A local Katrina vulture

One source of the alleged experts the media employs in stories is the fax machine. It helpfully spits out an endless parade of self-promoting authors, college instructors, retirees and others with the time and inclination to talk to the press about their area of expertise. As you might imagine, these are something of a mixed bag, running from actual experts any media outlet would be thrilled to use as a source to folks desperately trying to recoup their investment on a vanity press-published book via some free publicity. If you’re lucky, they’re local — an expert from outside the High Desert is all but useless to me. (An expert living or working in Hesperia is obviously the real goal.)

Today, we got our first of these trying to portray themselves as being relevant to the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Now she was from the High Desert, so bonus points there, but only the most desperate journalist would have used her area of theoretical expertise — and I say theoretical, since a quick Google would have turned up the same information she had in her three page fax, minus the promotion of her (apparently vanity press-published) book. Not only did her information seem uncompelling at best, it had only the most tenuous link to what was going on in the areas ravaged by the hurricane.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people are dead, and this woman is trying to use their deaths to recoup her investment on her booklet.

We passed on calling her.

The Verizon Hesperia Chamber of Commerce Reception

We just got back from a reception the Hesperia Chamber of Commerce held for new Hesperia City Manager Mike Podegracz at Foremost Healthcare.

I finally got to meet Ray Pryke, the publisher of Valleywide Newspapers, including the Hesperia Resorter, which was great, since I’ve wanted to meet him for a long time. Ray is a character’s character and the living embodiment of several truisms about the First Amendment.

The reception was sponsored by Verizon. This seems to be a growing trend.

Basset hounds at Precious Pets

These guys are some of the pets at the Precious Pets animal shelter on Walnut Street in Hesperia. They and their compatriots will be in a story in Tuesday’s Star.

fund raising, fund-raising, fund-raiser

The #1 sign that the Associated Press might need new thinking in charge of their venerable style guide:

fund raising, fund-raising, fund-raiser
Fund raising is difficult. They planned a fund-raising campaign. A fund-raiser was hired. The organization was planning a fund-raiser.

(Page 102, The Associated Press Stylebook, 2004 edition)

I’m going to hold a fund-raiser to get all of those variants just turned into “fundraiser,” like the rest of the English language uses. And “stylebook” isn’t one word, guys.

Hank Stuever’s last in-house Washington Post critique

America’s only pink paper (no, seriously), the New York Observer had this bit on Washington Post Style section reporter Hank Stuever going a wee bit further during his turn in the daily-critique-by-a-staffer thing than the big brass may have intended:

This forum seems to have a lot of focus-group fallout, calling for: shorter stories, faster formats, oh my it’s all too much to handle, I can’t possibly read it all, I don’t know where to start, I get everything I need from my (pet electronic doodad). And, my favorite, from a critique a couple of days ago, the assistant news editor guy who reads the NYT, WSJ (so navigable! Huh?), then gets online and reads everything else, and then and only then might deign to read The Post, which is, again, too this and too that and is an incredible intrusion on his time. Remarkably, the paychecks navigate their way to his bank account every other Friday, which is another way for me to say that I firmly, firmly believe that if you can be bothered to work here, you can bother to read this paper – the meatspace version, not the Web, the printed result that we all worked so hard to make — every day before you read someone else’s. This is why I can never be allowed to observe focus groups: I will surely bust through that one-way glass window and administer hard spankings to each and every participant who seems incapable of just paging through a newspaper, looking at headlines and pictures, and deciding whether or not there’s something worth stopping on.

I think we’ve overlistened to people who never read the paper, and yet insist it include more about their neighborhoods, lives, and concerns. A newspaper is filled with criminals, celebrities and fools and I for one am happy when it doesn’t include my life or neighborhood in theirs.

Then again, no one is interested in my new slogan for The Post: “News Flash: Everything’s Not Always About You.”

OK, that’s probably all funnier to me than it is to some of you, but I’m laughing here. And, frankly, Stuever nails a lot of the stuff that’s wrong with the reader survey results and (to an even greater extent) what the newspaper consultants have been pushing recently.

(Source.)