“Economic development does not happen in a vacuum. It is a partnership with everyone living here, including the city, schools, and media. It is the job of all entities to promote their cities in a positive light.”

I’d just like to make it very clear to Ms. Randall and to anybody out there who might think that this is case, that it is absolutely not the job of the Desert Dispatch to promote Barstow in a positive light.

Our job is to provide information to Barstow residents to help them make decisions about their own lives. Our job is to help Barstow residents understand what is going on in their community. We absolutely cannot do our job if we take on the role of city cheerleaders.

We’re a business, too, and what makes our information valuable is the trust readers have that we are fundamentally honest. If readers perceive that our newspaper serves the interest of city leaders and not the readers, they will not trust us, our newspaper will not be seen as valuable to this community, it will not provide certain information that readers need to know, and they will probably stop reading.

I always find it a little saddening when anybody in the business community suggests that we should turn a blind eye to our problems. First of all, they’re asking for us to hurt ourselves as a business in order to make the “community look good” in the belief that this will benefit them (it won’t — people aren’t blind). Second, bringing problems to light is a pretty darn good way to start fixing them. The public discussion surrounding Measure D and our safety needs has no doubt been fostered in part by our willingness to put all the information out there that we’ve got, pro and con.

If you want to comment here on the redesign, feel free to do so below.

Apologies if you have tried to call the redesign hotline we promoted, only to have it ring busy for you. Our phone lines are intimately connected with our power. We didn’t realize the phone lines were still scrambled until late in the day Friday and we were left in a lurch over the weekend. We’re working to get it taken care of.

Strangely, this will be the first time I’ve actually gotten to see Barstow’s fireworks show. Something has always prevented me from going out there until this year.

I explained to the caller that actually, my intent with the opinion page is to promote libertarian political views, while at the same time, accommodating other views as well.

There was one particularly illuminating moment in the conversation. Because he was more progressive, he was concerned that too much conservative opinion on the page, unchecked by an equal amount of progressive commentary, might influence people to believe in conservative politics.

In other words, he was concerned that we were encouraging people to believe in things that he didn’t want people to believe.

It was a real learning moment for me, because in my mind, of course the commentaries are trying to influence people to believe in the writer’s views — that’s what they’re for. The entire point of an opinion page is to influence and challenge what people believe.

But that’s not how the caller felt, and I should have probably known better. The rise of our pundit-based opinion culture has created a country where people believe the purpose of commentary is to validate what they believe. To tell them that they’re right and those other people are wrong. The purpose of running commentary from the “other side” is not for “balance,” like they want to believe. It’s so that they have somebody to be indignant about and prove wrong. The idea that there might actually be a third side (let alone a fourth or fifth) seems alien to people these days. Because Freedom Communication editorial writers have a libertarian perspective, we’ve been accused of being part of the “liberal media” when we write about individual rights and then accused of being “right wing pawns” when we write about property rights and support capitalism. There are people who really cannot perceive that there’s anything else out there.

The larger result has been bland, toothless opinion pages in other newspapers across the country, where editorials read like they’re written by a focus group and are designed to appeal to the pre-existing beliefs of the majority of the readership, not to actually influence anybody at all.

But I’m hopeful for change over the next 10 years. The fragmentation of the political parties might help. The increasing number of voices encouraging the Republican to turn back to a small-government mentality adds a new side to the discussion. Blogs have changed the dynamic in many ways — some just add to the pundit echo chamber, but a lot of them add nuance to the discussion, dissecting and pushing at the foundations of what we believe.

I will continue to try to challenge what people believe on our editorial page, and I don’t apologize for my — or any of my writers’ — efforts to actually influence people’s beliefs.

The biggest problem with such a plan (assuming we had staff members who could take the time to go around checking gas prices, which we don’t) is that the information would be collected one afternoon and then published the next morning. By this point the information is obsolete and would likely be incorrect. It simply wouldn’t actually be as useful as some people think it would be.

The solution to this problem is the easily updateable Internet, but even there we found a problem. A couple of weeks ago we a briefly added a widget from gasbuddy.com that allows people to search gas prices by Zip code. But the problem turned out to be that only a very small number of local gas stations participated — four or five if I recall. We did not get a good enough cross-section of gas prices for the tool to be useful or reliable. Ultimately, we took it off our site.

However, Gas Buddy also allows users to essentially join the site and contribute by reporting gas prices. If Barstow residents were willing to do so, we could develop a more reliable price check system so folks can better choose where to fill up the gas.

I bring this up because there have been comments relevant to our gay marriage issue in California. I received an e-mail from a reader, who wrote in part in response to my Monday editorial: “I know lots of people, to include me, who have a big problem with four judges over turning 61% of the voting population to make 3% of the state’s population happy. Scott those four judges just ‘beat it’s citizens into submission’ and how can you NOT think that?”

It concerns me that somebody believes he has been beaten into submission because the government refused to allow him to beat others into submission. As I, and all libertarians, argue, the will of the people cannot be used as an excuse to violate the rights of individuals. As Tibor Machan said yesterday in our conference, “The people cannot confer upon the government powers that they don’t have.” He was elaborating on something Freedom Communications founder R.C. Hoiles believed, which was that groups don’t have the moral authority to do things that individuals aren’t allowed to do. You can’t go around deciding who can get married. Therefore, neither do 61 percent of Californians.

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.

I too will be using the check to pay down debt, which will put me at 0-for-2 in using this money in the way the government wants me to. When we got the last “stimulus check” in 2001, I spent it all on a trip visiting some friends in Toronto, Canada, so all that money went to stimulate another nation’s economy.

I just can’t do anything the government wants me to do, can I?

I’ve heard this as well, but I have to say they were pretty accommodating to me when I adopted my dog, Xander, from there a little more than a year ago. They were no-nonsense about the whole thing, but I wouldn’t call them rude. I have a reputation for being pretty blunt myself, though, so it’s possible I just am not sensitive to that sort of behavior.

They were also very helpful when, not two weeks after I adopted Xander, he figured out how to unlatch the gate and escaped from my backyard. One of the employees recognized him a couple of days later out on the street, brought him back to the shelter, and I was able to bring him back home.

I’ll have an editorial in tomorrow’s paper about the Humane Society’s issues, but it should pop up online after 5 p.m. here in the editorial section if you don’t want to wait.

I wrote on Wednesday speculating that the CHP’s latest speeding enforcement drive coinciding with the governor’s budget cuts announcement was more of a show that they are a source of revenue of the state

A reader politely e-mailed me to inform me that the money from speeding tickets given by the CHP doesn’t go to the state — the money goes to county or city in which the driver is cited.

I’ve written here that one of my biggest concerns about writing editorials is presenting an opinion based on a factual foundation that proves to be incorrect, which is exactly what happened here. It should have occurred to me to think about the complex relationship between the state and county funding in California, but it did not.

I’ll have to make this right in an editorial next week. I do stand behind the rest of the editorial though, that a two-day publicized crackdown on speeders in the middle of the week is going to be unlikely to result in any sort of change in driver behavior on our stretch of Interstate 15.