Archive for April, 2009
April 28th, 2009
You do not have swine flu. You likely do not have any kind of flu. You are unlikely to come down with swine flu. And, if you do, you are unlikely to die.
Take a deep breath (and I said the same thing to my newsroom types.) We are not in a full-blown crisis. We are scaring the pants off each other over something that might-be. We are using apocalyptic words that guarantee only one thing: When — if — we actually need to use them, no one will pay any attention.
Influenza is a serious thing. We should pay serious attention so we can be prepared. To that end all this over-the-top stuff from goofy masks to travel bans is good for practicing. Think disaster drills. They’re good things.
But, for heaven’s sake, we’re letting the cable news shows and the instant-news of the Web create a news event out of smoke and mirrors.
Be smart. Wash your hands. Cover your mouth and nose when you cough and sneeze. Your mother ought to have taught you those things when you were two. But don’t imagine yourself into a case of swine flu.
And, read this terrific piece from Howard Kurtz at the Washington Post.
April 23rd, 2009
Tucked at the bottom of Isaac Guerrero’s story in the Register Star this morning was this juicy nugget:
“Though On the Waterfront’s operating budget hovers around $1.5 million a year, the city provides the agency with in-kind police protection. Money for those police wages — $400,000 or more a year — comes from a special city fund aimed at improving downtown. Morrissey wants to switch that annual subsidy with something else that better serves On the Waterfront, taxpayers and downtown.”
Egad and little fishes! How fast can that cash be switched away from On the Waterfront and on to more productive purposes? I used to love OTW as much as the next guy, but these days I think it’s OK to ask: What the heck is OTW really accomplishing for the couple million it spends? And, let’s be honest. That line of questioning must take a straight path directly to this: Should it just be killed?
One thing for sure. The city of Rockford ought not be spending $400,000 from a downtown improvement fund on OTW expenses of any kind. If OTW cannot completely generate the revenue stream to fund itself, then it’s time to cut it loose.
April 22nd, 2009
I spend a lot of time online. I love wandering through the Web universe and have been an early adopter of technology ever since cold type replaced hot type. I had a Twitter account in 2007; thought then I was late to the game. Turns out, not so much. The Register Star had an online news site back in 1996-97. We thought we were behind the times. Again, not so much.
Today, if you are not wired (or better still, wire-less), you might as well be the last dude riding a horse. You can lament the passing of the old days, whine about the seemingly purpose-absent technology of social networking. Help yourself, old brain. But, if you have no clue what that headline means up there, you’re cluelessly out of step.
The topic-of-the-day is whether social networking at work is work. Hard-line camps on both sides. Even employers banning social networking access, or promising grave harm to those who Tweet on the clock.
Let’s get one thing absolutely clear: If I am paying you to get jobs done, get ‘em done, done well, done on time, and ask for more. Do that and I don’t care how many Tweets you Twitter. Don’t care how many status updates you share. Waste company time by replacing your job with a Tweet? Bye-bye; hello unemployment line.
In the newsroom right now, I’m pushing everyone to the Web world of social networking. Not so much because I think we need more friends or can’t find enough ways to fritter (not Twitter) away our time, but because it IS work. Every time I post a status update or explore a new technology and how people are using it, I learn more about how best to do my job.
Two things today: Months of Tweets and FBing are leading to the creation of RockfordWoman.com. The new one launches June 19. Awesome. Second, the governor comes to editorial board Thursday. We’ll Twitter it and live stream video it. Way cool.
None of that would be happening if the newsroom weren’t Twitpixing with their mothers.
April 21st, 2009
“Drivers would stop at crosswalks under law.”
That headline in Tuesday’s Register Star must have been written by a gentle soul willing to forgive every whacko downtown Rockford driver who ever tried to run him or her down. As anyone who works at the News Tower can tell you, drivers do not yield to pedestrians. Period. Not even with a yield sign, crosswalks and, occasionally, a human being standing in the middle of the street.
Nope. Instead, they come gunning for the pedestrian. As far as I’m concerned, handing them a ticket for a couple hundred bucks is small potatoes. Charge and prosecute a couple of them for attempted murder and we might make some headway.
I respect Rockford Deputy Chief Theo Glover a ton, but he’s quoted in the newspaper saying this about the three “yield” crosswalks in downtown, one of which is right here at the News Tower: “Motorists do seem to be mindful of the yield, and we haven’t fielded any complaints about it from motorists or pedestrians.”
Theo, I swear, if I had known no one had complained, I’d have been first in line. Anyone who tries to cross East State Street is tossing up a prayer to God.
I stop for pedestrians at that intersection — and I’ve missed being rear-ended by an inch, not to mention the idiots who swerve to pass me on the right and eke by the pedestrian by a couple more. Then, there’s this “curb dance” we play. Step off, get blown back, step back on again, pray, step off, blown back, run to the middle, pray, stop, pray, get blown on both sides, run to the other side. Drop on knees and shout “thank you, Lord.” Get up. Try to act dignified.
It’s not much of a stretch.
We are grateful that the yield signs finally were installed a few years ago. Took decades to get them. These days they occasionally get stolen, are regularly on their sides because motorists sideswipe them. But, they’re there to prove that we pedestrians have the right away even if we’re road kill.
An Illinois legislator wants tougher, clearer pedestrian laws. Hear. Hear. Charge the offenders with attempted murder. Raise the fines high enough to fund the city deficits. Stake out pedestrian walkways and do regular stings. Please do it before some motorist actually kills a News Tower employee.
April 17th, 2009
Question: What do charter schools have to do with the desegregation lawsuit that consumed the Rockford School District in the 1990s?
Answer: Charters are but the latest in a long string of last ditch solutions to an education system run aground because we refuse to upend the whole thing. And, charters are exactly like magnets and school choice, except maybe without so much union control.
Before I go any further, let me make this clear: This is not a indictment of individual teachers, professionals or classroom techniques. God love you for what you do under exceptionally trying situations.
Now, the but: But, for heaven sake, we’re using a 200-year-old model. Teacher in front of kids in desks. I don’t care if the desks are in open classrooms or traditional ones, or if it’s a one-room school or a 500-room school. The 1809 student could walk into the 2009 classroom and not be much disoriented.
We cling to our Backwheneye memories and refuse to do more than tweak our educational system. Back to deseg.
Remember the magnet schools and the school choice programs? Both were direct results of the deseg suit — and the loudest voices in town hated them. Magnets and choice were solutions to one problem: The traditional classroom wasn’t meeting the needs of today’s students.
We promised parents a choice of where to send their kids. To a school in a safe neighborhood where parents were engaged and teachers the best. We promised parents magnet schools that offered specialized curriculums for special gifts, interests and skills. We said magnets and choice would show the “public” schools how it was supposed to be done, forcing them to improve to the standards of the choice and magnet schools.
Sounds like all the charter school hype to me. One would think that if the idea of public schools that aren’t public schools is so good, then the magnets and choices should have worked. We ought to have jaw-dropping educational success. We don’t.
Because everyone of these solutions is premised on going outside and around the public school paradigm. Public schools don’t work, so create some new-fangled thing to function outside the existing structure. That’s nuts. Just nuts.
If we want public schools that work for today, it’s time for gut-wrenching, paradigm-shifting implosion. Rip the rug out from under administrative bureaucracies, unions, political patronage and PTOs.
Without a crisis, innovation will not occur. And, there’s been no crisis strong enough to shake the complacency out of the modern public school machine.
I’m cranky today and it shows. Maybe charters will be the miracle. I doubt it. They’re just one more in a long line of ideas that will fail because we refuse to deal with the weary, old, ineffective entitlement-mentality that is the core of today’s public school machine.
April 10th, 2009
There’s no such thing as an apathetic voter. There are, however, apathetic people and I am delighted they don’t vote. The only people I want at the polls are those who care enough about and know enough about a candidate and the issues to get out of bed and go color in the circle.
The fact that 25.6 percent of eligible Rockford voters gave incumbent Mayor Larry Morrissey a landslide 63 percent of the ballots among four candidates is most excellent. The citizens — and I chose that word specifically — made it very clear: Despite the occasional flatfooted misstep, Larry Morrissey is delivering the goods and earned another four years.
The voters who listened and paid attention during the particularly nasty campaign drew a single conclusion: Morrissey was a far better choice than Doug Block, John Harmon or Jesus Correa. It wasn’t even close. Rockford citizens said: This mayor speaks for us; he’s doing what we want to have done. Back off, those of you who would question that.
It doesn’t matter a whit that three in four potential voters stayed home. It doesn’t matter what they think, feel or opine. It doesn’t matter that some of them can’t stop posting and dialing anonymously about how their “guy” ought to have won. They don’t count because they can’t be counted on to do what citizens do.
What does matter is this: Those who cared, really cared, voted. Their voices — among the winner’s circle as well as the losers’ circles — are the ones who count. The rest of you? Oh, don’t even bother to answer, because I don’t care.
April 9th, 2009
As a smoker-who-is-not-smoking-at-the-moment, I loved this Associated Press story that I found this morning on HealthyRockford.com.
Here’s an excerpt: “A Dutch study published last year in the Public Library of Science Medicine journal said that health care costs for smokers were about $326,000 from age 20 on, compared with about $417,000 for thin and healthy people.”
U.S. studies show the same things: Smokers actually SAVE us money. Because smokers die about 10 years sooner than non-smokers, smokers cost less over the long-haul than non-smokers.
Talk about a conundrum: Here we’ve created a society in which smokers have the cache of sex offenders and in which government is taxing the box out of cigarettes — all in an effort to reduce smoking and increase revenue.
So much effort into things that aren’t going to deliver the results expected. We’ll end up with a bankrupt health-pension-old-people care system because we convinced everyone to quit smoking so they’d live longer (and now cost way more), just when so many quit smoking that there’s no revenue increase to fund it all.
Had we left smokers alone, they’d have enjoyed their vice in peace, paid those crippling taxes to increase the revenue stream, and died off fast enough to not be a financial drain on the remaining thin, healthy, non-smokers. (Oh, notice that “thin.” Fat people die early too.)
Maybe I’ll buy a pack on the way home today….
April 6th, 2009
Michael Kinsley writes a weekly column for the Washington Post. I found this one online at washingtonpost.com. I share it with you via rrstar.com. Just another example of the changing information model…. Enjoy.
Here’s an excerpt for those who aren’t interested in the whole thing:
As many have pointed out, more people are spending more time reading news and analysis than ever before. They’re just doing it online. For centuries people valued the content of newspapers enough to pay what it cost to produce them (either directly or by patronizing advertisers). We’re in a transition, destination uncertain. Arianna Huffington may wake up some morning to find The Washington Post gone forever and the nakedness of her ripoff exposed to the world. Or she may be producing all her own news long before then. Who knows? But there is no reason to suppose that when the dust has settled, people will have lost their appetite for serious news when the only fundamental change is that producing and delivering that news has become cheaper.
Maybe the newspaper of the future will be more or less like the one of the past, only not on paper. More likely it will be something more casual in tone, more opinionated, more reader-participatory. Or it will be a list of favorite Web sites rather than any single entity. Who knows? Who knows what mix of advertising and reader fees will support it? And who knows which, if any, of today’s newspaper companies will survive the transition?
But will there be a Baghdad bureau? Will there be resources to expose a future Watergate? Will you be able to get your news straight and not in an ideological fog of blogs? Yes, why not — if there are customers for these things. There used to be enough customers in each of half a dozen American cities to support networks of bureaus around the world. Now the customers can come from around the world as well.
If General Motors goes under, there will still be cars. And if the New York Times disappears, there will still be news.
April 4th, 2009
Three police officers dead in Pittsburgh today because the shooter had lost his job and was convinced the Obama administration was going to take his guns. Thirteen, plus the suicide-shooter, dead in Binghamton, N.Y. yesterday. Yeah, I hear you Second Amendment folks: Guns don’t kill people.
Angry, unbalanced people with guns kill people.
We get our share of nasty phone calls at the News Tower. Earlier this week one of our staffers took a particularly threatening one from a man who said he’d get his gun and shoot anyone who messed with him or dared come near his property — and he meant our newspaper people.
We filed a police report. In my almost 40 years of handling out-of-control callers and visitors, I personally can remember filing less than a dozen. This time we did.
In today’s angry, armed world, when someone threatens to use a gun, it is a fool who doesn’t take it seriously. As I said the day we filed the report: I don’t want to be the one to write the headline: Register Star had early warning of shooter’s intent, but failed to alert authorities.
April 4th, 2009
Not everyone is rooting for the death of newspapers and the journalists who fill their news pages. Though their voices are whispers compared to the shouts of the rabble clamoring for a world in which no one can or will hold them accountable, those whispers are steadily increasing.
Tom Wartowski shared this Wall Street Journal link with me on Friday evening. Take a few minutes to read the opinion from a Maryland judge as he wrote about the case of a police officer-turned-whistle blower.
Then, come back here. You’ll understand the rest of this post a little better:
Anyone can be a secretary for the city council meeting. For the high school musical. For the criminal trial. For the school board. Anyone can fill the newspaper pages and the Web posts with information the recorder records and the secretary transcribes. Anyone can spout an opinion around that information. And it’s that information that fills our pages so successfully every day.
Only a journalist protected by the First Amendment and fortified with an obsession to keep asking “who, what when why and how” can make a difference. Maybe that happens once a day on the micro scale, once a career on the macro. But it happens. And it matters. We will only know how much when it is gone.
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