Here’s a portion of a letter we just received at the Star:
It was with great excitement that I read your article on the school district move, forwarded to me by Goggle. My name is Nicki Phelps, and I am the Director of Visitor Programs for the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy in San Francisco. We run all fee based programs on Alcatraz Island.
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Currently, we are in the midst of refurnishing the Alcatraz Cellhouse. When I read that some of the school district furniture is came from Alcatraz, I felt compelled to write. Would it be possible for you to forward this email to the school district, especially Ms. Baker? At the very least, I would sincerely appreciate seeing the furniture by photo or in person.
I hadn’t even thought about this aspect of the story, really. Very cool for all those Alcatraz history buffs out there.
It’s been a while since the last Hesperia Star podcast, for which we can only plead crazy schedules and all sorts of other things tripping us up in this new realm for the newspaper. Things haven’t calmed down, but in an attempt to get back on track, I did a solo podcast last night, using the high-tech equipment of Peter’s cellphone: I literally phoned the podcast in.
It should be posted on the Hesperia Star blog in the next day or so.
The next hurdle to leap, once we’re back to regularity with the podcasts, is getting a working feed up to automatically “cast” it to the waiting masses. (OK, to my dad.)
We have no idea yet if anyone from the Hesperia Star has won in this year’s Society of Professional Journalists awards (the ceremony won’t be until May 13 in Riverside), but anyone wanting to know now can check this thread regularly to see if any names have been added. So far, it looks like they’ve only judged the larger newspaper division.
One for now, one for posterity:
- I may have been influenced early on by Peter Parker and Clark Kent (who says comics don’t warp young minds?), but it was Edward R. Murrow, when I first heard about him in AP Government class my senior year in high school, who really showed me that journalists not only could change the world, but at times, have the obligation to try.
Whatever you think of the easily drawn parallels to today’s political situation, see Good Night and Good Luck
ASAP. A great film, a great reminder of the mission of journalism and a great — and accurate — glimpse into the often-times nail-biting world of journalists doing the right thing, as they see it, consequences be damned.
“Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn’t mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar.” – Edward R. Murrow
Murrow is still The Man when it comes to journalists.
- Jenn says she sees the return of my creepy sarcoidosis internal bleeding blotches on my shins. And we’ll have fun, fun, fun until her daddy takes the T-Bird away.
Listening to this week’s episode of the always-awesome radio show/podcast, The Business, I listened with amusement to the stories of reporters talking about what a nightmare it is to report on Hollywood.
I had no idea about any of this back in 1997, when I was working at the Potomac News and the second team for the $75 million disaster flick Deep Impact came to Prince William County, Virginia. They were there to film an evacuation scene on Interstate 66, heading out of Washington, DC as the comet approaches Earth.
My editor was told that we would be given a chance to participate in the scene — i.e., sit in my car on the blacktop for eight hours and write about the experience — which sounded like a fun little feature story.
I also got word that they’d be casting for said scene at middle school in Manassas in the gym. The news hole is always hungry, so I called for days and days, trying to touch base with someone — anyone — involved in the production to talk about what the process was like. Because movies don’t do a lot of casting in suburban northern Virginia, it was a story we all agreed would be of interest to our readership.
But I got nowhere with the telephone calls. The day approached and I said to myself, “Self, they’re meeting in a public venue” (this is obviously before the Columbine killings turned public schools across America into closed campuses) “and there’s no controls over who is coming and going, so it’s a public gathering. Just go and cover it.”
So I did.
The story came out in the paper, and a nice little slice of cinematic life it was.
And then a publicist for the production called up and screamed at my editor, saying I was banned from the set (Interstate 66) and that they didn’t want to see me anywhere near their production. My editor, Barb, eventually calmed her down enough to agree that another reporter could have the coveted sit-on-the-road-for-eight-hours gig. A non-features reporter got the story, and pretty much phoned it in.
This all seemed (and seems) highly irrational to me, but it’s apparently the way it goes in entertainment journalism, where information can be tightly controlled by the entertainment companies and the journalists are forced to dance to irrational whims. It was a shock to me, and I spitefully chose to not see the film, even if it does feature President Morgan Freeman.
In the end, Deep Impact commercially came in second to the other disaster-from-space flick to come out in 1998, Armageddon. I like to think it was my boycott that made the difference.
