Archive for August, 2008
August 29th, 2008
I’m a true believer in the future of newspapers, mine especially. Oh, it’s not so pretty at the moment. We’re hunkering down to weather the plunge of the global economy and the transformation of the industry, but there’s just no doubt the Register Star, its Web site and someday its holograms are going to be around for an other century or so.
The 24-7 doom-and-gloom whining from the disbelievers wears me out. So, when Sun-Times movie guru Roger Ebert took on departing sports columnist Jay Mariotti in a recent column, I just cheered.
This may be too much “insider” stuff for most folks, but if you want a peek into one of Eberts’ best-ever, in-your-face columns click here and settle in for a great read.
Here’s a clip; it made my day because that’s how I feel about the Register Star:
“I started here when Marshall Field and Jim Hoge were running the
paper. I stayed through the Rupert Murdoch regime. I was asked, “How
can you work for a Murdoch paper?” My reply was: “It’s not his paper.
It’s my paper. He only owns it.” That’s the way I’ve always felt about
the Sun-Times, and I still do. On your way out, don’t let the door
bang you on the ass. Your former colleague, Roger Ebert.”
August 28th, 2008
At least some of them are in jail; there could be more arrests by the time you read this. Mid-week, the Rockford police department announced they’d arrested three suspects in the northeast Rockford string of burglaries. On Thursday, there were two more.
Well done, guys in blue. I mean that. It does take time to piece the information together, to see the trend develop and make the connections. It takes smart planning and careful execution to do the stakeouts and catch the suspects in the act. For each cop who played a hand in this, I tip my hat.
It doesn’t, however, make me less annoyed that it took forever to get the information to the public. You captured the dudes less than two weeks after you sent out that vague press release and reverse-911 call (I got the call at my house, so I know it worked.) The first of the burglaries was in July, which made it six weeks or so before the public had any idea homes were being burglarized. I accept that the apparent random nature of the burglaries may have meant you didn’t see the pattern in July, but how about early August? If you want the public to help, to get involved, give us enough information that we can act on it smartly.
And, just so I lay it all out: I’m not all that thrilled with how the Register Star handled the press release in the beginning either. We didn’t ask enough questions in the first few days after that release and before our Freedom of Information Act filing. And, if I hadn’t been annoyed at the lack of information in the story we published, we might not have done our reporting. Once we got it clear what we needed to do, we did it and we got most of the information.
So, yeah, I’m annoyed at the police for making it so hard to tell readers what was happening. I’m not patting us on the back either because we didn’t kick it in gear as fast as we should have. Hopefully, we all learned some lessons.
August 28th, 2008
It’s a good day to be an Illinoisan. Oh, not because we are a blue state. Certainly not because our governor can govern. Not because we are smarter, wealthier, better employed. None of those things. And, not even because we had a thing to do with it. It’s good to be an Illinoisan today because when history books are written, we lived here in the land of Lincoln the day a black man was nominated for President of the United State — the first time a major political party has done so.
Barack Obama. Illinois junior senator, a man who just four years ago was little known outside a handful of editorial boards, some state politicians and his family and friends. Not for this post a discussion of politics, of platforms, of left versus right. This post because after four centuries of American history, a black man stands on the podium to accept his party’s nomination.
I grew up in the South. I remember signs on drinking fountains that said “whites only” and “colored.” I remember knowing there were separate doors for black patients and white patients at Dr. Baldwin’s office. I knew then that black women rode in the back seat, never the front, although I once told Miss Ida that it wasn’t right for a child (me) to sit up front. Grown-ups sit there, I said. Hush, she said; that’s not the way it’s done.
Not the way it’s done.
I’ve spent almost 20 years here in Rockford, and I lived here through the beginning, middle and end of the Rockford School District’s discrimination lawsuit and subsequent desegregation. Millions of dollars and countless political nightmares later, the mantra remained: That’s not the way it’s done.
Not the way it’s done. Our failure as people of all colors to reconcile 400 years of racial chaos may well be our country’s greatest challenge to the future. For all too often, that reconciliation is not the way it’s done.
But today? Today for just a moment, we see a glimpse of what that reconciliation might look like. Barack Obama, Illinois’ favorite son, was nominated to be President of the United States.
August 22nd, 2008
There’s not a thing I can write about this week’s layoffs at the Rockford Register Star that won’t get me smacked in the face by someone. For every decision I made, for every comment I write, someone — often anonymous — will have a “better” one and it frequently starts with “You’re the one who ought to have been fired….” Yeah, whatever; I’m not asking for sympathy. As my dad said: That’s why they call it work. If it were easy and everyone could do it, they’d be doing it.
What really annoys me, though, are the people who seem to rejoice in the pain of others. I am astounded by the venom that follows such announcements, and I’ve seen it happen enough times with other companies that when we posted our layoff story, I turned off “comments.” That didn’t sit well with some folks. As I told one poster who wanted to comment on the story, we’re hurting enough right now that I decided we didn’t need to listen to what were sure to be rants that we deserved to die. Frankly, I may do the same thing for other companies, if, heaven forbid, they face troubled times. There simply is something deeply wrong with people who get a charge out of “kicking you when you’re down.”
Anyone who has ever been without a job through no fault of their own (and I have, by the way) knows the turmoil, the feeling of being lost in a maze. That’s true for the survivors, too. I saw how tough it was for the staff in the News Tower — in every department — to get back to work minutes after the layoffs spared them. As I said to the newsroom staff Monday afternoon: Wewill have to grieve while we work. There will be a Web site today and a newspaper tomorrow. That’s our job.
As the weekend comes around, where do we start on Monday? Actually, the answer is simple: We’ll be the Rock River Valley’s primary source for news, information and advertising in print and online. That doesn’t change.
Our success in connecting with 80 percent of the adults in the market doesn’t rest solely on how many people we have, but on the quality of what each of us does. Quantity does matter; I’d be stupid to think otherwise. But quality will trump quantity. When we move forward, it will be the quality of what we do that matters: the quality of our local news content, the quality of the customers we connect to advertisers, the quality of our customer service.
When the dust settles, we will be fewer. We will not be less.
August 22nd, 2008
Quick update on an earlier post: We’re still waiting for answers to our (your) questions about the flurry of home burglaries in northeast Rockford. We first asked for details, then filed a Freedom of Information Act with Chief Chet Epperson, and then a second one. I asked Mayor Larry mid-week if he’d jog things loose.
We’re not asking for insider information here. Just a few basic questions: what happened, where did it happen, how many times did it happen over what period of time? What makes this so unusual that a press release was warranted? What are the police doing about it? Do they have information? Hardly a line-up of questions that would jeopardize any ongoing investigation.
I have some hope that we’ll get something soon. Although the chief yesterday denied a similar set of FOIAs for information on the department’s Taser policy, it’s my understanding, as of last night, that we may get some of the Taser answers without the FOIA.
I certainly hope so. The tit-for-tat practice of demanding a FOIA for basic public record information is goofy. It wastes time, paper and resources. Just answer the darn questions.
August 15th, 2008
Late last week, the Rockford Police Department issued a press release that said (and I paraphrase): If you live in northeast Rockford, lock your doors because someone is burglarizing homes.
The only other real information were the boundaries and the time frame: Riverside on the north; Alpine on the west; Bell School on the east and State on the south. Last time I checked that was one huge chunk of the city. Mostly between 9 a.m. — 3 p.m.
Frankly, there was a lot about that sketchy press release to annoy me. It was so vague. It must be news (meaning burglaries are uncommon in that quadrant). It must have been a lot of them or otherwise why mention them at all. And, just for good measure, I’m betting the cop shop doesn’t issue many press releases about burglaries in the southwest quadrant.
So, I asked my metro desk: Where are the answers? How many? Over what period of time? What was taken? Was anyone hurt? Where exactly? What neighborhoods? Suspects? What’s being done to catch the dude or dudette? Is this unusual? How does it compare/contrast with other areas of the city? Is this something new? If it weren’t serious, why issue a press release?
Here was the response from our journalists: We asked. They’re not talking and won’t say so we’ve FOIA’d ‘em. Not sure if they’ll respond, and if they do, response will be slow.
It annoys me that to get basic, public record information that’s actually useful, we have to beg. Answers to every one of those simple questions should have been in the press release. To demand that we go through a formal Freedom of Information Act paperwork drill is at best ludicrous and at worst an example of government secrecy at the expense of the public.
Maybe by the time you read this, the police brass will have come through with some answers. Don’t hold your breath.
August 12th, 2008
Web site “comments” can be — though often are not — important insights into what’s going on in a community’s collective brain. And, because comments are usually posted anonymously, the common wisdom has been that anonymity breeds a certain clarity and credibility since the poster doesn’t fear identification.
Yeah, it works that way in my dreams. It works that way in some Ph.D. candidate’s thesis. It doesn’t work that way — or not very often — in the real world. In the real world, there’s a preponderance of posters with way too much time on their hands and a deep-rooted hostility in their brains. They get ugly with each other and the world in general. They can’t express an idea that doesn’t drip with most every “-ism” and phobia. They are black holes sucking the rest of us into their unholy and unhappy vortex.
We take down the posts and ban the posters, exercises in futility that I’d liken to herding cats or containing Silly Putty. But we try, mightily. Our Terms of Use help, and best is mine: My house, my rules. If I don’t like what you’re posting, you must go somewhere else to post it.
Today, Howard Owens, director of digital publishing for GateHouse Media, shared this laugh-out-loud “article” from the Onion, the satirical weekly famous on college campuses (and printed here at the Register Star, by the way.) Some days, I am pretty sure this is what most comments posters are doing. Enjoy.
August 6th, 2008
Back in the early 2000s, Joel Cowen, the Rock River Valley’s guru of statistics and trends, told execs at the Rockford Register Star that the explosive home values seen in the late 1990s and early years of the century were an aberration and no one should start thinking they were here to stay.
He was blunt: We see three, maybe four or five, percent growth in home values, not this eight, nine, 10 percent stuff, he said. You own a home, it increases three percent a year and that’s it. We are a stable housing market (not to mention, of course, affordable.)
It was hard to swallow Cowen’s sober interpretation. After all, the region was coming off the depressed values underpinned by the decades-long school desegregation lawsuit. We were rejoicing at the rebound, at recovering some of that perceived devaluation. It was go-go times and way nice to see the market value of one’s house increase. I mean, what homeowner doesn’t want the house to be worth $15,000 more this year than last? (well, except that does also mean the tax bite is likely to increase.) I know some folks thought Cowen a sourpuss and bought into the idea that the housing fundamentals of the Rock River Valley market had changed forever.
We got used to values increasing, subdivisions multiplying, and homes selling in days, if not hours. As 2003 took off and headed toward 2007, it looked like Cowen’s conservative trend-reading was off base. Not so much.
When the mortgage lending fiasco blew up and sent the nation’s housing market into tailspins in some parts of the country, the Rock River Valley held its own. Instead of seeing home values tumbling by 50 percent, we’re seeing 3.5 percent or less. We are not Florida, California or the Northeast, which are reeling from stratospheric increases in home prices followed by an equally horrifying race to the bottom. We are doing what the region always does: Bump along the middle. Up a little, down a little, but stable all the way.
I won’t be disingenuous. It is tough in this market economically, and I blogged about it recently. It takes longer to sell a house and sales are fewer. But, there are some important things to be grateful for, and one is that “bump along the middle.”
August 4th, 2008
Lou Spencer, 64, was buried today. I miss him. You may not have known Lou, though thousands of Rock River Valley people did. Probably make that tens of thousands. I didn’t know Lou anywhere near as well as they did and I make no claims on our connections. But, Lou needs a permanent remembering, something that will make the cyberspace rounds forever to come.
Here’s my simple connection to Lou: My husband and Lou were Scout masters together for years. Lou and Sally’s five sons, and our one son, grew up together in Scouts. Early on, back in the first of the 1990s, when Lou found out I was the editor of the newspaper, he made it his mission to keep me on the right (and I do mean right) side of the political fence. He’d call me for what seemed like every Saturday morning, sometimes correcting some editorial position we’d taken; at others pointing out story ideas, sources and connections we needed to check.
Lou would open each conversation with: “This is Lou.” And, anyone who has ever heard him say those three words, knows exactly what they sounded like.
This is Lou, and off he’d go. Until one Saturday, I begged him to please call me at work rather than at home. You see, Lou, I said, sometimes I just need a couple of hours when I get to be wife and mother and not newspaper editor. He understood. He still called, thank goodness, but he split the calls nicely from work to home.
Lou lived his life exactly as we are supposed to: with gusto, with God at the center and family all around. Ask him for help, and Lou dropped everything to lend a hand. In all those Scouting years, if Lou ever said no, I can’t remember it and I doubt others can. Can do; will do; did do. That was Lou’s way of living. Sally’s, too. Their five boys, though they certainly are no longer so, will, I am sure, do no less.
In an earlier post, I shared the Ogle County fair queen’s question: “What would this world be like if everyone had your attitude?” Lou would know exactly how to answer that: “This is Lou.” Godspeed, friend.
