Natural Disasters: The Lighter Side

A few final notes on Tuesday's Chino Hills earthquake.

Meg at M-M-M-My Pomona has a neighbor who was kind enough to share a part of his earthquake kit with her. The neighbor calls it a "Lincoln Park":

Lincoln Park
orange sherbet
Grand Marnier
tequila
a spritz of lemon juice
a few ice cubes.

Combine in the proportion that suits your level of bibulousness, whiz in the blender until frothy, and serve in an Old Fashioned glass. A toast to our fair city is mandatory, not optional.

* * *

Watching the some of the coverage on the local TV stations, we could not help but feel guilty at not having written sooner about all those cut backs at the LA Times, the Riverside Press-Enterprise, and the William Dean Singleton-owned LA News Group papers. One wonders how much the ongoing deaths of a thousand cuts in newsrooms affect the ability of print media to cover the local news well.

Gary Scott, who once worked for the Claremont Courier and who is now a producer at KCRW 89.9FM, has been covering print journalism's death-spiral at hands of dedicated citizen-tycoons such as Singleton with the Daily Bulletin, the San Bernardino Sun, the San Gabriel Valley Tribune, or the Daily News, to name a few of his papers. Or Sam Zell at the LA Times and the Tribune Co., for that matter.

Then there's Ed Padgett's Los Angeles Times Pressmen's blog, which captures the pain of the industry's transition/transformation from within.

Professionalism seems increasingly out the window as journalists face the pressure to produce for upper management types who don't always have the background to understand what exactly it is they're managing.

Television news long ago gave up much of its ethical and professional pretensions. It's entertainment, after all, and disasters make for good pictures. For the discriminating news consumer, there's really not much you can do except chill out and toss back another Lincoln Park.

The scary thing is that the line between satire and reality has become awfully blurred:


Breaking News: Series Of Concentric Circles Emanating From Glowing Red Dot

Tough Times

More thoughts on print media following our post from last Friday:

Picking up today's Sunday LA Times we couldn't help but notice that the paper seemed decidedly thinner. The trimming is apparently one side-effect of the recent exodus of staff members, some by choice; some, like 35-year Times veteran Al Martinez, by layoffs.

Yesterday's Times' business section carried an article by James Rainey that tallied the departures. It read like an obituary. The cutbacks represent an attempt pump up the paper's bottom line in response to declining ad revenue and declining circulation.

Any organization can stand to become more efficient, but one wonders at what point does fat trimming start to cut into meat? The latest cutbacks included six Pulitzer Prize winners, and the effects of such losses on the newspaper's quality have to be felt eventually. It's a lot like a game of Jenga, where a tower of small wood blocks is first built, then players remove the blocks one at a time until it falls.

If current trends aren't reversed, one can imagine a similar thing happening at the Times and other papers. Collapse will happen, as Hemingway once wrote, gradually, then suddenly.

The Death of The Small Town Paper

We came across a 2006 article from The Economist magazine titled "Who Killed the Newspaper?" The commentary got us to thinking about the future of small town journalism.

As we've noted before, there's been a significant drop off in quality, in-depth local coverage the last year or so. At one time, the Claremont Courier provided a good source of information on the local scene. Owned since 1955 by publisher Martin Weinberger, the Courier is a an independently-owned local paper that strived for a certain kind of focused local reporting that gave a real snapshot of the town. And the coverage during the tumultuous times of the late 1990's and early 2000's showed a real professionalism. The Courier under Weinberger was able to ask tough questions.

Weinberger, who has been absent from the Courier for some time due to health problems, is the last of a rapidly disappearing breed. A 2005 profile in La Verne Magazine pointed out the obvious: He is a newspaperman. The Courier reflected that tradition with its strong stance on First Amendment issues and its willingness to print all sides of a viewpoint. It really was the community forum, our meeting place. Remarkably, as the La Verne Magazine article reported, the Courier has had only two publishers in the past 99 years - Weinberger and his predecessor Stanley Larson.

At some point, perhaps in the not-too-distant future, the Courier will be sold either to an out-of-town newspaper group or possibly to a local group with its own agenda. Indeed, there has been speculation about town that some of the Claremont 400 might try to buy the Courier, which would spell the end of the institution for sure. If the paper becomes nothing but a soapbox for any single person or group, one way of thinking, it will represent the antithesis of the journalistic professionalism that Weinberger stands for.

As one reader wrote in yesterday, "[if that happened], we might as well just cancel our subscriptions and just settle for the free city newsletter." The Courier would become nothing more than a glorified Pennysaver, good for not much more than real estate ads and calendars of events and silly boosterism. A glance at the last few issues suggests that may have already happened.

The chatter about town on this point is happening in too many places for there not to be some concern for the Courier's well-being. We worry that where there's smoke, there's fire. Would a paper owned by Claremonsters bring the journalistic insight and experience to the table that a Martin Weinberger possesses if by chance they took an interest in buying the paper? Could they be fair in their editorial judgment? We think not.

As much as we like blogs and blogging, we're smart enough to know what we don't know--unlike the Claremont 400. We understand that we're not professional journalists; we simply fill a kind of informational niche that has opened precisely because of the problems facing newspapers today. Print media owned by people and corporations that don't really understand these problems focus on things like the financial bottom line instead of just covering the news and providing balanced context for that information. The bottom line usually takes care of itself if the content is there.

A real newspaper needs the judgment and experience of professionals such as Weinberger. Without those dedicated people, the small town paper loses all credibility and cannot long survive.

Reason vs. Emotion

"The heart has its reasons that reason knows not of."
--BLAISE PASCAL


The Claremont Courier isn't quite dead, as this editorial from Wednesday's edition shows:

(Published in the Claremont Courier, 3/14/2007)

My Side of the Line

By Rebecca JamesCourie
Managing
Editor

[NOTE: We have removed the body of the text because, as a reader has pointed out, the material is copyrighted, and we would need the Courier's and JamesCourie's permission to post it in its entirety. Unfortunately, the Courier does not post its editorial material, so readers will have to find a hard copy of the 3/14/07 Courier to read the piece.

The editorial did cite three campaign issues that winning candidates Linda Elderkin, Sam Pedroza and Peter Yao focused on: affordable housing, the Vulcan gravel mining proposal and the Padua Sports Park project. JamesCourie pointed out that in all three of these issues, the winning candidates made promises to emotionally-driven voters--promises that the editor thought might be hard to keep.]
_______________________

The Claremont 400, with its blood up, will be calling a pecking party for Ms. JamesCourie after this piece.

Media Matters

Question: Is the Claremont Courier a dying institution?

There's a lot of talk going on now about the role of newspapers in the digital age. The PBS show Frontline recently did a four-part series called "News War" that looked at the future of the news profession. The series included a look at blogs and their contribution to two events: the downfall of former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott and the retirement of Dan Rather from CBS.

One person skeptical about the power of blogging is Columbia School of Journalism dean and New Yorker writer Nicholas Lemann. Frontline interviewed Lemann for their report, and he has some pointed observations regarding the relationship of journalism to blogging.

The third episode of the series spent a good portion of the segment looking at the Los Angeles Times and the struggle between the editor and publisher and the Tribune Co., which owns the Times. There does seem to be a real struggle between the media conglomerates that own most of the news outlets in the U.S. and the idea of journalism as a kind of public service. Like most service industries, the news business is undergoing an efficiency craze--make fewer people do the same job or more.

But where does that leave a paper like the Courier? Is there a niche market for extremely localized news? Or do papers like the Courier end up being not much more than Lemann's description of blogs: the equivalent of church newsletters?

For a time, the Courier did a pretty good job reporting local issues. Reporters like Gary Scott or Chris Bray were independent enough thinkers to look beneath the surface of an issue and report the news in context. But the revolving door of reporters at the Courier hasn't allowed the new ones to develop a deep enough understanding of the community's dynamics before they move on.

And, if the Courier seems bad, the Daily Bulletin in many ways is worse. The Bulletin has greater resources than the Courier, but it doesn't allow reporters like Will Bigham or Jason Newell to do much more than sketch out an issue. As a result, things are presented in black-and-white, without much of the nuance a complicated subject like the water company buyout requires. Even when the Bulletin ran a special last Sunday on the water issue, it still missed many points and accepted official statements without really looking at the facts.

For instance, Claremont Councilmember Ellen Taylor in a recent Bulletin article attributed the lack of movement on the the city's prospective water company purchase to "micro-management" (meaning Councilmember Jackie McHenry). Yet, neither Taylor, Sandy Baldonado or Peter Yao (who claims to be for the purchase) moved forward with a proposal in the last year for an eminent domain proceeding. Taylor claims that McHenry and Councimember Corey Calaycay were opposed to using eminent domain, but no proposal was ever considered. Taylor was in the majority on the issue. Why didn't she do something? And what about last year's eminent domain initiative, Prop. 90, putting the kibosh on such proceedings until after the November election?

These are the sorts of questions the Bulletin should have asked but failed to. Blogs for local news exist because traditional news outlets often overlook the nuances of events.

So, where does that leave the Courier? One day in the not-so-distant future, the Courier may come up for sale. If someone like former Mayor Diann Ring decides to buy it (as was rumored a few years back), then the paper becomes something worse than a church newsletter. It becomes a uncritical propaganda sheet, and that isn't really journalism either.