Me and my big mouth
October 16th, 2007, 10:57 am · Post a Comment · posted by Scott Shackford
In case you hadn’t seen it, I made a nuisance of myself at Monday night’s City Council meeting. You can watch the video here.
We’ve been mulling over what to do about crime reports in the newspaper for quite some time — and I should add that this problem existed well before Chief Burns took over and has nothing to do with her as far as I can tell. It has developed to the point where readers were accusing us of deliberately concealing crimes in the community. Nothing could be further from the truth.
What’s our incentive? There’s a saying, “If it bleeds, it leads,” meaning that crime and violence sells newspapers and increases viewership of news. This is true, though people tend to say it sarcastically, with idea that people are bloodthirsty and enjoy watching or reading about violence.
The reality is, though, that people want to read about crime because it affects them and their community. It’s very clearly the number one concern for most Barstow residents and it bothers me that there may be crimes out there going unreported.
And so, of course, my big speech ultimately accidentally backfires. Due to a technical issue, page A3 did not print properly today. So the bank robbery story was accidentally cut off and our crime reports did not print at all.
We will reprint the robbery story tomorrow and add the missing action briefings to the next report. We apologize for the problem.
