dogtown commons

This Sunday, 60 minutes will air a story on Chauncey Bailey, the Oakland Post reporter killed in broad daylight on 14th Street in downtown Oakland last summer. It sounds like typical television news magazine fare — a dramatic “exclusive” interview with accused shooter Devaughndre Broussard by celebrity anchor Anderson Cooper, with no new information at all. According to a preview article at CBS5’s website, Broussard repeats the same story he has been telling for months — that he was told by Yusuf Bey IV to confess to the murder even though he didn’t do it, and that he will name the actual shooter at his trial. This has all been known since last summer.

Shockingly, Oakland’s Assistant Police Chief Howard Jordan gives an on-camera interview alleging that Paul Cobb, the Oakland Post’s publisher, called Chief Wayne Tucker and told him that Bailey was investigating Your Black Muslim Bakery, which led police to bakery members. Whether or not this is true, Jordan knows that Cobb has received several death threats and took them seriously enough to request protection from the OPD. It is outrageous that Jordan would finger Cobb as a “snitch” on national television under these circumstances. (Let’s hope that anyone who might wish to do Cobb harm will be watching the Oscars instead.)

To the credit of KPIX, they led the 11 o’clock news on Friday with a story critical of their corporate parent’s 60 Minutes report. Manny Ramos interviewed Cobb about his anger at Jordan’s claims. Cobb says that he did not provide Chief Tucker with the information, and that the OPD already considered bakery members the prime suspects before they interviewed Cobb. I have no idea whether Cobb told Tucker anything, but I can’t think of any reason for Jordan to go on national TV and say that Cobb pointed the police in the direction of the bakery. Is 5 minutes of TV time with Anderson Cooper worth putting Paul Cobb’s life in further danger for?

By failing to record the conversation between Broussard and Bey in an interrogation room the day after the murder, the Oakland Police may well have hurt the chances of getting a conviction in Bailey’s murder. Jordan’s turn in the national spotlight sounds like a further disservice to Bailey and the city where he built his career.

(The KPIX interview with Paul Cobb can be viewed here at their website.)

UPDATE: The Oakland Tribune also wrote about this in Sunday’s paper.

So common these days that I almost have trouble keeping up. The Bay Area News Group, which includes the Oakland Tribune, the San Jose Mercury News, and the Contra Costa Times, announced a voluntary buyout program today, and warned that if not enough employees opt for a buyout, then some people will be laid off with half the severance package that a buyout would get them.

In the quest for high page-view numbers, newspaper websites often break an article into two or more pieces. This is usually nothing more than a mild annoyance, and there is often a “single-page” option, but sometimes this practice gets downright ridiculous. The final “page” of an old Frank Rich column at the New York Times website contained only two sentences — 23 words!

I’m sure that they use some automated algorithm to divide articles into pages, so it’s unlikely that anyone intentionally chose to make the final two sentences of the column a separate “page,” but they might want to re-visit whatever algorithm they use. Maybe this is just a pet peeve, but when I click to a page that has only one paragraph on it, it irritates me — and more importantly from the newspaper’s point of view, it makes me less likely to click on “next page” links in general, so it may end up hurting the website’s advertising revenue in the long run. (In case anyone’s wondering, I was browsing through old Frank Rich columns to remind myself of what he was writing during the lead-up to the Iraq war, in order to explain why he seems to detest Clinton and her inner circle so much.)

Check out the fitting byline on this New York Times story:

Beach Toll Road Plan Rejected in California

By WILL CARLESS

Published: February 8, 2008

DEL MAR, Calif. — After a marathon public hearing in which hundreds of people spoke, the California Coastal Commission voted late Wednesday to deny approval for a toll road through a popular beach state park.

The 8-to-2 vote against the road, which would bisect California’s fifth-most-visited state park, San Onofre State Beach in north San Diego County, was seen as a significant victory for the region’s environmental movement and a major setback to a 20-year-effort to ease traffic congestion in the increasing sprawl of southern Orange County.

(Will Carless still has nothing on Dog Davis when it comes to cool bylines. Unfortunately, Dog Davis seems to have left journalism.)

If you need an example of the mindset that public transportation supporters are up against, all you have to do is look at today’s San Francisco Chronicle article on parking around city schools. The gist of the story is that teachers and school staff around many SF schools park in public spots on streets near the school, and since most of those parking spaces are in one-hour residential-parking zones, they end up running out to their cars between every class, moving their cars to new spots, and then running back in time for the next class. Many end up getting tickets because they don’t move their cars in time.

Everyone seems to recognize that this is completely insane, yet the only solution anyone takes seriously is increasing the availability of parking, by distributing more city permits which allow teachers to park all day in residential zones for a small annual fee. Public transportation is mentioned only once in the article, in this paragraph reproduced in its entirety:

City and school officials encourage everyone to take public transportation, walk, ride a bike or carpool whenever possible. Teachers said that such options are often impossible or inconvenient with bags full of lesson plans, books, students’ homework and art supplies.

This is, frankly, ridiculous. It might shock the Chronicle reporter to hear this, but there are many teachers in cities all over the country — and in San Francisco — who get to work just fine without cars, lesson plans and all. And I would bet that a lot of the students in these San Francisco schools also get to school just fine without cars, often carrying more than a fifth of their body weight in textbooks on their back. Yet in two short sentences, the notion of mass transit, walking, or bicycling is dismissed as “often impossible or inconvenient” for teachers.

To get an idea of what lengths people will go to in order to avoid “inconvenient” public transit, here is one choice bit from the article:

On a recent morning, Buena Vista school secretary Judy Diaz abandoned the phones and the photocopier to run out to her van - again.

She stopped in her tracks just outside the building’s front doors.

“Where did I park?” she mumbled to herself before seeing the vehicle up the hill.

She then drove down up and down side streets where there are a limited number of all-day spots, but every one was taken. Some teachers arrive by 6:45 a.m. to get one of those spots before they fill even though classes start at 9:30 a.m.

Diaz grudgingly pulled into another one-hour space around the corner and checked the time.

Think about that: Some teachers arrive by 6:45 a.m. to get one of those spots before they fill even though classes start at 9:30 a.m. Yet these same teachers think that carrying homework and lesson plans on a bus or a bike would be too inconvenient? And Judy Diaz (who as a secretary probably doesn’t need to schlep lesson plans, art supplies, or homework to work with her) would rather run to her van and search in vain for a better parking spot several times a day, instead of finding an alternative to driving?

I don’t mean to pick on the teachers or other staff in San Francisco schools. They are surely no sillier than anyone else when it comes to transportation alternatives, and that is the most depressing aspect of this. No one — not the teachers, not the reporter who wrote the article, and not the city officials quoted in the article — seems to be able to break out of the mindset which assumes that the only possible solution is to increase the availability of parking, rather than to reduce the need for it.

This lack of imagination about transit options actually manages to take an advantage of urban life and twist it into something negative. For example:

School board members admitted this is a long-standing problem with no easy solution.

“In a neighborhood with crowded parking, we can’t expect them to put the teachers’ interests above all others,” said board member Jill Wynns. “This is just an ongoing problem of an urban school district. It’s a conundrum.”

This is exactly backwards. It is precisely in urban school districts where parking should be less of a problem, because unlike in suburban or rural areas, people in urban districts have access to buses and trains, or may be able to live close enough to walk or bike to work. One task that proponents of mass transit must work on is to reframe discussions over transportation, so that urban density is seen as an opportunity to eschew use of cars, rather than a problem of where to park them. The lack of vision shown by every single person involved in this Chronicle story demonstrates just how tough that task will be. If these teachers in San Fransisco can’t comprehend the possibility of getting to work without cars — and the benefits, personal and global, that would ensue — then the odds of getting people in most other parts of the country to leave their cars behind seem long indeed.

There’s a lot of senseless drug policy in this country, both in our laws and our corporate policies, as I was reminded by today’s California Supreme Court decision affirming an employer’s right to fire (or refuse to hire, as in the case at hand) an employee who tests positive for marijuana, even if the employee has a physician’s recommendation for the use of marijuana to treat chronic pain under California’s 1996 voter-approved medical marijuana law, and even if the employee’s marijuana use is strictly during off-duty hours, and even if there is no allegation that the employee’s marijuana use is affecting his or her job perfomance.

For an example of a drug policy that’s more sensible, here is a snippet from a new Tribune Company handbook (pdf), distributed to employees after the company recently changed ownership (rule #1 is “Use your best judgment”):

This common-sense approach is apparently typical of the new owner, Sam Zell, who seems to believe in giving people responsibility for their actions rather than viewing workers as children and managers as their nannies. Another example: when Zell learned that the company was filtering the internet content of editors, reporters, and producers at the company’s newspapers and TV stations, he sent the following memo:

From: Talk to Sam
Sent: Tue 1/22/2008 11:03 AM
Subject: Censorship, the First Amendment and the Fourth Estate

Everyone, I learned on the first leg of our tour of Tribune’s business units that some of them were filtering Internet content. I do not see how a member of the Fourth Estate, dedicated to protecting the First Amendment, can censor what its own employees and partners can see. I have instructed that all content filters be removed. You are now exposed to the dangers of You Tube and Facebook. Please use your best judgment.

Let’s focus on what is important, and go for greatness. Sam

Imagine that — allowing workers to use their best judgment, and implicitly relying on managers to take responsibility for the people that they hire, promote or fire, instead of relying on one-size-fits-all policies that are designed to prevent management from actually having to use any judgment or make any tough decisions.

It’s easy to understand why employers, and especially their lawyers, like to rely on drug testing and internet filters to help them manage employees. After all, if an employee is fired, it is easier to justify the termination by a cut-and-dry violation of a drug policy than by more squishy judgments about whether the employee was slacking off or spacing out too much on the job. Similarly, it is easier to simply block internet sites en masse than to get into the murkier business of worrying about which employees are exploiting their Facebook privileges and which ones are pulling their weight.

As understandable as blanket policies like drug testing or internet filters may be as a way to avoiding the responsibility of actually managing their employees, it’s nice to see a company put some responsibility back on the shoulders of workers and their supervisors instead.

So tie-shy Chronicle Editor Phil Bronstein is leaving the Editor’s post for a new “editor-at-large” position with that sounds like part strategic planning for the Hearst papers, part community representative for the Chronicle, and part writer/editor/whatever for the Chronicle and SFGate.com. SFGate’s story on his move
neglected to mention whether he wore a tie during his newsroom announcement today, or whether he will start wearing one more often in his new role, but it did note that he once wore scuba gear in a hunt for an alligator (no word on whether the alligator hunt is what prompted a Komodo dragon to bite his toe in 2001 — a gesture of reptilian solidarity, perhaps?).

Hearst laid off 90 of the Chronicle’s 400 newsroom employees last year. How many of those salaries could have been paid with the small fortune Bronstein will probably earn in his vague-sounding new job?

If I’m ever a presidential candidate, and you are the editor of a big city paper who is coming to interview me in a formal setting at the St. Francis hotel, and you happen to be male, then I just have one request: please wear a tie! That applies even if you are known for your hunky looks and your marriage to Sharon Stone.

(San Francisco Chronicle Editor Phil Bronstein, Barack Obama, and Editorial Page Editor John Diaz on January 17th before or after a long interview with the Chronicle Editorial Board at the St. Francis Hotel.)

I promise, no more posts about Bronstein’s sartorial choices for a while. I’m not usually in favor of dress codes and the like, but I think Bronstein looks pretty silly in that picture. This white shirt/dark suit/no tie trend isn’t my favorite in the first place, but in a newsroom it’s fine. At a formal interview in a nice hotel, it’s ridiculous. So please, if I’m ever a presidential candidate, just do me this one little favor…

The Los Angeles Times had an article today that may be a harbinger of things to come, as California confronts the problems posed by a burgeoning population and a shrinking water supply. The headline is “Water laws may throttle growth” and this is how it begins:

The planned distribution center for the footwear firm Skechers USA would rise on 1.7 million square feet in the Inland Empire, making it one of the largest warehouses in the United States. It would anchor a new community called Rancho Belago, a variation of the Italian for “beautiful lake,” after nearby Lake Perris reservoir.

Now, in a sign of growing water anxieties, the Skechers warehouse and six other large projects in western Riverside County are on hold until March or later because the local water agency could not promise to deliver water to serve them.

The dilemma shows what can happen when construction and global trade, key drivers of the regional economy, are reined in by a potential lack of water.

“Just looking at the raw numbers, we kept coming up short,” said David J. Slawson, president of the board of directors of the Perris-based Eastern Municipal Water District, one of the largest districts in the state.

Slawson explains that his own livelihood as a land surveyor depends on growth, that no one on the board wants to hobble the economy. Still, he said, the restriction is “something we feel is necessary until we have some better numbers and we see some action statewide.”

The District’s decision was based on two laws passed in 2001 which require local agencies to assess future water needs when they are considering large development projects. As anyone who has seen Chinatown or read Cadillac Desert knows well, struggles over water resources are nothing new to California, and there’s reason to think that we ain’t seen nothing yet.

Given the importance of water to the state’s future, it’s good to see the state’s biggest newspaper addressing the practical local consequences that result from limited statewide water supplies. However, the LA Times article seems strangely focused on the narrow matter of how the 2001 laws may “hobble” and “throttle” the region’s economy, rather than the larger questions of what kind of growth is feasible given the looming water crisis, with minimal economic damage. Call me crazy, or call me an urban snob, but I have a hunch that building thousands more green-lawned, swimming-pooled exurban homes in a desert may not be the best use of the state’s limited water.

While the reporter does explain the logic behind the two statutes, and does a service by publicizing the issue, much of the article is written as if laws and court rulings were to blame, rather than the lack of water. That unfortunate headline, “Water laws may throttle growth,” is symptomatic of the tone taken in much of the article — as if there would be no problem with millions of people moving to parched areas if only those pesky lawmakers would get out of the way.

Plenty has been written recently about coming water shortages, including a long New York Times Magazine cover story in October and books such as Fred Pearce’s When the Rivers Run Dry and Ken Midkiff’s Not a Drop to Drink. Unfortunately, as with most issues, people will not pay attention until it starts affecting them and their neighbors. Like most Americans, I take the water coming out of my tap for granted, and I take the relatively inexpensive fresh produce at local markets for granted, but sometime soon fresh water may be a luxury here as it currently is in many other parts of the world. The LA Times had a perfect occasion to make the connections between the big picture and the local angle, and I wish the article had more deeply explored how California should plan for a future in which more and more people will share less and less water.

As part of the effort to promote its “Journalism of action,” the San Francisco Chronicle has recently been running ads in the print edition explaining it to readers. The ads usually feature editor Phil Bronstein’s image alongside few paragraphs of text. Wearing a dark suit coat, unbuttoned dress shirt, and no tie, the outfit that everyone from Barack Obama and John Edwards to Mahmoud Ahmedinejad now uses to say “I’m a powerful man but also a regular guy, and you can trust me,” Bronstein looks directly into the camera’s eye with a sincere and compassionate expression.

While “Journalism of action” may conjure up an image of Clark Kent changing out of his reporters’ clothing and saving the world as Superman, the reality is much less dramatic. As I’ve written before, “Journalism of Action” is not much more than a new name for an old idea, known in earlier incarnations as “community journalism” and “news you can use,” now updated for the internet age.

In case the appeal to people’s natural self-interest and nimbyism wasn’t clear enough, these new ads make it explicit. The final paragraph of the text next to Bronstein is: “Journalism of action. It’s about accountability. It’s about being concerned. It’s about getting involved. It’s about you.” And to drive the point home, the bold-faced line at the bottom of the ads repeats the point: “It’s your Chronicle, and it’s all about you.”

That’s right: it’s all about you. Never mind the millions of people dying each year from preventable disease due to lack of clean water and adequate sanitation, never mind nearly 2 million people dying each year of treatable tuberculosis — you don’t know those people, therefore you shouldn’t care. It’s all about you.

I don’t mean to pick on the Chronicle. It’s not their fault that people don’t buy papers to read about tuberculosis in the third world. I’m sympathetic to the current plight of newspaper publishers and editors, and encouraging involvement in one’s community is all well and good, but I would argue that many of the civic problems in contemporary America boil down to the prevailing attitude that “it’s all about me.” While the Chronicle may be subtly trying to transform the phrase “it’s all about you” from an accusation of solipsism into a plea for community engagement, I fear that this “journalism of action” is just one more desperate effort to save a dying industry by catering to people’s most egocentric impulses.