The Editor's Desk

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.

Reporter Jason Smith took a look at local primary activism and found little to speak of, but that doesn’t necessarily mean a lack of interest.

We have been tracking visits to the Desert Dispatch on days when we have our live primary results, and we are noticing significant increases in both the number of page views and the number of distinct visitors. The state is reporting a recent jump in voter registration to the tune of 700,000 people over the 2004 presidential election. It’ll be very interesting to see how Tuesday turns out.

Also, because of the change in the voting system yet again, we’re being warned about slow result tallies. We may not be able to declare winners for Wednesday’s Desert Dispatch, but we will have our live vote counter online as we’ve been doing throughout the primaries so visitors can keep track.

Tuesday night we arranged for a page with New Hampshire primary votes updated automatically. The results were astounding — we set a new record for page hits in one day for our site. People were really interested in following election information.

Now we’re adding a special feed of election-specific wire stories on our home page. Scroll down and you’ll see the links under the national and world headlines. I hope these help visitors stay up to date with the latest campaign news.

Reporter Aaron Aupperlee has posted our casual newsroom predictions of how the Iowa Caucus will shake out over on the “Off the I-15” blog. I e-mailed my local commentary writers to see if they wanted to make any predictions. Carol Jensen predicted Barack Obama for the Democrats and Mike Huckabee for the Republicans. Richard Reeb isn’t much for predictions. He said that he hopes Hillary Clinton loses and Mitt Romney wins.

Former managing editor and columnist at the Desert Dispatch Carole Myers passed away Wednesday at the age of 61.

I only worked with her for a couple of months at the fall of 2002, the end of her time here. She was a friendly face and had a great sense of humor, which you need in this line of work. We’ll have a story about her passing in Friday’s Desert Dispatch.

I don’t normally believe in New Year’s resolutions. If I think something needs to be done, I generally do it then, not put it off for some sort of artificial deadline.

But over the course of this past year, I’ve been going through a bit of a political awakening, partly due to my role writing editorials, partly through an increased interest in reading about outside analysis of political issues.

I’ve mocked pundits constantly as an adult, and have generally found them useless. But as I’ve been writing for the Orange County Register’s Horserace ‘08 blog, I made a bit of a realization. Most commentary, especially in print, is targeted toward the Boomer generation, the generation before mine.

Generation X commentary tends to be confined to our stomping ground on blogs or in magazines. Even commentary by Gen Xers like Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter is more targeted to affirming or attacking the values of the various boomer factions.

So I’m considering starting a weekly political commentary column, distinct from my editorials next year, targeting Gen X readers, focusing on larger political issues than my typically local-oriented editorials.
I haven’t made a decision one way or another, but as more of my generation grow more vocal about politics (particularly in support of Ron Paul), I feel like it might be time.

The courts cast a pretty wide net to put together a jury for the upcoming lengthy Barstow Truck Parts embezzlement trial.

They managed to snag both myself and Jon Prince, who works in the Desert Dispatch advertising department.

I’ve actually reported one of the stories (more than a year ago) about the progression of the case, so there was no way I would ever be seated on that jury, but there’s no bubble to fill in on the jury form explaining as such, so I had to go through the process anyway today. Ultimately we were excused.

I understand from the newspaper’s history that being in the press doesn’t always mean people in the newsroom won’t have to serve on the jury. I was told that a general manager years ago did ultimately end up on a jury for a case. I imagine if the case involved were one that the Desert Dispatch was not covering, I might end up there in the jury. I don’t assume the accused in any of our crime stories are guilty, so being in the media isn’t necessarily a free pass out.

We have two other newsroom folks with pending jury service notices within a month. This seems to happen every fall — we all seem to get summoned for jury in a staggered group. I’ve gotten summons four of the five years I’ve lived here. This was the first time I actually had to go sit in for jury selection.

Apparently reporter Jason Smith got a rather chilly reception from BarWest Spokesman Tom Shields at Monday’s City Council meeting following his reporting of internal troubles with the BarWest/Los Coyotes/Big Lagoon casino project.

Ah well — I’m not sure if there’s anybody left for us to alienate on the casino project. I’ll probably write an editorial using this as a reason why the city needs to step back and make the tribes and developers fight for the project themselves. I’m sure that will endear me further to them.

I must confess, despite the leaking of internal information, I’m not exactly sure what BarWest is so angry about. To me, they come off as the victim in this conflict. They’ve committed all this money and it turns out there’s an internal struggle among the Los Coyotes about who to partner with and people trying to cut BarWest out. On the other hand, it does show how fragile this agreement is, which undercuts their PR campaign of solidarity. Frankly, I think they need to think up a new message now that the cat’s out of the bag there. The amount of money they’ve spent already is a sign of their commitment to the project, so letting folks like Larry Halstead try to spin it like it’s bad for a developer to put their money behind a project is a bit strange.

We get calls every couple of months from anonymous folks who want us to “investigate” the Michigan bankrollers of the project, who have a less-than-gleaming reputation back home. I’m guessing for some, that we haven’t done so is a sign that we support them as the developer.

Editorially we support the project as we support pretty much any legal business that wants to come to Barstow. It’s not a judgment call over the worth of anybody involved with the efforts. I’m not going to make a decision over who would be the best developer (we’ll leave that for the people involved to decide, like any marketplace decision), and I don’t care who is the most “deserving” (an irrelevant distinction).

However, on the news side, when the casino was first announced — long, long ago when the only opposition was religious leaders who objected to gambling — we sat down and decided how we would go about covering the casino, given our limited resources as a small community newspaper. Once we learned about the lengthy process of actually getting this casino built, we decided that we would focus on the stages as they came to pass (or did not, as the case may be).

So, our first coverage was focusing on the city level for the agreements with the tribes, and then the state level to get the compacts approved. Our reasoning here was pretty simple: If the tribes couldn’t get permission from the state for the off-reservation casino, nothing else mattered. The BarWest backers’ reputations as developers weren’t particularly important if the tribes couldn’t get past the opposition from the other gaming tribes.

If the compacts ever did finally get approved, we actually discussed plans to send a reporter all the way to Michigan to explore the relationship between the developers and their home community. But if the casinos never move beyond the legislative stage, we can’t exactly justify all that work and expense.

So that’s the explanation why we don’t have more about Michael Malich and the Ilitches. It’s not time to take a look at them until the casino moves forward. Some folks want to claim it’s because we received ad money opposing Measure H from these folks in 2006. However, the reality is that gaming tribes have spent far, far more money in our newspapers advertising their events in our Weekender section, long before a casino was ever even announced for Barstow. (For that matter, the Chemehuevi advertised in our newspaper in 2004 as part of a PR campaign). If my views were for sale (which they’re not), the existing gaming tribes would have owned them long ago. We’ve jeopardized more advertising money by going against the Southern California tribes than we stand to gain from this one project.

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.

Stevie St. John, our city editor, has said farewell and has moved on to bigger and better things in Los Angeles, where she is probably still sitting in traffic right now.

The city editor, for those who may not know, is the person who actually manages the daily workflow in the newsroom, keeping track of reporters’ workload, handling the primary editing of their stories, and making sure we have good content for the next day’s newspaper. It’s a tough job and not for somebody who can’t manage stressful situations. Stevie will be missed.