Short Hesperia City Council meeting

The good news: Tonight’s city council meeting was super-fast.

The bad news: The meeting in two weeks, which includes a public hearing on renewing and expanding eminent domain authority, should be an epic session.

SPJ News Photo entry

This photo, which I’ve shown before, in a smaller size, accompanied the August 30 story, Shelters of Hope. The photo was a happy accident. The dog’s blind blue-green eyes and the girl’s blue-green eyes, as well as her expession that mixes defiance and a little bit of sorrow I find extremely compelling for some reason.

Not sure if I’ve got a chance at the SPJs with this one, but it’s my submission for a photo award this year. Peter had a heck of a year. I’ll post some of his later this week.

Best of Freedom award entries

Maria just sent off our entries for the Best of Freedom awards this year:

1. Dear teens: Buckle up! (Peter Day)
2. The inventor (Peter Day)
3. Is the Hesperia casino really “terminated?” (Beau Yarbrough)
4. The Audit (Beau Yarbrough)
5. Colly home from war, three medals later (Beau Yarbrough)

For the related Tibor Machan Outstanding Libertarian Commentary Award:

1. City of potholes, enough progress? (Peter Day)
2. Dear teens: Buckle up! (Peter Day)

The awards are given out to the best stories (and editorials) by papers in the Freedom Communications family, split into metropolitan and community newspaper divisions. Last year, Peter won a nifty crystal trophy Best of Freedom award for A mother’s decision. Here’s hoping for a repeat!

IRE follow-up

It’s been pointed out to me that I haven’t written about how the IRE conference went. I expect I’ll have to give a report to the editor-in-chief over at the Daily Press this week, so it’s probably a good idea to organize my thoughts here.

I was probably naive going into this (it was my first professional conference), but I was disappointed. There was a little bit about covering local elections — and I did learn some valuable things that I will put into practice during this election cycle — but the majority of the time was spent on statewide and national campaign coverage. This confuses me: Do we really need more coverage of the same Washington hijinks? Even Sacramento is pretty well-covered. But local politics? Not so much. And if the local papers — I saw reporters from Riverside and Ventura there — aren’t covering the local politicos, who is?

A more charitable reporter from the Daily Press suggested that a lot of this applies to local elections, but I must politely disagree: I’d used the resources they were talking about, and they absolutely don’t drill down to the local level.

Besides the (to me) somewhat off-point focus of the day, two of the three speakers (both from the same paper) seemed to think that the day was about talking about how much they rock. There were numerous stories that literally had nothing to take away from them, other than the alleged awesomeness of the speaker. (When you’re in a room of 100+ people, and fewer than seven are laughing at your jokes, you’re not funny, move on.) I saw people muttering about one of the reporters and ditching early because of her, in fact.

It was telling that, in a room full of journalists, only a handful of people asked questions all day. As Jenn will tell you, getting journalists to not ask questions is a real trick. But at the IRE panel, it seems like I wasn’t the only one who didn’t think there was much chance of getting anything worthwhile out of most of the speakers.

I’m hoping this was the exception, and not the rule, especially since I think the IRE magazine is so useful.

(USC is a spectacular campus, though.)

Following the money to USC

Tomorrow, bright and early to beat the traffic, I’m off to the Annenberg School for Communication to attend The Investigative Reporters and Editors Campaign Finance Workshop.

I really got into following the money during 2004’s Hesperia City Council campaign and this year, if anything, will be even more slam-bang of an election season. I’m looking forward to the seminar, although 84 miles, driving with rush hour traffic into LA, and trying to get there by the 9 a.m. start fills me with dread.

We’ll see how it works out.