The Editor's Desk

My staff is cheating!

You may or may not have noticed some slight changes to the way the current Desert Dispatch looks. As we’ve been putting together the various elements and features that we’ll be using in the redesigned newspaper, they’ve been quietly showing up in the current version. A couple of new items — a stat file display and a “Did you know?” box — were used in Saturday’s paper.

We’ve started practicing designing the new pages to see how much work it will be once the redesign launches in July.

Just to make things clear, though, the redesign is actually fairly modest. We’re not really changing our content that much. We hope to make it easier to find important information and details in the way we present the news so that busy readers can quickly get what they need.

“ASSEMBLYMAN COOK’S CAPITOL PUNISHMENT BILL PASSES FULL ASSEMBLY”

It’s about time we got some capitol punishment up there in Sacramento.

This week marks one year since we started blogging at the Desert Dispatch. This blog in particular has 83 posts (not counting this one), and I’m looking to increase that frequency of posting over the next year.

Unfortunately, Barstow doesn’t seem to be much of a blogging town as yet. There are a few out there, but not many. I’ll attribute the loss to the fact that we tend to lose population of folks between the ages of 20 to 40, which apparently are prime blogging years. As much as a new medium can have a formal demographic as yet.

But anyway, as a reminder, if you want to join the blogging party, we host reader blogs through the “Publish Your Stuff” feature on the home page.

Yesterday, editors of Freedom Communications newspapers had several seminars regarding the future of our Web sites and newspapers (more are happening today).

One of the major focuses yesterday was on information databases for our sites, something we’ve wanted to do here at the Desert Dispatch, but lacked the tools and staff. For example, we held off posting our police logs in the way we posted typical stories, because we wanted to figure out a way to present them in a map format, the way a lot of larger newspaper sites do. Lacking the tools to do so, we decided to just go ahead and post them online anyway to fulfill readers’ needs.

Fortunately, our friends at our larger Freedom publications are working on tools to help us more easily build and develop our own databases to help Barstow residents find local information. In the future, expect to see more resources on our site to help you track down important local information.

“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.

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.

When nearly everything you do in your line of work involves communicating, suddenly not being able to do so really makes you feel kind of useless.

The Desert Dispatch got hit pretty hard in the communications outage today. Our phones went out, our Internet went out, and our company cell phones went out. We couldn’t access our customer service database to deal with problems. We couldn’t even post about the telecommunications problems on our Web site (not that most Barstow residents would have been able to read it anyway). We were as cut off as everybody else.

I thought I’d be able to work around the issue because I have a cable modem and phone service at home, but when I ran home to post a quick news story about the communications outage, I discovered cable phone/Internet service was out as well.

So for four hours I simply sent Aaron Aupperlee and Jason Smith loose on the city to get all information that they could and then … just kind of sat here. I couldn’t call the two of them, so I trusted them to come back with good information. I couldn’t do anything. We were supposed to have a teleconference regarding a redesign of our Web site, but I couldn’t call in. Everything on my to-do list was shot. There is hardly anything I do as the editor of the newspaper that doesn’t incorporate telecommunications of some sort. Fortunately, some people on our staff had personal cell phones that still worked so we were able to contact a few folks outside Barstow to plan.

If you care at all, if we’re in a situation where we can’t design the Desert Dispatch here (and with communications down, we can’t — all our work is saved on a collective server and we can’t access it or print it), we send our page designers and sometimes even reporters to our sister paper the Daily Press in Victorville to make sure a newspaper comes out as usual. We’ve had to do so once before a couple of years ago due to a power outage. Fortunately our services came back around 2 p.m. and (knock on wood) don’t have to do so today.