Day.

We got initial tips for many of the stories from the radio scanner, with alerts from the fire and police departments and California Highway Patrol. But much of the information we couldn't get from the authorities came from readers. The online comments, in particular, led us to sources we wouldn't have found otherwise.
The aerial photo, above, came in this morning from a longtime reader, John Silva, who carries a camera when he goes paragliding over Tracy. It shows the aftermath of the fire at the Sycamore Village Apartments, which is about three blocks from where John lives. Thank you, John, and thanks to all the readers!

Sunday, February 04, 2007

MediaNews Monopoly

I'm interested in this latest piece of media news, not only because so many Bay Area newspapers have been swallowed by MediaNews papers (Oakland Tribune, Tri-Valley Herald, San Jose Mercury-News, Contra Costa Times, San Mateo County Times, Monterey County Herald, Vallejo Times-Herald, need I go on?). I'm interested, because our tiny, family-owned newspaper company, Tracy Press Inc., owns and operates two weeklies in the Santa Cruz mountains.

The news — that MediaNews has bought the Santa Cruz Sentinel — was announced Friday by MediaNews chief executive Dean Singleton, from the company's Denver headquarters. It's the Sentinel's second sale in two months.

"We are delighted to acquire the Santa Cruz Sentinel and expand our reach in this very competitive region," MediaNews chief executive Dean Singleton said Friday.

Oh, and here's something I just read in the Bay Guardian, for those who want to know more about the web of connection between the Bay Area's two giant chains.
And this from Between the sheets.

Friday, February 02, 2007

Anonymous darts cause commotion online

Here's tomorrow's column today:

This week started early Sunday with two comments posted on the bottom of our police log on our Web site.

Had we heard about the crash? Were we going out to the scene?

It was those early comments online that pushed us out the door and over to West High School to see what had happened late the night before. Now, at week’s end, I’d venture to say that everyone in Tracy knows a student died and three others were seriously injured in the tragic accident Jan. 27.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes at the Tracy Press, we’ve had technical turmoil that turned to angst. The “comment” function was added to stories online less than a week before the accident at West High. The idea — to allow readers to leave notes, almost like instant letters to the editor or an online bulletin board. I’ve noticed on other newspaper sites that commenters seem to like to chime in with a final word on stories, with a, “Good job, Jake,” or “Boy, are you biased, Betty.”

Little did we know that this new function would produce an explosion in feedback, turning into a public forum where a full range of emotions would be expressed — and managing to wreak havoc on our computer server.

Before Sunday, the Tracy Press site averaged 1,100 hits a day. When we posted the first photo and story about the accident Sunday afternoon, the comments started rolling in, and so did those hits. By Monday, the hits increased tenfold, to more than 10,000. Page views (the number of times users request a page) went from 5,000 to more than 43,000 that day.

Rapid-fire comments were being posted on stories at a rate of one a minute, producing instant-messaging. That’s about the time that Steve Reichgut, owner of SolutionsIC, which hosts our site, had to disable the commenting for a few hours to relieve the overloaded server. The increase in traffic, he said, was massive and the number of comments phenomenal.

On Tuesday, the commenting barely took a breather. One story gathered more than 200 comments online, with tears flowing and tempers flaring.

And that’s where the technical became personal.

Many of comments were wonderful tributes to the teen who died. Some of the memorializing was pure poetry. Other comments, however, were toxic diatribes that assaulted the senses. Members of the community worried — and rightly so — that the families of the young victims would be hurt by the comments. Some said it was irresponsible for us to allow this and pleaded for us to take down all the comments.

On the street, we also heard from parents — some angry at the uncensored comments and others happy to discover a place that served as an outlet for their children’s expression.
Some were merely aghast at the poor writing skills of the commenters.

We started to monitor the site for more than profanity, all the while discussing and debating with everyone, from the publisher to the webmaster, about which posts crossed the line. Cuss words were obvious, but what about criticism? Those who posted comments were quick to point out the insensitive posts, and we removed some of them.

As City Editor Eric Firpo told a reader, “I know that fails to satisfy a lot of people who are offended by some of the postings, which seem tasteless at best. But we’re reluctant to start censoring based on taste, or hurtfulness. Where do we draw the line there? That line is different for everybody and would satisfy no one.”

So it’ll be a never-ending judgment call for individual posts, and we’ll keep monitoring, even when the commotion dies down.

I don’t know where all this is heading. This is new territory. Someday we may look back and cringe at our rudimentary methods of connecting the town through personal comments pasted on online stories.

But community conversation at a time like this, I think, can be good, perhaps, even healthy.

Cheri Matthews, editor of the Tracy Press, can be reached by phone (830-4201) e-mail (cherim@tracypress.com) or blog (www.editor-matthews.blogspot.com).

Thursday, February 01, 2007

Remembering Molly Ivins

One of my great mentors, the feisty and funny Molly Ivins, died last night, and I can't go another minute without paying tribute here to her. We ran her columns in the Tracy Press for many years, and about five years ago, I was thrilled to listen to her speak at Smith College in Massachusetts.

What's the most important message I got from this Texas journalist?

"Raise more hell."