(I know, I haven’t been posting a lot lately: I’ve been busy at work and busy at home. More soon, I promise.)

Although I’ve been subscribing to Coverville for several years now, it can be a somewhat lightweight podcast at times, particularly when host Brian Ibbott goes with requests instead of his own musical tastes.

That said, this week’s track-by-track set of covers of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds album is
an amazing show and more than the sum of its parts. I’ve heard of Pet Sounds and was familiar with it in theory, but hearing even the non-hits covered on this show just let me focus on the songs themselves, and Brian Wilson’s songs just absolutely shine.

Even if you don’t normally listen to podcasts or care about the Beach Boys, just listen to this show. Great, great stuff. If there was a Grammy for a single podcast episode, this show would be a lock for a nomination.

Juniper celebrates 50 years, Non-teacher staff agree to fewer days, Carmel wins reading contest, Juniper principal duct-taped to door, Oasis Charter’s future in question, Shotgun-wielding motorist arrested, Motorist leads deputy on foot chase, Traffic stop leads to gun bust, School police log - May 9, 2008 and other stories.

Tonight, the Hesperia Star won the most SPJ awards in the paper’s eight year history: five, including two for editorial writing.

As always, it was surprising to see what won, and what didn’t. The wildfires of last spring were popular at the awards, and my piece, Smoke-Out, won a third place award in the Breaking News Category. I don’t think the piece is as strong as my story about a Hesperia sheriff’s deputy being shot, but that’s how it goes.

My earlier guess was wrong: I did win an award about an infamous necrophiliac finally getting prison time in connection with his earlier violation of a child’s corpse. I was thrown off the scent because the award wasn’t listed as a Daily Press win, despite the story appearing in that paper. This also marks the fourth year in a row that I’ve won a Law Enforcement/Legal Affairs award (first time getting a first place award, and only my second first place award from the SPJs ever), which I worry will misrepresent what I was covering in Hesperia these years in future job interviews. No awards for my school board coverage or my California Charter Academy coverage, for instance, which dominated much of 2007 for me. Go figure.

And then there’s the award I have the most mixed feelings about: A second place editorial writing award for my piece on being a Virginia Tech alumnus in the wake of last April’s massacre. Jenn and Sharon have already stressed to me that I’m not capitalizing on a tragedy, but it still feels odd.

Overall, the Freedom High Desert papers cleaned up, with the Barstow Desert Dispatch in particular doing well — I’m ashamed to admit I haven’t been reading their multiple award-winning blog, but I clearly need to, especially since Peter wants one added to the Star’s site ASAP.

As always, it was a (reasonably) good time, although it almost feels like a Riverside Press-Enterprise recruiting event, between the ton of awards the PE and its associated papers get, and how happy everyone from the paper always looks (especially given the number of non-award-winning PE staffers who show up just to show support).

Peter got two awards as well: One was an editorial piece about founding father Val Shearer leaving Hesperia and the other was an entertainment piece about swing band Phat Cat Swinger. Peter always excels when writing about music, and it’s nice to see that recognized.

The full list of awards, and judges’ comments for many of them, will appear in the next day or so at the SPJ blog.

You can tell the reissue is close at hand: Liz is making the media circuit. (I’ll figure out a way to write about her for the Star or CBR if you call, publicist!)

This time up, it’s Rolling Stone, the magazine that first introduced me to her, back in the 1990s, when I lived in Egypt.

It seems like the music you’ve made in the past few years doesn’t have much of a relationship to the music on Exile in Guyville. What’s your relationship to that record now?

It’s coming back around again, and I don’t think it’s an accident. For the first time in 15 years, I’m not on a major, and the forces around you are different. If you asked me to do this reissue five years ago, I don’t think I could have. For a while, Exile in Guyville was something that I was running away from. When I got bashed for my pop period, it was almost like that album belonged to critics and not me anymore. They used it against me, in a weird way. I couldn’t figure out how I felt about it or how I should feel about it. Now because I feel a tremendous sense of freedom for the first time in a long time, I said, “I’m going to find these people and bring that moment back.” If you told me five years ago that I was going to hunt down [Feel Good All Over label head] John Henderson, I would have laughed in your face. No fucking way! But I did. I found Steve Albini and all these people I had issues with in the past. It was so good for me. I was able to remember who I am — not just who I was. If you don’t ever deal with your past, you don’t even know half of who you are, and that’s what I was suffering under.

You’ve been critically attacked for most everything you’ve done since Exile in Guyville. How have you dealt with it?

It did bother me. I stopped reading press because I couldn’t write. I couldn’t deal with reading about what people thought about me all the time. But how could I escape it? Everyone was like, “You suck! You don’t just suck, you really suck!” They were so angry, and I couldn’t understand what made them so angry. I reserve fits of anger for people that I know who might have done something mean to me personally. I got into it with one writer who was like, “Do you know how personal that record was to everyone?” And I was like, “Do you know how personal it was to me?”

I’m not sure why, but this has been my decompress-after-a-bad-day song for a few years now, having replaced Steve Winwood’s “Back in the High Life” at some point after I moved to California.

I have never been to Lake Charles. I don’t think I’ve even been through Louisiana, or even driven through it. Still, it speaks to me for some reason.

Carrier Brownstein is now a commentator for the very un-Sleater-Kinney NPR. Here’s part of her look at Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville:

The first thing I noticed about Liz Phair was the voice. She wasn’t screaming, she wasn’t being cloying, she wasn’t an amazing singer, but there was something serious about the vocals, something deadly. Part of it was the flatness; the strange deadpan delivery, like someone is singing on their back, like they woke up one night and decided they’d had enough and so they made an album. But the songs weren’t victim anthems just like they weren’t merely come-ons; they spoke of the fine lines between power and powerlessness, autonomy and isolation, they depicted epiphanies and the subsequent letdowns. The album was a journey vacillating between interior and exterior landscapes, the lyrics evoking halcyon moments always on the verge of implosion, either by the author’s own hand or by someone they loved. And the album was drenched in desire, of wanting and of wanting out.

The revised at last LizPhair.com is not available yet, but the 15th anniversary reissue of EiG will apparently hit stores on June 24. It’s not in Amazon yet.

HUSD non-teaching staff avoid largescale layoffs, agree to work fewer days

After ages of them just providing bite-sized pieces, the full podcast of PRI’s The World is now available each weekday. Previously, PRI’s partner, the BBC, had nixed using their contributions to the show, so only selected segments were available. I’m not sure what happened, although the BBC is fully on board with podcasts themselves, so that likely played into it.

In any case, The World is a good solid half-hour news show with a good mix of national, international, financial, technology and cultural news coverage.

Apples to Apples: Hesperia teachers well paid compared to other valley districts, Apples to Apples: McKinney’s salary in the middle of Victor Valley pack, Apples to Apples: Hesperia principals among the valley’s best-paid, McKinney to hold ‘town hall’ meeting, Chamber president: Expo was ‘wonderful’, Hesperia Junior principal gets hair dyed pink, School police log - May 2, 2008 and other stories.

Another issue of American Journalism Review, another issue packed with timely pieces. If only every newspaper was as good as this magazine that covers them.

Here’s a piece that speaks directly to the economics of running a paper like the Hesperia Star:

There were 600 newspaper people at the New York Press Association conference in Saratoga Springs in April 2006, ages 18 to 80, all races, men, women, straight, gay — whatever variation of newsperson you might imagine. English, Creole, Spanish, Hindi and more were heard in the halls.

The energy could have lifted the roof off the old Gideon Putnam Hotel.

That was the first time I heard it: Weekly newspapers are the only growing niche in print journalism.

Tom Ward, a refugee from chain dailies in Woonsocket and West Warwick, Rhode Island, told me how he started the free-circulation Valley Breeze with two colleagues in his living room in Cumberland, a growing suburb between the two aging mill towns. That was 10 years ago; in 2006, he had just moved to modern offices and was putting out an ad-heavy, 68-page-plus tab.

I spent a morning with Paul Bass, who after 25 years in print founded the online, nonprofit New Haven Independent (newhavenindependent.org) to cover the hometown news he perceived newspapers were ignoring. Using NPR as his model, he obtained grants from various foundations — to cover health-care issues, for instance (see “Nonprofit News,” February/March) — and relies on readers’ contributions to make up the difference.

Tim Ryan, president and publisher of the Westerly Sun in Rhode Island, instructed me in the benefits of “localness” beyond what a daily can provide. He had spun off four free-circulation broadsheets to attract very local advertisers.

There was no shortage of advice: from Ron and Charlotte Bartizek, who had owned the Dallas Post in Pennsylvania; from Tony Jones and Vicki Simons, who grew the tiny Roe Jan Independent into the countywide Hillsdale Independent in New York; from Gary and Helen Sosniecki at the Vandalia Leader in Missouri.

In short, it didn’t take long to figure out that many brainy, ambitious, independent people had already done what I was determined to do. Bob Estabrook, former Washington Post editorial page editor, then the paper’s chief foreign correspondent, clinched it for me: His three-decade association with the Lakeville Journal in Connecticut — beginning when he was about my age, 54 — were the most satisfying years of his life, he said.

Along the way it had dawned on me: 90 percent of the businesses on any Main Street — pizza joints, dry cleaners, gift shops — have simply been priced out of advertising in the dailies.

And not because of the cost of putting out a newspaper; no, those hefty if shrinking profit margins are needed, not just for operating expenses, but to pay off massive debt and keep up the stock price.

Middling-sized chain dailies are looking to average $15 to $20 an inch for advertising; the open rate is often twice that. Working through the numbers, it looked to me like a weekly could survive, even flourish, at $7, $8 or $9 an inch. Bingo.

The economics of 21st century weekly newspapering rapidly came into focus. Only one computer was serviceable at the level we were moving to. For just $7,000, we obtained two workhorse Dells, five PCs and a copier. Every town has techies galore — ours was Mike Hand from Cherry Valley — and he networked us, hanging wire over the firehouse’s primitive beams.

Within a matter of days, predawn 55-mile drives to the printer were a thing of the past. With a click and a drag, we could load the newspaper onto our printer’s FTP site, then take a leisurely drive up the following morning to pick up that week’s masterpiece.

We spent $1,000 on a Canon EOS-20D, (now down to $799). I commandeered M.J.’s Canon PowerShot ($350 then, $280 now) as backup. Our photography challenges were resolved.

M.J. and I identified cost centers, and pinched them off one by one.

We had a circulation driver — I loved his red, white and blue Mohawk — but when the June 2006 Susquehanna flooding stranded him at home in Schenevus, we discovered we could do without him and save $500 a week. M.J. and I each took a route, and divided the rest up among the staff.

A printing house in Utica was handling subscriptions, another $500 a week. Bill Garber’s Interlink of Berrien Springs, Michigan, provided the program that allows us to print our own labels and cut postage to about $200. Mailing the papers from Cooperstown (and Hartwick, and Fly Creek) also got them to subscribers sooner. (Half of the papers are delivered and half are mailed.)

Printing is a competitive business. We were paying $1,200 a week. If we paid by check at the loading dock, we could print for half that at Sun Printing in Norwich, New York, a shorter drive, too.

Those steps alone, a little dead-reckoning arithmetic will tell you, saved tens of thousands.

(A caveat: Watch your expenses. When, after a year, we moved to well-appointed new offices on the other side of town, the new desks, new phones, carpet and wiring resulted in the one major bump in our fiscal road to date.)

Ironically, we at the Star can benefit very little from this article, since we’re already doing most of this. Still, it’s nice to see someone else do the math and come up with a similar number.