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April 2008
What would the right-wingers do without the mainstream media
I’ve come to the defense of the “mainstream media” on more than one occasion in this space. After all, I’m part of it. But beyond that, I think the mainstream media do a pretty good job of telling people in this country what they need to know to make informed decisions.
But it has become an article of faith among the right-wing blogosphere and shout radio that the MSM is very much the root cause of all that is wrong with the country.
My friend Rick Wagner, who writes a column for us and has a blog of his own, certainly is a member of that side of the political spectrum.
So I found it not surprising, if a little illogical, that this morning on his blog, he wrote that the MSM gives a “pass” to the liberals by doing little or nothing about the fact that out-of-state interests, of the liberal persuasion, are targeting conservative candidates, in this case Republican U.S. Senate candidate Bob Schaffer. He then links to where he read the story. And lo and behold if it wasn’t … the mainstream media. That story came out of the Rocky Mountain News.
I e-mailed Rick and pointed that out. I also told him there have been two big stories about Bob Schaffer in recent weeks. The first was the story about the candidate’s ties to disgraced and now-jailed Washington insider Jack Abramoff, and the second was the one he cited. Both of those stories originated in the mainstream media, the Abramoff story in The Denver Post and the out-of-state financing in the Rocky Mountain News.
Indeed, that’s where virtually of the the blogosphere and shout radio’s raw material originates. They do very little if any original reporting of their own. They rely on the good ol’ mainstream media to do all of that for them — and then say the MSM doesn’t do its job.
Go figure.
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Check this out
Gene Kinsey over at Living the Grand Life has a great take today on Unity Fest at Mesa State. Be sure to read all the way to the end.
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Nothing good can come of this
I’ve written often enough in this space about my thoughts on what role — none, in my opinion — journalists should play in the political process.
So it’s discouraging to see stories like this. All it does is give a bunch of ammunition to all of you out there who think I’m either less than candid, or naive, or both.
For the record, if I were running CJR, Todd Gitlin would be fired before lunch today.
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New leadership at RMHP
Rocky Mountain Health Plans is in the midst of transition planning for new leadership.
John Hopkins, who’s been with RMHP since 1986 and CEO since 2001, is preparing to retire.
He’ll be succeeded by Steve ErkenBrack, vice president for legal and government affairs.
ErkenBrack, former DA and unsuccessful state legislative candidate, joined RMHO in 2001 after returning to Grand Junction from Denver, where he was in the Colorado Attorney General’s Office.
The transition is expected to be complete sometime next year. You can read more about it later this week on GJSentinel.com and in The Daily Sentinel.
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Worth a read
Dick Maynard sent this this morning. It’s cynically funny.
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Check Rock Jam lineup in your Daily Sentinel
Heard one of the radio stations, the one that is to “officially” announce the Rock Jam lineup later this week, was grumbling on the air this morning about our report today about the lineup.
Seems this station — I don’t know which one because, frankly, there are so many I can’t keep them all straight — was claiming that our report had no merit because it was “unofficial.”
It may be. Around here, though, we’ll just call it good reporting on the part of entertainment writer Sam Stiles, who, if memory serves, did the same thing last year.
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I don’t think so
Ralph D’Andrea has quickly become the dean of western Colorado bloggers. His Junctiondailyblog in a few short months has become a must-read for anyone interested in local politics. His analyses are usually spot on, and he’s not afraid to be hyper-critical.
But occasionally he misses the point completely, and sometimes his Democratic blinders are too obvious. Such was the case this weekend, when he, once again, accused a particular Daily Sentinel reporter, of not doing his job. To the contrary, I think the story in question did a darn good job of exactly what we wanted it to do.
D’Andrea’s sole complaint with the story about what highway projects might not happen in Mesa County because of a lack of funding was that the reporter only talked to Steve King and Josh Penry, both Republican legislators, and not his favored Democrats. He used that to beat up on the reporter, a reporter who is a frequent target of D’Andrea’s blog. That’s OK. He can like or dislike anybody he wants. But when his critique is as far off base as this one was, he can’t expect it to go unanswered.
Read the story yourself. If you do so without blinders, you’ll see the story isn’t at all about what legislators think about highway funding. It’s about what the people who build the highways are going to do as a result of what the legislators did or didn’t do. In this case, they’re not going to build some projects that they had planned on building if they had received enough money.
The reporter’s sources were exactly who they should have been: Colorado Department of Transportations officials, a highway commissioner, a transportation planner.
Frankly, I don’t know why we had any legislators in the story at all. The two we did quote both gave us self-serving, throw-away quotes. That’s what politicians do. All of them, the Republicans who D’Andrea doesn’t like, and the Democrats he does.
We have way too many of those kinds of stories in the paper already. Hardly a day goes by without stories that have politicians talking and talking and talking — and saying nothing that has any meaning whatsoever to a typical reader. In fact, we’ve been working to get more stories just like this in the paper — stories that tell readers what public policy means to them, not what the politicians say it means, but what it really means. In this case it means a local highway project isn’t going to happen.
If anything, rather than getting a Democrat to balance the two Republicans in the bottom of the story, I would have cut the two Republicans out of the story. The story wasn’t about what politicians thought and they had nothing worthwhile to say. Running their comments was a waste of newsprint.
D’Andrea has called us to task on a number of occasions. And many times I’ve circulated his criticism throughout the newsroom because he’s been right. But this time Ralph, you let emotion get in the way of the facts. We can talk about it next time we go to lunch.
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What’s on your mind?
As most readers of The Daily Sentinel and GJSentinel.com know, there’s a new cast of characters down here. We have a new publisher, I was elevated from managing editor to editor and we have a new managing editor, Laurena Mayne Davis.
Laurena and I have a goal: We want to make The Daily Sentinel/GJSentinel.com indispensable. We want everyone in our market to be unable to get through the day without the help of the printed product or the website That, of course, is a pretty tall order we’ve set out for ourselves. We’re realistic enough to know that 100 percent readership is an impossibility. Studies tell us our readership is already darn good, among the best in the country, actually, but we want to make it better.
Newspapers all over the country are trying to reinvent themselves in an effort to do the same thing we’re doing. The traditional plate of news, commentary, sports, business, comics, etc., is getting a second look, as editors question whether that is the right mix to attract the most readers.
Do we need to change the mix? Do we need more lifestyle stories? Are there topics that are important in the lives of our readers that we don’t cover enough? (Health care and faith come to mind.) Are there better ways of telling stories than the traditional narrative? Should we have more photos and graphics? Should we have more “how to” stories? We all have thoughts about all those questions, but we’d really like to know how you feel.
E-mail me, or post a comment to this blog entry, if you have thoughts or ideas. Laurena and I will also convene some focus groups of both readers and non-readers later this year, and if you’d like to be considered for one of those, let us know.
We’ll never abandon our role of telling you what’s going on in our community, but we’re always looking for better ways to do it. Let us know what you think.
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A kinder, gentler “You Said It”
Here’s the thing about “You Said It,” our popular Saturday and Sunday feature that lets readers vent on just about any topic they want: It seems just about everyone has an opinion about “You Said It.” They either love it or they hate it. But there are many more of the former than there are the latter. It is one of the top two or three most popular features in The Daily Sentinel.
And, as most of you know, there tend to be a lot more negative rants in “You Said It” than there are folks who have good things to say. That’s not by design. Editors look for every positive comment they can find when they assemble the column. There just aren’t very many of them.
That bothers some people. Dick Maynard, our Wednesday local page columnist, has made no secret of his dislike of “You Said It,” and was more than happy to pass on to me this suggestion he got from one of his readers: “Has anyone at our Daily Sentinel paper considered initiating a (new) twist on what I’ve always called the Complaint Column? (You Said It). It seems a lot of people get easily peeved at others’ griping, so why not have two columns, side by side: one for praises, compliments & one for complaints, criticisms?”
Well, here’s the deal: We’re more than happy to consider that. If we can get enough positive comments to fill a column, we’ll run it.
Spread the word.
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The value of blogs
We’re not going to give up blogging, but this study says getting big blog readership numbers may be difficult.
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Decorum on Community.GJSentinel.com
Earlier this year, when we created Community.GJSentinel.com all of us around here were pretty excited about giving readers a forum all their own.
For those of you who haven’t been there, it’s a website within GJSentinel.com where we do a couple of things. First, we use it to publish a lot of letters to the editor that don’t make it into the print product. Readers can, and do, comment on those letters and there have been some very good discussions on the site about a variety of topics. The second feature of the site is a place for reader-generated forums. Anybody can start a forum about nearly any topic and anyone who wants can join in the discussion. There have been a number of productive, high-level discussions there, too.
All of that is part of a concerted effort to get readers more involved in their daily community newspaper. We believe providing as many platforms as we can that allow readers to contribute their thoughts to various public issues make The Daily Sentinel and GJSentinel.com better, more useful products.
But, unfortunately, a couple of participants in the forums have stepped over the line of what we consider constructive public dialogue. Their rants have deteriorated to nothing more than name-calling, personal attacks and innuendo. Our initial intent was to let the forums go where they may, and we would do no editing whatsoever. But at least one went too far and we took it off the site. We still believe the reader forums are a service to readers and we have no intention of taking them down. The great majority of you realize their value and respect other’s opinions, even when disagreeing with them. We’d ask that those very few of you who think name-calling is acceptable public discourse to think twice before you post. We didn’t create Community.GJSentinel.com to be a soapbox for toxicity in the public discourse. Most of you understand that completely, and we are grateful for your participation.
