The Editor's Desk

I’m very happy about today’s California Supreme Court decision regarding gay marriage, though I know there are many people in our area who are probably not.

I’m leaving myself out of the decision-making process in the newsroom (a very rare occurrence) as I have absolutely no objectivity on the matter, letting the staff decide how to run the coverage of the decision.

I will be out of town next week for a business conference, but I’ll try to put something together as an editorial comment for Monday’s Desert Dispatch. My editorial will be one of my less formal ventures in order to account for my personal stake in the debate.

A couple of days ago I pulled in at a local gas station that shall remain nameless (I don’t want to get any employees there in trouble over a mistake) that was offering regular unleaded at $3.89 a gallon, pretty cheap for our area.

I scanned my card and had to wait an unusual amount of time for it to let me start pumping. I pushed the button again, just to make sure I hadn’t forgotten, but it was still about 30 seconds before I actually was able to pump fuel.

As I was waiting, I noticed something odd — the price digitally listed on the pump for gas was $2.89 per gallon, not $3.89. I figured perhaps this was a visual glitch. But once it let me begin pumping, I watched the numbers fly by and discovered, indeed, it was charging me only $2.89 per gallon.

I wondered briefly what to do. Part of me wanted to let the staff there know, because I’m well aware that the profits from high gas costs aren’t going to individual stations. I didn’t want them to get in trouble or fired for “undercharging” for gas. But then once I was finished and replaced the nozzle, the display went through an odd reset process, and the price switched back to the correct $3.89 per gallon.

By the way, Barstow is of course known for higher gas prices due to our location in the desert. Traffic between Los Angeles and Las Vegas increases demand for gas to get through the Mojave, and that drives up prices. Typically gas is cheaper almost everywhere in the state (except Baker).

However, when I drove down to Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago, I discovered gas prices were pretty much the same as they were out here. My previous experiences had gas prices at about 10 to 15 cents cheaper per gallon in LA. So even though our gas prices are extremely high, they’re not necessarily that much higher than gas elsewhere in the state the way it used to be.

“The Editor’s Desk” won second place in Best Overall Blog in the 2007 Society for Professional Journalists Inland Southern California chapter award ceremony.

I’d complain that I deserve first place, but that award was taken by my newsroom compatriots in the “Off the I-15” blog.

While it would be nice to crow about what a distinction this is, I think the reality is that newspapers, particularly editorial writers, have been slow to get on board the blog train. Or maybe they’re just reluctant to make a big deal out of them, given it’s still an evolving form? The Press-Enterprise won a ton of awards at the ceremony, and has quite a few blogs, but didn’t win any awards in that area. I wonder if they even entered.

Also, an experiment of mine failed. Way back when I was in college, I posited a theory that if you wrote about being gay in your English composition classes, you would automatically get an A. This turned out to be pretty true for me and some gay college friends of mine (to be fair, I got A’s on most of my essays though, so perhaps correlation doesn’t imply causation).

I thought I would try the experiment again for the individual blog essay competition. I sent in my essay on National Coming Out Day back from back in October. I got beaten by two essays about housing market issues and one about crime by Kate Rosenberg, formerly of the Daily Press in Victorville, now of the Lucerne Valley Leader.

The loss could mean several things — the most obvious is that it’s no longer much of a surprise to find out somebody is gay, particularly in the media. It’s not as big a deal as it was 10 or 20 years ago. It also probably wasn’t my strongest essay. I considered sending in my piece on how I became a libertarian instead, a stronger blog essay that talks about my thought processes as an editorial writer.

I also submitted one of my editorials about rental inspections in a print category. It didn’t win, nor did I really expect it to. I’ve noticed that libertarian editorials that hinge on the idea of setting boundaries for government behavior tend to not be rewarded. I suspect media judges don’t find it particularly inspiring to read pieces telling the government to stop doing things, unless these things are causing obvious physical harm to citizens. I think the editorials I do write are about issues that are important to residents to Barstow, but they lack a certain level of flash due to my reluctance to grandstand.

The first of what I’m sure will be another dozen incomprehensible spammed e-mails:

Dear Desert Dispatch,

Maureen Wessler

Sincerely

Maureen Wessler
[Address redacted]
Woodland Hills, CA

Let’s see how many I get this time. I did finally manage to get taken off one mailing list we ended up on that was supposed to send spam responses for action to legislators. I was getting pretty tired of demands that I vote in favor or against particular bills.

Monday’s paper might have looked a bit strange to some of our readers. Pages are misnumbered and certain features aren’t where you expect. There was a small technical glitch in the production process that caused the middle four pages of each section to run out of order. It’s being dealt with.

I didn’t blog that much in April or even write as many editorials as usual. I apologize, but there are two contributing circumstances. First, April has been a month for vacations (I just came back from Seattle myself) and whenever somebody is absent from the newsroom, we all have to fill in, given our small size, and it leaves me with little free time to work on commentary.

But the second, bigger reason is that we’re working on a redesign and a rethinking of the presentation of the Desert Dispatch. We’ve actually been planning it out for two years, and many Barstow residents have been consulted and shown some prototypes of what we’re considering.

Sadly, due to logistical issues, we aren’t able to make the most dramatic change we considered — turning the Desert Dispatch into a compact magazine-sized publication. We got very good feedback from the prototype, even from Barstow residents who tended toward more traditional attitudes about newspapers. It’s a concept we will revisit in the future if we can.

While we will be staying the same general format, we will be doing a lot of work on how we present stories. One of the messages we got from readers in our presentations last year was that, essentially, people getting the information they need easily was more important than any particular “style” of reporting. On more than one occasion, we had readers ask us why “Information Detail X” had not been published in the newspaper. Actually, I knew that “Information Detail X” had, in fact, been in our newspaper. But I knew that these details they couldn’t find were often buried in larger stories about meetings and projects. This meant these readers were not reading whole stories. There were bits and pieces of the story that mattered to them, but they didn’t care about or didn’t have time for all the bells and whistles.

So we’re looking at ways to pull out important details to make them more visible to our readers. You may have noticed some initial efforts in this matter over the last year as we strive to put more information “boxes” in our stories, pulling out important information and making it more visible for folks who don’t have time to read full stories.

We’re expecting to launch the redesign in June, and we’ll have more details as we formalize the changes.

We’ll be running The Orange County Register’s editorial about Propositions 98 and 99, the competing eminent domain measures on the ballot in June, in Wednesday’s Desert Dispatch.

I know some folks tend to ignore the editorials we run from other newspapers, but OCR’s editorial writers are experts when it comes to eminent domain issues, and they’ve certainly taught me a thing or two. I consulted with one of their editorial writers, Steven Greenhut, before taking my position in support of Proposition 90 back in 2006. I will ultimately write my own editorial prior to the June vote, but OCR’s editorial writers are saying what I plan to say anyway.

Whenever there’s a state proposition on the ballot, I get inundated with press releases and phone calls from folks hoping to bend my ear and influence our editorial stance for the vote. Yesterday I took a call from a polite woman who wanted to encourage us to take the exact opposite stand that we’re taking. I don’t argue with these folks, because there’s no point in it. It’s not like I’m going to convince this paid shill to change sides. But it did amuse me that she clearly had no understanding of our libertarian editorial position (not that I blame her; at times I feel Freedom Communications is pretty much alone in the mass media wilderness in our worldview). She attempted the “bandwagon” argument by pointing out all the government agencies and organizations that oppose Proposition 98 and support Proposition 99, unaware that this actually makes me more skeptical of her claims.

Her big misstep, which they keep repeating in their e-mailed press releases, is try to convince me to oppose Proposition 98 on the grounds that it harms rent control laws. I don’t support rent control laws (and I say this as somebody who rents a house), so this argument has the exact opposite effect of their intentions. And they’re not convincing me otherwise with such arguments as “Proposition 98 hurts real people,” somehow suggesting that people who rent property are not real people and don’t have rights.

I have a typical pattern of “checking things” when I first arrive in the morning. I check my voice mail and e-mail of course. Then I check the web site to make sure there aren’t any pending abuse reports for comments or blogs and take a look at site participation. I was a bit surprised to check in this morning and discover several comments about today’s editorial.

The editorial, about a proposed global warming tax plan in Los Angeles, was reprinted from the Orange County Register (part of our chain of newspapers). I run editorials from them on state, national and international issues because we share a libertarian viewpoint. Normally, their editorials don’t garner much response on the site because they’re not about local issues, and of course, local reporting drives our readership and online participation.

Figuring then that another site must have referred to or linked back to us, I decided the check out our web stats. Much to my surprise, we had set a new record for page views for an entire day, even though it was only 8:30 a.m. After some investigation, I found out the Drudge Report had linked to the editorial, which was driving thousands of folks from outside Barstow to come take a look.

I certainly don’t mind the boost in page views for a day, but felt bad because the OC Register was responsible for them. I did let the editorial crew there know they had gotten a Drudge Report link, even though it was through our site.

The United Way in Barstow is in the middle of determining the allocation of its donations to its local member agencies for the year.

I was invited to participate in one of United Way’s allocation subcommittees, which visits the agencies to see what they do and serves as a form of oversight to make sure United Way donors’ money doesn’t go to waste.

One of the agencies I visited was New Hope Village, a transitional housing complex for homeless adults and families that works to make them self-sufficient members of our community. I met a couple of the complex’s residents, recovering addicts who are working to put their lives back together. According to Executive Director Angela Pasco, many of them have destroyed their credit ratings, making it difficult for them to overcome their problems even after fighting back their addictions.

New Hope Village struggles as well, trying to secure enough funding to keep their modest efforts going. Pasco said they’d like to expand to offer more apartments for needy families. They rely a lot on donations to furnish the apartments they offer. They do a lot with a little.

A couple of weeks ago a wrote an editorial chiding State Sen. George Runner and Assemblywoman Sharon Runner for trying to compound the failures of the drug war by increasing penalties for meth use and sales. Their “Safe Neighborhoods Act” is a costly waste of time that attempts to garner support for their own ambitions by appealing to people’s fears.

And so you may ask, “Well then, what’s the alternative?” Places like New Hope Village are the alternative. Residents get assistance with meeting basic needs, training and help with their problems so that they learn to overcome them, and most importantly, they’re also held accountable for their actions. They are neither discarded, nor coddled. They are treated like adults, not wards of the state — but also not like helpless children.

We need more places like New Hope Village, not more prison cells.

Steve Chapman over at Reason Magazine has a piece analyzing the media’s abuse of anonymous sources to protect people in the government from being held accountable for inappropriate (even illegal) behavior or incompetence.

In short, a gentleman named Steve Hatfill was identified (through anonymous government sources) as the man behind the anthrax mailings following the Sept. 11 attacks. He was completely innocent and was never so much as even charged in the case.

A judge has ordered a former USA Today reporter to disclose her sources or else face fines for contempt. News organizations are defending her right to keep the information a secret.

The media, in general, does have an ethical right to keep sources a secret in a number of circumstances. In its role as a government watchdog, the media sometimes needs to depend on whistle-blowers providing them information about wrongdoing. Whistle-blowers, of course, may face retribution for revealing inappropriate activity and the media has the ability to reduce the risks by providing secrecy. The government, with its ability to create laws, has a tendency to abuse this authority to protect itself.

However, obviously some people in the media have forgotten exactly why it is we protect sources. In this case, the media is trying to protect the identity of government agents who, either out of incompetence or maliciousness, damaged the reputation of an innocent person. This entire case turns the whole point of protecting sources on its head. We’re supposed to be protecting the innocent from the government, not the other way around.

To me, as an editor, the larger question is, why on earth would a newspaper allow government officials to anonymously name a suspect in a crime in the first place? The legal and ethical risks are obviously high, as we’re seeing here with Hatfill proving to be completely innocent. If a reporter came to me and said we were given the name of a suspect in a crime but couldn’t reveal the source, I absolutely wouldn’t allow the name to be printed. If law enforcement officials don’t have the confidence to publicly state their suspicions, it’s completely irresponsible for a newspaper to risk its own reputation by putting the name out there. Why is it that I can immediately see this problem, but the larger media companies cannot?