Remembering Richard McKee

In case you haven't already heard, Richard McKee died Saturday. McKee, an open government activist who lived in La Verne, was well-known in Claremont, having taken the City to court a few times during the Glenn Southard administration.

Just last month, McKee had an opinion piece in the Daily Bulletin (now sequestered behind the Bulletin's pay wall) reminding readers of the responsibility each of us bears in a participatory democracy and of the risks we take in shirking those duties.

McKee, who taught chemistry at Pasadena City College, was a citizen activist in the purest sense, and, as former Claremont Courier reporter Gary Scott notes, we all have McKee to thank for our access to local government records:

McKee fought every day to ensure California lived up to a simple and obvious idea. He believed the public has a right to know what the government it elected was doing....

It was a simple idea, and yet McKee spent more than a decade fighting nearly identical battles in city after city, county after county, as craven government officials decided it was easier to conceal than to reveal. The salary scandal in the City of Bell - the one that won the Los Angeles Times a Pulitzer - shows what happens when people like McKee are not around. He not only fought his battles, but he fought countless battles on behalf of people who did not know they had rights.

We first saw McKee when he was active with the California First Amendment Coalition and then later when he, CFAC general counsel Terry Francke, and others broke off and formed Californians Aware, another open government activist group.

La Verne Online has an obit for McKee, and it reminds us that his activism did carry a personal cost:

While most of McKee’s efforts were focused on open government education, to protect the public’s rights, he also litigated 14 successful open government and First Amendment lawsuits, often representing himself. KPFK radio dubbed him “John Q. Citizen.” KCET’s “Life & Times Tonight” called him “the citizen who won’t shut up and go away.” The Times characterized him as “the scourge of public agencies across the eastern suburbs of Los Angeles County” who “walks softly and carries a big stick.” The Sacramento Bee christened him “Mr. Sunshine,” a man with “a head for the law, a heart for justice and a nose for government officials with secrets.”

His crusade at time took great personal and financial toll. After suing the Orange Unified School District Board for alleged violations of the Brown Act in 2007, McKee as the losing plaintiff was responsible for paying thousands in attorney’s fees and court costs, forcing McKee to take a lien on his home and suffer garnishment of his wages.

Whether you realize it or not, you owe a great deal to Richard McKee, and you can best honor that debt by getting involved in the governance of your city, your school district, your water district and holding them accountable whenever they stonewall you on information that is rightly yours.

It's become fashionable to complain about too much or too little government on all levels, but 99% of the complaints come from people sitting on sofas in the comforts of their living rooms while the 1% represented by the likes of McKee actually do the heavy lifting. Let's get off our collective lazy duffs and lend a hand.

Saturday Economic Report

Uploaded to Flickr by Abraaten
The bad news on the economy just keeps rolling in. The national unemployment rate hit 8.1%, the highest in 26 years, and in California the numbers were even worse, topping 10%. There was plenty of bad news floating around locally:

CUSD LAYOFF NOTICES APPROVED

More bad news from the Claremont Unified School District. The CUSD Board of Education voted Thursday to issue 34 layoff notices to CUSD teachers and nurses. The notices aren't final, but they are the necessary first step if the district has to go through with the layoffs in June.

Wes Woods II reports on the layoff notices in the Daily Bulletin, saying that CUSD is facing a $3-4 million budget deficit through the end of the 2009-10 school year. Woods article said that boardmember Steven Llanusa was the only one to vote against issuing the notices.

Woods also explained some of the actions the CUSD board has already taken:

[CUSD Assistant Superintendent Devon] Freitas said there was already 12 staff position cuts from the district in February.

Among those positions eliminated then were the director of an adult school, director of a child development programs and director of secondary educations, Freitas said.

Lisa Shoemaker, assistant superintendent of business services, said the cuts and reductions were being used to address a $3 million to $4 million deficit for the district in the 2009-10 school year.

JOURNALISTS TAKE THEIR HITS, TOO

Print journalism continues its bleeding. You may have noticed the Los Angeles Times California section disappeared, getting folded into the main, front page section. The Times advertised this as good thing, saying that you can now get all your local and national news in one place, but the fact is it was a cost cutting measure.

LA Observed blogger Kevin Roderick gave the reasons for the Times' decision to ax the local section:

The backdrop, of course, is the economy and the Times' continued free-fall in ad revenue. By getting rid of California, the Times can print the more profitable Calendar section at night and eliminate the expense of a second, earlier daily press run. (Times presses can only handle four sections per run, as this post from last Friday discussed. Note, too, that pressmen are the Times' only unionized workers.)

The move will apparently be spun as an enhancement in local coverage, but Times officials are bracing for howls of protest from print readers who already have been canceling subscriptions over the paper becoming thinner and less well edited. Some LAT officials fear this might be a tipping point. "We can't keep alienating our core readers," a senior person told me. Papers that have tried doing away with just their Business sections have been stunned by the backlash; the Orange County Register reversed its decision to mollify readers.

The added efficiency the Times gained by eliminating the California section allowed the paper's management to show some love for their press workers by eliminating 63 pressroom jobs, reports Ed Padgett.

The Times seems to be giving new meaning to the phrase "Stop the presses!"

And Gary Scott's blog informs us that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer wants to top the LA Times and completely eliminate its print edition, along with 75 percent of its staff.

Meanwhile, over at the Daily Bulletin and at other Dean Singleton-owned LA News Group papers, employees who have survived layoffs have been forced into mandatory furloughs. David Allen had a seven-day unpaid break but was back in the media mix this week with new columns and a few posts about what he did on his forced vacation.


CLAREMONT STILL WAITING ON THAT $850,000

In case you were wondering if the state's $42 billion budget fix was going to free up that $850,000 grant for Claremont's Padua Ave. Park, Magic 8-ball's answer would be, "Ask again later."

You may recall that the San Gabriel and Los Angeles Rivers and Mountains Conservancy (RMC) grant to Claremont was approved but never delivered because California placed a moratorium on issuing new bonds.

October 14, 2008, Claremont City Council
proudly receives $850,000 rubber check from RMC

Although the state has balanced its books (for the moment), Claremont will have to wait a while longer before California can go back to issuing voter-approved bonds for projects like Padua Ave. Park. The RMC's website had a notice:

BUDGET IS SIGNED
BUT THERE IS NO IMMEDIATE CHANGE FOR RMC PROJECTS
Updated March 2

While adoption of a state budget is a critical step in addressing the freeze on sate bond funds, the Department of Finance has advised state agencies that: the cash flow results of the solutions adopted in this budget agreement need to be analyzed. After this process, the State Treasurer’s Office will begin to proceed with bond sales. But it will be some time before we know the amount of cash available to address past and future obligations for these projects, as well as past obligations for the nearly 5,400 projects and grants that have been stopped. It will be some time before the projects and grants that have already shut down will be able to restart. It will also take time to determine when any new projects will be able to start.

As a result of the bond freeze, on December 18, 2008, the RMC notified all grantees to stop work on all bond funded projects and laid off several consultant staff. The remaining staff continue to work with our grantees — in particular to update files and prepare billing for all work performed prior to December 18, 2008. In addition, the Governor has declared that all state employees will be furloughed two days per month; it is expected that our offices will be closed on the 1st and 3rd Fridays of the month beginning February 6, 2009.

At this time we do not know when payments for expenses incurred prior to December 18 will be released, when the freeze will be lifted on existing projects, and when we will be able to authorize new grants. For information on the status of a specific project, please contact us directly.

Needless to say these are challenging times and there are no certainties regarding when the freeze will be lifted. Although updates to this website will be done irregularly, we will update this page with new information as it becomes available.

Among the laid off staff was Claremont's own Tim Worley, a former city Traffic and Transportation commissioner, who was the RMC's water policy director.

The World of Local News Blogs

The Foothill Cities blog had a post back when in December about the state of journalism blogs. It was written by an anonymous Southern California newspaper employee who tried to explore the reasons why journalists aren't generally good bloggers.

The post identified three reasons for the lack of better journalistic blogging:

• They don't promote their own content. In other words, they are not doing a good job of networking to get more clicks on their sites.
  
  
• They don't know what the reading public wants. In the FC writer's view, this means giving readers some additional insight into their newspaper's coverage of the scene rather than random observations by the aspiring blogger.
  
  
• They don't need to be successful - the journalist gets compensated the same whether one person reads his/her blog or no one reads.
  

We're not sure about the FC writer's criteria for blogging success, but there are a few local journalistic blogs we think are worth following.

The David Allen blog is always good finding interesting tidbits about the Inland Empire. Whether it's a place to eat, an interesting issue before a local city council, a cultural event, or a good read, Allen covers it with wit and manages to keep the subjects separate from his Daily Bulletin column for the most part. Maybe, as the FC writer's post noted, it is easier for a columnist to blog than for a regular news reporter since the columnist's work generally involves the sort of personal observations that lend themselves to blogging.

Tony Krickl's Courier City Beat is also a fairly decent local news blog. We like it because Krickl blogs about some of the story bits that don't make it into his Claremont Courier stories. His post on the 10th anniversary of the Landrum shooting strikes us as a good example of the sort of additional information that gives some nuance to a news piece.

We also follow former Courier reporter Gary Scott's blog, not so much for the local news as for Scott's observations about the state of journalism, local and otherwise. If you want to witness the unravelling of the print news industry, Scott's posts are an excellent place to start.

A Little Housekeeping

We've made a few changes and additions to the links list in the left-hand margin. First, we've moved the Claremont-specific links into a "Community Links" list.

Second, we've moved Gary Scott into the "News" links section because his posts are primarily related to journalism rather than local interest items. We did leave David Allen in the "Local Blogs" section because Allen's posts seem to have a good deal of local color sort of items.

Lastly, if you scroll down towards the bottom of the left-hand margin, you'll see we've added several Craigslist feeds specific to Claremont: "Jobs in Claremont," "Gigs," and "For Sale/Wanted." There's also a feed for "Free Stuff" in the San Gabriel Valley (there wasn't much free stuff in Claremont alone, so we had to go to a wider area).
As always with Craigslist, you'll want to perform your due dilligence in all cases.

We got the idea for the Craigslist feeds from Amanda Wray's Living in Monrovia blog, which is one of the better designed and written metro blogs around.

News of the News

Newspapers have been taking it on the chin for some time now, not just from the Insider and not just about their proofreading.

The Tribune Company's recent bankruptcy filing is merely the latest example of the extreme set of troubles currently hitting the print journalism industry: online competition for classified ads (think Craigslist); a dead real estate market leading to fewer real estate ads; a global recession; rising labor, energy and material costs; and a steady, general decline in subscribers.

James Surowiecki, who writes the New Yorker's Financial Page column, had an essay in the magazine last week about the paradoxical decline in newspaper readership at a time when more people than ever are getting their information from newspaper websites:

....The peculiar fact about the current crisis is that even as big papers have become less profitable they’ve arguably become more popular. The blogosphere, much of which piggybacks on traditional journalism’s content, has magnified the reach of newspapers, and although papers now face far more scrutiny, this is a kind of backhanded compliment to their continued relevance. Usually, when an industry runs into the kind of trouble that [marketing scholar Theodore] Levitt was talking about, it’s because people are abandoning its products. But people don’t use the Times less than they did a decade ago. They use it more. The difference is that today they don’t have to pay for it. The real problem for newspapers, in other words, isn’t the Internet; it’s us. We want access to everything, we want it now, and we want it for free. That’s a consumer’s dream, but eventually it’s going to collide with reality: if newspapers’ profits vanish, so will their product.

Does that mean newspapers are doomed? Not necessarily. There are many possible futures one can imagine for them, from becoming foundation-run nonprofits to relying on reader donations to that old standby the deep-pocketed patron. It’s even possible that a few papers will be able to earn enough money online to make the traditional ad-supported strategy work. But it would not be shocking if, sometime soon, there were big American cities that had no local newspaper; more important, we’re almost sure to see a sharp decline in the volume and variety of content that newspapers collectively produce. For a while now, readers have had the best of both worlds: all the benefits of the old, high-profit regime—intensive reporting, experienced editors, and so on—and the low costs of the new one. But that situation can’t last. Soon enough, we’re going to start getting what we pay for, and we may find out just how little that is.

As Surowiecki points out, newspapers have been slow to come to the realization that they are not in the newspaper business but are in the information biz. This short-sightedness, along with considerable pride, has prevented newspapers from doing what other online information services do best: link to a wide variety of outside news sources, including sites belonging to rivals. It's what Surowiecki calls the "not invented here" or walled garden mentality.

For news consumers, it's all a good deal. If you're looking for news, you can get it for free from the New York Times' or the Daily Bulletin's websites, or any number of other news and information sites. However, the free news party can't continue forever, and something's gotta give at some point. Some of that reckoning may take the form of more layoffs at places like the Dean Singleton-owned Los Angeles News Group's papers (of which the Daily Bulletin is one) and at the Tribune-owned Los Angeles Times. And all those layoffs eventually will eventually result in a decline in the quality and quantity of that free information we are all getting.

Singleton, who runs MediaNews Group, certainly has made no secret of his desire to downsize and to consolidate his operations - What's so important about having writers with local knowledge about the communities we're reporting on? says Singleton. Last October, former Claremont Courier reporter Gary Scott wrote about Singleton's outsourcing ideas:

Dean Singleton, speaking Monday to the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association, urged his belt-tightening brethren to consider "consolidating and outsourcing news operations" in these tough economic times. From USA Today:

MediaNews Group CEO Dean Singleton, who also serves as chairman of the board of The Associated Press, told the Southern Newspaper Publishers Association that papers should explore outsourcing in nearly every aspect of their operations.

-snip-

Singleton said sending copyediting and design jobs overseas may even be called for.

"One thing we're exploring is having one news desk for all of our newspapers in MediaNews ... maybe even offshore," he said during the speech.

Singleton added after the speech, "In today's world, whether your desk is down the hall or around the world, from a computer standpoint, it doesn't matter."

And, earlier this month Singleton consolidated his Inland Empire copy desks for the Daily Bulletin, the San Bernardino Sun, and the Redlands Daily Facts into one office in West Covina with LA News Group's San Gabriel Valley operations. Gary Scott reported on that as well.

If this talk of outsourcing by local news organizations sounds familiar, you might be recalling James McPherson, the man behind the online Pasadena Now. In May, 2007, McPherson made the national news when he hired some workers in India to cover the local Pasadena scene, including city council meetings, via the Internet. Other less well-known online news sources quickly followed suit.

The McPherson news, even in the Internet Age, apparently didn't get around all that fast. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd jumped right on the story on this past November 29th, 18 months after the story first broke.

The mainstream media's going to have to move a bit faster if they hope to compete with a person typing away in Bangalore, India, for a penny a word, as Dowd noted:

[McPherson] said he got the idea to outsource about a year ago, sitting in his Pasadena home, where he puts out Pasadena Now with his wife, Candice Merrill. Macpherson had worked in the ’90s for designers like Richard Tyler and Alan Flusser, and had outsourced some of his clothing manufacturing to Vietnam.

So, he thought, “Where can I get people who can write the word for less?” In a move that sounded so preposterous it became a Stephen Colbert skit, he put an ad on Craigslist for Indian reporters and got a flood of responses.

He fired his seven Pasadena staffers — including five reporters — who were making $600 to $800 a week, and now he and his wife direct six employees all over India on how to write news and features, using telephones, e-mail, press releases, Web harvesting and live video streaming from a cellphone at City Hall.

“I pay per piece, just the way it was in the garment business,” he says. “A thousand words pays $7.50.”

A penny for your thoughts? Now I knew my days were numbered.