Peoria Pundit

I’m working on a writing assignment and have my regular job later in the
day, so I won’t be posting today, excepts perhaps later tonight. I’m
know this comes as a *crushing* disappointment. Deal.

If you’re jonesing for a fix, visit The Community Word Online
and read some other Peoria writers.

? New city manager forming plan of attack

/One priority that can be developed fairly quickly and easily,
[Randy] Oliver said, is a hotline where city residents can log
complaints – everything from potholes to litter problems.

“One of the things that’s very frustrating for people is when you
call (the city with an issue) and you’re transferred six times and
disconnected twice. I’m not saying that happens here. The citizen is
our quality control. They know about those nagging things which
frequently are the most frustrating to them.”/

Yeah, that’s it. That’s the problem. Phone queues. Not 20 years of
corporate welfare and economic development projects that drain, not
develop, the economy.

? Staff: City manager contract ‘pretty standard’

/Despite one City Council member’s sticker shock, new City Manager
Randy Oliver didn’t get anything out of the ordinary to be lured to
Peoria, city staff say.

Oliver earned $140,400 as city manager for Greenville, S.C., a city
of 56,000.

In Peoria, a city almost twice that size, Oliver will be paid a base
salary of $149,500 plus various fringe benefits, including a
$500-a-month car allowance and $10,465 in deferred compensation to
be contributed annually to his retirement fund.

Additionally, Oliver will receive up to $9,000 for moving expenses
and a lump sum of $9,500 for relocation costs./

Apparently, reporter Jennifer Davis felt the need to devote an entire
article to disproving the subjective opinion of one council member (Gary
Sandberg) that the city can’t afford to pay a new city manager $26,789
more than his predecessor earned in salary alone, not to mention much
more generous perks and benefits. I also got a kick out of Mayor David
Ransburg complaining that the city manager has to be paid that much
because of the higher cost of living. He’s much more generous with
public employees than those who work for his private business — L.R.
Nelson — who are notoriously underpaid. Well, he can afford to be more
generous with our money than his own, I suppose.

I also hope that after Davis settles into her job as city hall reporter,
she will devote entire articles to disproving the provably untrue
statements and blatant spin attempts of City Council members who are NOT
regularly attacked on the newspaper’s editorial page.

I know it’s chic to attack Katie Couric for her alleged left-wing bias.
Now, Romenesko (accused by some
for his own alleged left-wing bias) has a snarky headline that links to
a NY Daily News piece
about the
perky morning journalist: Couric to help disgraced newsman Blair promote
his book:

/Katie Couric’s March prime-time NBC special on the New York Times
is timed to the publication of Jayson Blair’s memoir, “Burning Down
My Master’s House.” Lloyd Grove reports Blair will be on the
hour-long show, but it’s not known whether Howell Raines or Gerald
Boyd will sit down with Couric. She says: “I’m especially interested
in this because I came of age during the whole Janet Cooke
controversy, and this seemed to have echoes of that.” (Third item.)/

Sources might chose to be interviewed because they are promoting
something, but the story itself is newsworthy. The whole Jayson Blair
controversy is newsworthy. At the local level, reporters and editors are
constantly approached by people looking for publicity for this or that
event. Sometimes its newsworthy, so we cover it.

The headline is a bit unfair to Couric.

Best column /ever/ …

… and Phil Theobald didn’t even write it. The culprit was Jacqueline
Koch , a Metamora
Township High School student. It seems Ms. Koch wants to be a
journalist, so she shadowed the /Journal Star/ sports columnist as he
did his job one day. First, sports columnists don’t have real jobs.
Covering school board meetings is a job. Watching baseball games and
writing about it isn’t a job. He should pay for the privilege of writing
about the Cubs.

Phil turned his column over to Miss Koch and the result is amazing. She
has a gift for the sarcastic — which she might have picked up from
Theobald — that it sometimes takes professional journalists an entire
/week/ to acquire. She also has a good ear and put Phil through the
satirical wringer.

Her column was the best thing in the paper today.

Take my advice: Get your hands on a hundred or so copies of this issue
and use in the packet of clips you will send out to prospective employers.

Now — if we can just figure out a way for her to replace Phil LUCIANO
for a day or two …

Testy Copy Editors

is enjoying a discussion about the use of the question and answer (Q&A)
format. Several folks say it’s stenography and not real journalism.

/ Readers love Q&As, but most journalists hate them because such
devices skip the middleman — us — and simply do the basic and
simple job that newspapers no longer are interested in performing:
reporting dispassionately what someone did or said./

There is much wisdom in this paragraph.

Q: Why do readers love Q&As?

A: *Because *they eliminate the middleman. There’s no filter. There’s
just the question and the answer. The reader not only gets to see the
questions — which reveals the bias and preconceived notions of the
interviewer, it also gives the whole and complete answer, virtually
eliminating the possibility the quote is being used out of context or
worse, subjected to Dowdification
. This
assumes, of course, that there was no heavy doctoring of the quotes or
the questioned asked.

The use of Q&As can insert a heavy dose of objectivity into a newspaper
that is having a hard time convincing readers that they are free of
bias. Remember, journalism is supposed to be about the needs of the
readers, not about the ego of the reporters or the winning of
newswriting awards.

Besides, there is plenty of journalism going on in deciding: 1. who to
interview in the first place; 2. what questions to ask; and 3. what
followup questions to ask. This is no different from what broadcast
journalists have been doing for years, except that instead of replaying
the interview, we are transcribing it and maybe cleaning up a few
quotes. There’s also the advantage of making it harder to duck tough
questions by changing the subject. After all, the followup question is
included and readers can see with their own eyes that the question isn’t
being answered.

Rather than complain about it’s use, newspapers wanting to reconnect
with their readers should consider using Q&As more often. It’s a weapon
that should be in every newspaper’s arsenal, but probably isn’t because
its, well, different.

Hat tip: Tom Mangan .

Democrats worship at the feet of the Kennedy family.

Ted Kennedy can do no wrong, even though he killed a woman in a drunk
driving accident. They morn the loss of JFK Jr. because they envisioned
him as the rightful heir to Camelot. When a Kennedy runs for office, no
other Democrat dare oppose them in a primary and they are almost always
assured of victory despite an absolute lack of qualifications. My own
parents — who almost certainly are in the advances stages of senility
– once said they wished a Kennedy — any Kennedy, mind you — would
move to Illinois and run for Senator. This was said even though Illinois
has a perfectly good liberal holding one of the seats — Dick Durbin.

But if John F. Kennedy were alive today, he would have nothing but scorn
for the liberal policies of his family. JFK was a legitimate war hero
and was a hawk on defense. Kennedy was a hawk on the economy, and
believed low taxes stimulated the economy.

Today, Tom Mangan linked to a blogger

who links to evidence
that
JFK planned a unilateral, unconditional withdrawal from Vietnam.

Why do libs persist in this fantasy? Because they cannot conceive that
the source of all Kennedy worship wasn’t into appeasement and was an
anti-communist. It just doesn’t compute for them. Hadn’t Kennedy been
murdered and assumed martyr status, he would have gone down in history
as a better-than-most president.

? /Journal Star/: Quinn: Tap the rich to fund schools

/Lt. Gov. Pat Quinn on Wednesday pushed a plan to raise the *income
tax on the state’s rich* to help fund schools and give rebates to
homeowners, an idea that Gov. Rod Blagojevich opposes.
—
“We have the most unfair tax code in the U.S.,” Quinn told the
Journal Star editorial writers. Illinois “can continue to be a tax
haven for millionaires in the Midwest, or the state that has the
best education for children,” he said.

The issue places Quinn, a former state treasurer with a reputation
as a maverick who challenges the establishment, fighting for a
populist idea opposed by Blagojevich, who has tried to develop a
reputation as a populist governor./

/For God’s sake! Think of the children!/

I shook my head in disbelief when Democratic voters in 2001 picked Quinn
as their candidate for lieutenant governor. The former consumer rights
advocate and current class warrior seemed a poor choice for the
practical-minded Democrats. This Illinoiis, remember. There are a few
loud liberals coming from the Democrats up in Chicago, and a few
downstate. But most are concerned mostly with patronage and
run-of-the-mill corruption to endorse this class-warfare nonsense.

Say what you want about Quinn. At least he’s still the liberal he always
claimed to be, still unaware or unconcerned with the unavoidable truth
that the rich don’t pay taxes, they just hike what they charge for goods
and services . The only
people who benefit from soak-the-rich taxes are accountants and
politicians who pander to voters to ignorant to realize they are being
screwed.

WMBD 1470-AM station
manager/afternoon drive time host John Malone is fond of refering to the
proponents of crack conspiracy theorists as his “black helicopter
friends.” So, in Malone’s honor, I am launching a new category of post:
“Black Helicopter Patrol.”

The inaugural entry is this little tidbit from the Democratic
Underground: Did Bush Family Interests kill JFK ?

Normally, I’d make a comment that the Democratic Underground is a
conspiracy engineered by Carl Rove and the GOP to make Democrats look
weirder than they already are. But that would have to be its own entry
in the Black Helicopter Patrol category.

*UPDATE:* I’ve heard that there are people who think that GOPers
actually do egg these people on for this very reason. Oy vey.

Peoria’s favorite attorney-turned-neighborhood-activist-and-zealot has a
letter to the editor
today. It’s a
Biblical, yet funny, take on the whole controversy over whether a strip
club should be located in, heaven forbid, /North Peoria./

Hat tip to Jeff Trigg
and this
post about blue noses in someplace other than Peoria.

… for this worker losing his job
?
That’s a simplistic way to explain what really happened
:

/Michael Hanscom admits it probably wasn?t the best idea. He thought
the photo on his personal blog

of Apple computers being offloaded at a Microsoft loading dock might
get a couple of smirks from friends. He never imagined it would cost
him his job.

That’s precisely what he says happened, though. Hanscom has found
several minutes of Web fame this week as the latest example of how
bloggers? blend of personal and professional can backfire. Hanscom,
who says he has kept an online journal since 1998, worked in
Microsoft?s copy shop, taking printing and publishing orders from
employees at the software giant?s headquarters in Redmond, Wash.

On Monday, Hanscom?s manager called him in and showed him an Oct. 23
post that featured a photo of stacked boxes of Apple Macintosh G5
computers under the title, ?Even Microsoft wants G5s,? noted he had
seen them on the loading dock of the building where he worked and
remarked that a couple had fallen off their palettes. The
close-cropped photograph reveals little more than a delivery truck
and the pile of computers on a loading dock. Though Microsoft
remains a target of derision for many Mac users, the company remains
a major producer of software for Apple systems.

But the entry still raised hackles with Microsoft security
officials, he says, who told his manager they couldn?t ask him to
remove the post but instead wanted him off Microsoft premises. ?I
was told they saw it as a security violation,? says Hanscom, a
longtime Mac fan who says he was amused to see Microsoft getting the
machines. ?I think they might have seen it as derogatory.? /

There isn’t an employer on Earth that tolerates someone violating
security rules. If I took a picture inside my place of employment and it
posted it on the ‘Net for everyone to see, /including my employers’
competitors/, I would be fired. Whether the photo actually showed
anything that would be of help to these competitors is besides the
point. The company can’t let individual employees decide what is too
sensitive and what isn’t. I am certain that this guy was told when he
took the job that there were rules against this sort of thing. Common
sense says that employers might not appreciate it.

Now. he has to find another line of work. Or, he might get hired back
now that the point has been made. But I wouldn’t count on it.

There is a lesson in all this: If you want to behave irresponsibly and
unethically on the net, then you have to blog anonymously. But remember,
a subpoena can reveal the IP of any one who posts on Blogger or even on
their own site.

The article points out that Microsoft has many blogging employees, some
of whom — even Hanscom — aren’t always 100 percent supportive of
company products and services. That seems awfully forward thinking. I
don’t blog about any employer.

Of course, Hanscom is the underdog in all this, while the Evil Empire is
cast, once again, as the villain. But the support from the Blogosphere
isn’t paying Hanscom’s bills:

/Hanscom says he?s mostly thinking about covering his rent and hopes
to get another assignment through his temp firm. After readers asked
about his cash situation, he reminded them they could chip in via a
link from his Web site to the Paypal service. His inbox is
chock-full of supportive e-mail. The Paypal button remains unused./

An unused Paypal button — boy, /that/ sounds familiar.