Journalism

Chron flackery poses as news

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By Tim Redmond

David Cay Johnston, the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, has a few choice words for the Chron in Columbia Journalism Review. He’s got a good point — the Chronicle basically ran a Hearst press release as news on the front page.

Reminiscent of the days when the Chronicle and the old Examiner formed a joint operating agreement in the 1960s. The deal, which changed journalism and the newspaper business in San Francisco forever, was announced in a small, brief item that ended: “Neither publisher could be reached for comment.”

Yet another example of VVM ethics (or lack thereof)

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Did VVM hire these people to game Digg?

By Steven T. Jones

SF Weekly parent company Village Voice Media has been exposed for predatory financial practices, undermining good journalists and practicing unethical journalism, and secretly using a social networking tool in a sleazy way to promote its advertisers.
Now, a detailed investigation by thedeets.com shows how VVM has been gaming Digg.com (which is a tenant of ours in the Guardian Building) to inflate the number of page views on its websites, apparently hoping to fool advertisers and the public into thinking they have more readers than they really do.
VVM spokesperson Andy Van De Voorde refused to comment on the substance of the allegation, instead offering only taunts and insults and writing by e-mail, “Now here we go again with the obligatory request for comment, all under the guise of fair reporting.”
Digg spokesperson Beth Murphy told the Guardian, “We don’t really talk specifics with regards to individual Diggers, sites or media outlets in order to protect their privacy and ensure a level playing field. What I can tell you is that various sites can perform better on Digg based on social media tools and the breadth and diversity of their audience. For sites or individuals that attempt to game or spam Digg, as always, we’ve developed the back-end systems and algorithms to flag and detect gaming.”

PG&E: Blackout at Just For You restaurant

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BREAKING NEWS: PG&E electricity goes out at a restaurant just four blocks or so from the Potrero Hill power plant

By Bruce B. Brugmann

And so about 2 p.m. this afternoon (Thursday, 2/5/09), I walked in to the Just For You restaurant, just four blocks or so from the Potrero Hill power plant in the heart of Dogpatch. I wondered if PG&E had known I was coming in for my regular lunch of fried oysters.

For lights were out, the place was empty, and the proprietor, the normally jolly Arienne Landry, was sitting disconsolately in the corner with some friends and workers.

Arienne said that the electricity was off in the whole area and that PG&E had told someone who called that it would be back on at 3 p.m. “But they always say they can’t guarantee power,” she said, shaking her head at her shortened, expensive lunch hour. I asked if PG&E know I was coming. Arienne laughed.

I asked how much she was out in money. She said about $200 to $300. Arienne, who was reported in the Potrero View as a possible candidate for district supervisor, said she needed the money and would write to PG&E and ask for a reduction in her PG&E bill or other form of compensation. She said she would also copy the California Public Utilities Commission, the SF Board of Supervisors, and the Small Business Commission.
She said she would also ask the CPUC, the board, and the SBC to do a study of PG&E’s treatment of San Francisco restaurants and other small businesses on service, reliability, rates, and collection policies.

It looks to me as if she has a good and timely issue. PG&E is a notorious no or slow pay for damages to small business, but the company is quick and tough as hell on small businesses that are slow pay, which many are these days. We get lots of complaints at the Guardian about PG&E hardball policies on small business and on their customers.

Now more than ever, PG&E should be giving a break to small businesses and not shove them against the wall on compensation for blackouts and slow pay and other increasing small business concerns.

We’ll follow Arienne’s request for compensation for damages. And we urge other small business people and their customers/residents to email us their problems with PG&E service and rates. There’s no reason, except for PG&E resistance, that the CPUC and SF shouldn’t start monitoring how PG&E treats our local small businesses. More: they should provide ombudsperson help during these tough times.

Meanwhile, I must report that the power at Just For You did go back on a few minutes before 3 p.m. And I did get my usual lunch of fried oysters with lots of red cajun sauce. They were better than ever today. B3, who sees from my office window the fumes of the Potrero Hill plant, pumping poisons into the city every minute of every day, courtesy of PG&E and Hearst journalism

Why newspapers won’t die

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By Tim Redmond

But before I get into that:

Doesn’t the Chronicle’s new design look awful? I mean, it’s cluttered and backward-looking and I don’t think it’s going to save THAT newspaper from its financial problems. Why doesn’t the Chron just take local news seriously, cover San Francisco, and hire just one, just one progressive urban political columnist to balance the suburban Chuck Nevius?

Okay: But newspapers aren’t going to die. I try to explain this to people all the time. I tell students that journalism is going to be around forever, even if we stop killing trees to make paper and the internet morphs into a consensual hallucination or people screw sockets into their brains to learn things or whatever. There will still be communication, and some of it will still involve journalists.

I don’t always agree with Bill Keller, the editor of the NY Times, but in a recent column answering readers’ questions, he got this one just right:

First, there is a diminishing supply of quality journalism, and a growing demand. By quality journalism I mean the kind that involves experienced reporters going places, bearing witness, digging into records, developing sources, checking and double-checking, backed by editors who try to enforce high standards. I mean journalism that, however imperfect, labors hard to be trustworthy, to supply you with the information you need to be an engaged citizen. The supply of this kind of journalism is declining because it is hard, expensive, sometimes dangerous work. The traditional practitioners of this craft — mainly newspapers — have been downsizing or declaring bankruptcy. The wonderful florescence of communication ignited by the Internet contains countless voices riffing on the journalism of others but not so many that do serious reporting of their own. Hence the dwindling supply. The best evidence of the soaring demand is the phenomenal traffic to the Web sites that do dependable news reporting — nearly 20 million unique monthly visitors to the site you are currently reading, and that number excludes the burgeoning international audience. The law of supply and demand suggests that the market will find a way to make the demand pay for the supply.

And it doesn’t take that much money to create a news operation on the web. The giants in the industry (and some of the not-so-giants, like the SF Chronicle) may fall by the wayside, and we may see much more web-based local reporting from a larger number of smaller and more diffuse news outlets (already happening in SF) and that won’t be such a bad thing.

But newspapers, in the traditional sense of organizations that pay staffers to report and deliver news and charge people (in our case, by showing them ads) to access it … that’s not going anywhere.

Street fighters

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› steve@sfbg.com

StreetsBlog (www.streetsblog.org) isn’t your average blog, but rather a well-funded institution that helped promote and propel a major transformation that has taken place on New York City streets since the site was founded in 2006, sparking rapid and substantial improvements for bicyclists and pedestrians.

In the process, StreetsBlog — which is part of the Livable Streets Network, along with StreetFilms and the StreetsWiki, started by urban cyclist Mark Gordon, founder of the popular file-sharing site LimeWire — developed a loyal following among alternative transportation planners and advocates in cities across the United States.

"There was nothing like it," said Leah Shahum, executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. "They put out these inspiring images and really helped people envision better streets."

So when a group of about two dozen of these Bay Area transportation geeks made the trek up to Portland, Ore. last summer for the Towards Carfree Cities International Conference (see "Towards Carfree Cities: wrap-up," Guardian Politics blog), one of their secret goals was to try to lure StreetsBlog to San Francisco.

What began with a long, beer-soaked meeting at a Portland brewpub has turned into substantial new voice in the local media and transportation landscape since StreetsBlog San Francisco (www.sf.streetsblog.org) launched at the start of this year.

"All this really came together in Portland during the Carfree conference," said Aaron Naparstek, executive editor of the three StreetsBlogs (SF, NYC, and Los Angeles) and executive producer of the LivableStreets Network. "The No. 1 reason we decided to open up SF StreetsBlog is because so many people were asking us to do it, particularly from the bike activist community. Most important, we also had a guy with money asking us to do it — [San Francisco bicyclist] Jonathan Weiner … There’s a vibrant activist community that thinks we can be useful and there are people willing to fund the work."

It also dovetailed nicely with the organization’s push to influence the quadrennial federal transportation bill reauthorization that Congress will consider later this year, which environmentalists hope will shift money away from freeway projects. "There was a sense that now is the time to build a nationwide movement," Naparstek said. "The freeway lobby guys are very organized and embedded in all the state [departments of transportation] and it’s tough to counter that. We want to use the Internet to foment a national movement."

StreetsBlog SF has two full-time staffers, editor Bryan Goebel, a San Francisco-based journalist who worked for KCBS) and reporters Matthew Roth, part of the team that started StreetsBlog in New York. StreetsBlog also pays as a contributor longtime local author and activist Chris Carlsson, who was part of the SF crew in Portland.

"I think they have an opportunity to bring close attention to the texture of life on the streets, something print journalism doesn’t do very well," Carlsson said. "It’s about reinhabiting city life."

Shahum said she’s thrilled at the arrival of StreetsBlog, which she says will help local leaders envision a less car-dependent city: "We as advocates are not always so good at helping people visualize what something better looks like."

And that, says Naparstek, is his network’s main strength. "We’ve actually had a lot of success in New York moving these livable streets models forward and we have a lot of best practices to share," he said, noting their network of 175 bloggers in cities around the country and world.

With Mayor Gavin Newsom’s penchant for "best practices"; San Francisco’s experimentation with innovative ideas like market-based parking pricing, congestion fees, Muni reform, and creation of carfree ciclovias; and the imperatives of climate change and the end of the age of oil, activists say this is the ideal time and place the arrival of StreetsBlog.

"There is an interesting convergence of issues that has made it bigger than it might have been," Roth said.

"And in San Francisco, who’s covering these issue besides the Guardian? There is a big need for this," Goebel added. "From a journalists’ point of view, we need to call people on their inconsistencies and not just let leaders govern by press release, which Mayor Gavin Newsom has a tendency to do."

Vive l’amour

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

REVIEW Stephanie Young edited the anthology Bay Poetics (Faux Press, 432 pages, $29), which attempted to take a snapshot of the Bay Area’s poetry scene while acknowledging the failure built into such a task. Her second book of poetry, Picture Palace (in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni, 120 pages, $15), is not particularly concerned with choosing between various poetic modes and traditions. Picture Palace draws as heavily on pop culture as it does on theory to find its form and to subsequently understand form’s impact on content. In the process, Young escapes the lyric poetry/language poetry binary. (Or, to use a less geography-bound but equally contemporary axis, the flarf/conceptual poetry binary.)

As its title suggests, Picture Palace is heavily invested in movies. Young makes and unmakes icons as well as the minutiae of daily life. On the theoretical tip, she applies Gaston Bachelard’s thought in books like 1994’s Poetics of Space and 1987’s The Psychoanalysis of Fire to the act of walking around Lake Merritt. In terms of ideas and visual imagination, Picture Palace is best described as dense. Images and their aftereffects are at play, but the reader has to dig for the gratifying thrill of recognition; even when a pop-culture reference is spotted, it has a strange murky glimmer. Young is both recovering a shared experience and implanting a new one when she writes lines like "Tim Robbins with Tupac<0x2009>/ the one where they stabbed each other<0x2009>/ for treatment," in "Betty Page We Love You Get Up."

There are other funny moments (the most intense flashes of Sylvia Plath’s "Lady Lazarus" are condensed into the formula "Rising, ash, eat, air, etc."), yet the real thrill of Picture Palace comes from the way it jumps between different levels of knowledge, in the kind of epistemological recreation that brings us back to Bachelard. Young’s ability to portray, in tandem, the way her speakers routinely perceive the world and the way they are able to break with those perceptions, and the ways of knowing the world that those perceptions embody, reminds me of the libretti of Robert Ashley’s operas more than it does the work of other contemporary poets. Much like the titular protagonist of Ashley’s Now Eleanor’s Idea (2007), her poetry is haunted by an "end of the world feeling," but where that feeling prodded Now Eleanor to pursue investigative journalism focusing on New Mexico’s lowrider culture, the same feeling pushes Young’s speakers to ponder and deform images projected onto, or from, screens: "There was a superimposed face on my face and I gradually came to see my own belief that it could never change. In this way my face functioned as an image on film."

The overall effect — and this seems like an inaccurate phrase, given how much Young’s poetics depends on micro-effects, small calibrations, and reversals of thought — is similar to Lynne Tillman’s 2006 novel American Genius. By this I mean that both writers’ driving concern is finding new forms to convey new experiences; they each establish a voice that, in its neurotic precision, contains multitudes.

Nat Hentoff’s last column in the Village Voice

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Nat Hentoff, a graduate with honors from the George Seldes/I.F. Stone School of Journalism and a great journalist on his own, wrote his last column for the Village Voice on Tuesday, Jan. 6.

The Village Voice newspaper chain laid off Hentoff, 83, on Dec. 30 of last year, signalling that the New Times owners from Phoenix, Arizona, had officially and formally ruined the legendary alternative paper.

Read Hentoff’s last column and see what the Voice since 1958 had as a writer, talent, jazz critic, First Amendment guru, and distinguished civil libertarian with a civil sense of rage and what they will have no more. And read Louis Menard’s Jan. 5 piece in the New Yorker that told how the Voice was once “one of the most successful enterprises in the history of American journalism.” Alas. Alas.

Click here to read, Nat Hentoff’s Last Column: The 50-Year Veteran Says Goodbye

Click here to read the Guardian’s politics blog, How New Times ruined the LA Weekly.

Click here to read Stephanie Clifford’s December 30th article in the New York Times, Village Voice Lays Off Nat Hentoff and 2 Others.

Reinventing journalism

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› news@sfbg.com

Journalism, the critics say, is dying. The model of news reporting that has dominated the United States for most of the past century — big, well-funded outfits paying reporters and editors to choose and produce what the public reads or views — is crumbling. The main culprits are media consolidation and corporate cutbacks, but the downward spiral is also being fed by declining readership, competition from the Internet, investor expectations, demographic shifts, self-inflicted wounds, and myriad other factors.

This years-long trend is hardly even news anymore, but there were some troubling developments in 2008. Some of the problems facing newspapers and broadcast outlets are the result of a bad economy, but everyone agrees the issues run deeper.

At the same time, however, countervailing forces are gathering momentum, many of them based in California and some in the Bay Area. People who believe in the indispensable role that reporters and editors play in this society are developing news models, ideas for reinventing journalism that could blossom in 2009.

From the Huffington Post and its 8 million monthly visitors to journalism experiments such as Spot.us and the San Francisco Public Press being hatched right here in San Francisco, the media landscape is shifting. As traditional newspapers contract and wrestle with relevance in the online age, Internet-based news organizations are filling the void and seeking to change the rules along the way.

Nowhere was this new reality more on display than last summer at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, where Bay Area new media powerhouses that included MoveOn.org, the Daily Kos, and Digg.com created the Big Tent, which played host to everyone from small-time bloggers to the most powerful politicians and big time political thinkers.

Among them was Arianna Huffington, the HuffPo founder who has become a leading voice for media reform and reinvention. The vision for journalism she espoused from the stage is a familiar one to Guardian readers but apostasy to believers in journalistic objectivity: writing from a progressive perspective to hold the powerful accountable to the public.

“Our highest responsibility is to the truth,” Huffington told us in a recent interview. “The truth is not about splitting the difference between one side and the other. Sometimes one side is speaking the truth … The central mission of journalism is the search for the truth.”

But the HuffPo has come under some criticism for not paying its legions of bloggers and for occasionally lifting content from media outlets that do pay their people. Searching for truth may be the central mission of journalism, but news organizations still have to find ways to fairly compensate the people who do so. Citizen journalism and blogging may be wonderful additions to the landscape, but in the end, democracy require reporters. You can’t properly cover City Hall or monitor the White House unless it’s a full-time job. And that seems to be the big challenge in this era of overextended resources.

 

TOO MANY MERGERS

The mainstream media landscape is bleak. Nearly every major newspaper in the country laid off significant numbers of reporters in the past year. The Tribune Company, which owns the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times, among other properties, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in December, and it’s entirely possible that several other big media companies will follow the same path in 2009.

It’s not that these papers aren’t making money — the LA Times, for example, remains profitable. But in the past decade, waves of mergers and consolidations led the giant conglomerates that own many US newspapers to take on huge debt. And private investors are demanding returns that may have been possible in the boom years of a decade ago but are only possible today if costs are cut so deeply that the basic journalistic mission of the nation’s great newspapers is in danger.

The alternative press isn’t exempt. The past decade has seen a wave of increased consolidation in the weekly industry, and at least one chain is now in serious financial trouble. Creative Loafing, which has its flagship paper in the big and growing Atlanta market, filed for bankruptcy this year. The company borrowed millions to buy Chicago Reader and Washington City Paper. Although all three papers were making money, when advertising slowed down, debt payments overwhelmed revenue.

Westword, a paper owned by Village Voice Media, a heavily leveraged chain, reported Dec. 18 on rumors that its parent company was facing financial problems. The conclusion of media critic Michael Roberts: the chain is doing fine. (Full disclosure: The Guardian won a lawsuit against VVM this year; the $18 million verdict is on appeal.)

So the scene is wide open for new approaches.

Among the San Franciscans who have taken a lead role in creating a new model for print journalism is Michael Stoll, the former San Francisco Examiner city editor who for the last few years has been spearheading creation of Public Press (www.public-press.org), which aims to create a non-commercial daily newspaper supported by readers and foundation grants.

The project (which Steven T. Jones has been involved with supporting) has a working business plan, began offering limited content during the last election, and recently received a grant from the San Francisco Foundation. Stoll said the time has come for a new newspaper model.

“It seems like the existing commercial models of journalism were always problematic, but their faults only became apparent when the economy started to fail. And we’re now faced with an abandonment of the core principles that media companies said they would never stray from,” Stoll said, listing basic government and corporate accountability among those core principles.

“The daily, routine coverage of public policy is now performed very selectively, even as the optional, more entertaining coverage is beefed up. There comes a point when the public’s patience with those priorities wears very thin and it increasingly demands straight talk,” Stoll said.

 

SHOW ME THE MONEY

The problem is how to fund it. News Web sites like ProPublica.org and journalism collectives such as the Center for Investigative Reporting have relied on large foundation grants to fund investigative and other public interest journalism. That’s fine for some things — but foundations often have their own political agendas, and the influence of foundation agendas on grant recipients can be pernicious (see “Pulling strings,” 10/8/1997). Foundation funding isn’t reliable, and a news outlet that became critical of the pet causes of a major funder could quickly find its income cut off.

Another model is being developed by Spot.Us (with the help of a two-year, $340,000 grant from the Knight Foundation).

Spot.us founder David Cohn wrote for Wired and the Columbia Journalism Review before going on to work as both a freelance journalist and technical consultant to news organizations. That unique combination, during a time of industry decline, got him thinking about how to fund good, public interest journalism.

Cohn developed the idea of creating a Web site where writers could pitch news stories and solicit funding for them directly from the public, a concept that drew from bloggers such as Christopher Allbritton and his Back-to-Iraq blog, as well as innovative charity sites such as DonorsChoose.org.

Stories published by Spot.us are then licensed under the Creative Commons, allowing anyone to use them for free and spread the work. News organizations can also buy the rights to an article by repaying Spot.us, or they can get the site to help fund their freelancers by paying for half up front and letting donors cover the rest.

“Everyone can benefit: the news organizations, the writers, and the public. But the market needs to be rethought,” Cohn told us, noting that the success of his venture will be up to the users. “It depends on whether people will see journalism as a public good and want to fund good stories.”

Media outlets that aim to have a full-time news-gathering staff need to tap into more stable funding sources — or they have to start slow and hope their new ideas catch on.

“With the extremely limited funding we’re starting out with, we’re planning to start a hybrid freelancer/volunteer news operation, and that’s not terribly sustainable in the long run,” Stoll said. “But we hope to increase our financial wherewithal on pace with increasing our news operations.”

Although finding resources for his new model is a difficult task in the current fiscal climate, the need becomes stronger all the time. “When talk centers on how long the commercial press will be able to operate in our community, it’s never too soon to talk about long-range alternatives,” Stoll said.

Stoll left the Examiner in November 2002 after clashing with the owners, the Fang family, about how to cover the city. After that, Stoll joined the media watchdog group Grade the News and taught journalism at San Jose State University, where he still works.

“The readers probably guessed that public interest coverage was not the Examiner‘s top priority, and they voted with their quarters not to support the paper long enough to see it survive in that incarnation,” Stoll said, referring to how the Examiner was sold to Denver billionaire Philip Anschutz after the Fang’s court-ordered subsidy ended. “And I see the same thing happening with the Chronicle.”

 

WHO GETS PAID?

Still, there are some new journalism experiments that have shown they can be moneymakers, most notably HuffPo, which has translated its enormous popularity into a substantial revenue stream from its online ads, a dynamic it has parlayed into increasing venture capital funding to expand its operations.

But HuffPo is still struggling to find a business model that allows it to expand its original reporting and pay journalists a living wage, a problem highlighted recently by a controversy about HuffPo stealing content without permission.

In an interview with the Guardian, Huffington admitted that HuffPo did inadvertently steal content from newspapers including Chicago Reader, which highlighted the issue on its blog, triggering a lively online discussion.

“With regards to the Chicago Reader, that was completely our editor’s fault, and it completely violated our guidelines, so I sent a letter to them wholeheartedly apologizing,” she told us.

Huffington said it’s important to honestly admit mistakes and use integrity to win the public trust. “We want to be very transparent about what we’re doing,” she said.

As for the larger issue of not paying for content, she makes a distinction between journalism and blogging, citing the mantra, “Facts are sacred, opinion is free.”

That means HuffPo bloggers benefit from a large audience for their work and from a team of moderators who filter out the flames and personal attacks that constitute so much of the online commenting. But they don’t get paid.

“We pay our reporters, we pay our editors, we pay anyone who works to report the news. But we don’t pay anyone who blogs their opinions,” she said.

In this media transition period, original reporting is being done on blogs (such as the politics blog at sfbg.com), that line isn’t so clear. But it does single out the important role that professional, full-time journalists play in the media landscape.

She said HuffPo now has six editors and writers on the payroll in Washington, DC, on top of the 50 employees (which includes technical, administrative, and advertising staff) in New York. And the outfit is in the process of launching an investigative reporting fund and story funding service, with models similar to Spot.us and Propublica.org. As Huffington said, “We’re all basically trying to reinvent journalism.”

But HuffPo’s model of journalism isn’t really that radical. The notion that reporters are allowed to have opinions, that news outlets can take on causes, push issues and represent the public interest, has been a part of the nation’s media landscape since before the American Revolution. The technology that allows almost anyone to publish a blog, and allows the public to comment on and challenge what’s written, is only a modern version of a long tradition. Small printing presses and small publishers with influential pamphlets date back to before Thomas Paine helped spark the revolution with Common Sense. And before the news media got huge, reporters and editors were part of the communities they covered and heard from their readers every day.

In many ways, the media pioneers these days are looking at reestablishing the best roots of the American press. The only thing missing at this point is the business model that, in 2009, works well enough to pay for it.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I was going to do New Year’s resolutions this week. I got started: turn the cell phone volume down when the kids are in the car and Aaron Peskin is on the line. ("That man sure does like to use the f-word when he talks about PG&E," my nine-year old noted this fall.) Stop shouting "Yo, asshole!" when cars come too close to my bicycle. (I know I can be way more creative and foul-mouthed than that.) Return Gavin Newsom’s phone calls. (Hey, the poor guy must be lonely.)

But really, it’s not all about me.

So instead, in honor of the end of the Bush Years and in the hope of a 2009 we can all be proud of, here are some things I would like to see other people do:

I would like to see the California Legislature and US Congress raise the gas tax enough to bring the price to about $3 a gallon, making sure SUVs remain unattractive forever.

I would like to see the new progressives on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors make open government a real priority; I would like to stop having to fight to get even routine information out of City Hall. I would like everyone in public office to read Bob Herbert’s column in Dec. 27’s The New York Times and understand that one reason FDR was successful with the New Deal was that he understood the importance of restoring faith in government; transparency, accountability, and oversight were a central part of the package.

I would like Anchor Steam to start making a light beer.

I would like someone to get Wi-fi installed at City Hall.

I would like Gavin Newsom to stop hiding behind Nathan Ballard.

I would like the right lane of the stretch of I-80 near Lake Tahoe repaved so those of us with small cars don’t get bounced up and down like ping pong balls.

I would like the federal drinking age lowered to 18.

I would like everyone to stop talking about the death of newspapers and stop pretending that blogs and citizen journalism can ever replace full-time trained reporters.

I would like the San Francisco police to stop turning immigrants over to the feds.

I would like the executive editor of Village Voice Media to shave his head, move to Tibet, become a monk, and accept the karmic implications of the way he’s lived his life.

I would like the state to tax the millionaires instead of the college students.

I would like some really rich person to die and leave $20 million for a public power campaign so that for once we could match Pacific Gas and Electric Co.’s money and have a fair fight.

I would like Barack Obama to appoint Arnold Schwarzenegger ambassador to some meaningless country so we can have a new governor.

I would like Newsom to liquidate his personal fortune and use the money to pay rent and grocery bills for the front-line city workers he’s laying off.

I would like the Catholic archbishop of San Francisco to quit the gay-hating.

I would like all my fellow dog owners to clean up the poo on the sidewalk.

I would like to be able to ride high-speed rail to Los Angeles before I start collecting Social Security. Happy New Year.

HuffPo: The future of journalism, or its death?

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By Steven T. Jones

I’ve always had mixed feelings about the Huffington Post, and not just because of media-savvy founder Arianna Huffington’s convenient conversion from neocon darling to progressive populist. No, for me, as a struggling newspaper journalist of 17 years (and with the debt to prove it), I’m bothered by a business model that relies on free content. Call me old-fashioned, but I believe writers — even that subspecies known as bloggers — should be paid for their work. More media, great; more exploitation of media professionals, not so great.
But of even greater concern is that HuffPo has apparently been outright stealing content from other outlets that do pay their writers, as a post and discussion over at the Chicago Reader’s blog details. I’ve heard these stories for quite awhile and I know some of the victims, so it doesn’t seem like this is an isolated instance.
At a time when my profession has been decimated by corporate layoffs and challenged by evolving expectations of readers, HuffPo often get held up as a model for the future. In fact, they reportedly have their sights set on the San Francisco media market, flush with venture capital cash. Unless they can figure out a way to pay reporters for working a beat, HuffPo could be a huge contributor to journalism’s demise rather than its savior.

Wow wow wow wow

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› a&eletters@sfbg.com

Kevin Killian is an inveterate and unapologetic collaborator: even when writing solo, there’s always another presence. Whether he ventriloquizes through this other, or assimilates or deconstructs it is the reader’s call, and it’s a difficult one to make. The poems in Killian’s most recent book of poetry, Action Kylie (In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni, 128 pages, $15) are places where T.S. Eliot’s cats LOL, Antonio Banderas anagrams to "no brains on a date," and Kylie Minogue’s derivativeness is more compelling than genius. In the process, Killian sinks probes into public-celebrity exchanges that increasingly substitute for news. On the eve of the book’s upcoming release party, I spoke with him about Kylie, Amazon reviews, and Ted Berrigan’s Pepsi addiction.

SFBG When I first saw you in person, I noticed that you were drinking Diet Pepsi. Pepsi is also mentioned in the book, Kylie having been a Pepsi spokesperson. And there’s a video from a band called Ssion, a cover of the Young Marble Giants song "Credit in the Straight World," that starts with the singer drinking from a Pepsi can. So I’ve kind of had Pepsi on the brain. Didn’t Kylie do a Pepsi ad and get shit for it?

Kevin Killian Yeah, at a low point in her career she did a terrifying ad for Pepsi in Australia. In it, she’s on TV in a sexy video and a young boy, like 11 or 12, is watching. He opens a Pepsi, and she’s there in his bedroom, sitting on his lap, and is really tastelessly grinding into him. That video was too raw to be shown very widely. It wasn’t classy — what can I say?

SFBG Since the cola wars are over, I was wondering if there was some sort of cachet to Pepsi.

KK It was Ted Berrigan’s favorite drink. I didn’t know him, but I saw him a few times, and he guzzled it down. He would get a little antsy if he didn’t see a quart of it somewhere nearby.

SFBG There seems to be a kind of split between Action Kylie‘s first three sections, which are explicitly focused on Kylie as a subject, and the last four, where her relationship to the writing is less obvious.

KK The book was written roughly chronologically, and I guess my sense of her was so deep — it’s part of my identity now — that she’s in it equally all the way through. I’m thinking of incidents, circumstances, apparitions of her that maybe aren’t visible to you in those later poems.

SFBG The Action Kylie essay "Kylie Evidence" and the huge number of Amazon reviews you’ve authored collapse a lot of different registers. They’re not exactly straight criticism, or uncomplicatedly ironic. There’s a strange cacophony in the way they’re constructed, going from Wikipedia-style omniscience to something intensely personal. When you identify with Kylie as a "second- or third-rate talent," it’s hard not to feel like you’re giving yourself short shrift, because that kind of writing does something that’s pretty rare to both "creative" writing and journalism or criticism.

KK It wasn’t really a way of fishing for reinforcement, but I realize that’s what it does. I had spent years and years writing about Jack Spicer [resulting in the 1998 biography Poet, Be Like God] and seeing his status change from a kind of cult figure into [an element of] the canon. When I started writing [2001’s] Argento Series, few knew [Dario] Argento; now everybody does. There’s something about the situation of the cult figure that’s always exasperated me. I don’t like it, for some reason. I couldn’t figure out why.

When I started working on Kylie Minogue, I was drawn to her because she was a figure who seemed to me, at this one moment in 1998 or 1999, to have absolutely no talent. You know, she had something, but she had no talent, at all, period. And it’s the same old story: she is fabulous, it just took me a while to understand how. But it was a great period to be a fan. I think my essay was written in that tone.

SFBG Your Amazon reviews could be a conceptual project. Some of the lines are really killer, such as your description of Joe Jonas’ eyebrows being "like crow feathers — feathers from a 600-pound crow."

KK Well, when you do something every day … I had written about a thousand [reviews] before I realized that was an enormous number. I’d write three or four a day, and sometimes they’d be in themes: I’d pick up a dictionary and see a word — "midnight" is one I remember. I’d realize I knew a lot about books with "midnight" in the title — or movies, or records — so I would just do 40 of them, all about midnight. Maybe here or there there’d be something I actually didn’t read.

SFBG I wanted to ask about the Kylie lyrics that preface your book, "These are the dreams of an impossible princess."

KK It comes from an actual LP called Impossible Princess (Deconstruction, 1998). She took the name from Billy Childish, who had a book of poetry called Dreams of an Impossible Princess.

I’m having a book out next summer from City Lights, and it’s called Impossible Princess. It’s impossible for me to be a princess because I’m a man, beyond everything else, and there’s that kind of futility, that ambition to be something other than what you are, that drove her, and that drove me, I guess. Every year you’re alive, you’ll see some possibilities diminishing behind you, things you’ll never be. The good thing is, new windows open up, things you never thought you’d want. I never thought I’d write about Kylie Minogue, and what’s worse is that I can’t stop writing about her, either.

THE NEW READING SERIES AT 21 GRAND: KEVIN KILLIAN AND STEPHANIE YOUNG

Sun/14, 6:30 p.m., $5

21 Grand

415 25th St., Oakl.

(510) 444-7263

www.newyipes.blogspot.com

Extra! Extra! Heterosexuality in peril!

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Dear Readers:

I’m kind of pretty

and pretty damned smart

I like romantic things like music and art

and as you know I have a gigantic heart

so why … don’t I have a boyfriend?

— Kate Monster, "Sucks to be me" from Avenue Q

Sucks to be Kate Monster, and it sucks just as much to be my many friends of similar description — not monsters but smart, pretty, funny, adventurous, and moderately level-headed young women of great heart, who are caught in an endless cycle of dating to no (desirable) purpose and no end in sight, at least out here on the coasts. One friend actually moved to the Midwest to get away from the evil scene and was promptly rewarded with an actual boyfriend, the type who proudly introduces you as his girlfriend and can discuss a future together without smirking. I’ve developed a kind of semi-vicarious hate-on for the coastal guys — what gives them the right to treat my friends like instantly replaceable consumer objects of dubious value? — so I’ve been reading with interest some of the recent glut of articles and books on the state of young manhood, First World Problem version.

Most of these come down to "men are just big boys/no they aren’t," the argument currently raging, or at least smoldering, pretty much anywhere you find people discussing the current social climate and where we seem to be heading, love-and-marriagewise.

On the "no wonder you can’t find a boyfriend" side, you find innumerable lifestyle articles, most notably and recently Gary Cross’s Men To Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity, in which the historian blames the immaturity he sees in modern Western males on three decade’s worth of cultural shift, starting with a rejection of the old, unquestionably masculine and often admirable but also frequently rigid and authoritarian paternalism of the "Greatest Generation," which left men wandering, lost and fatherless, for lack of a better role-model to replace the castoff, too-dadly Dad. This is nothing startling — we’ve heard it before — but he does present a decent argument and does so without too much blame, some hope for the future of heterosexuality, and none of the (admittedly rather entertaining) snottiness of our next example, the recent articles by Kay S. Hymowitz in City Journal.

City Journal is the organ of conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute, but so what? It has lively cultural commentary and even if you don’t want to be a conservative yourself, it isn’t (I think) contagious, so why shouldn’t readers of leftish news weeklies read out of their comfort zones occasionally? And its authors, apparently, aren’t afraid to say they were wrong, which is always cheering. The first of the two articles, "Child-man in the Promised Land" was another of the "men suck" pieces. The man-child (whom the writer contrasts with the man, who has or wants a wife and kids and actually seeks out responsibilities and then discharges them rather than avoiding ever acquiring any) has tastes both formed and reflected by Maxim and [adult swim]. He likes video games and junk food and sex but not women, really, and he doesn’t call when he says he will because he never intended to — why should he when there’s always another girl who, not having met him yet, expects even less from him than you do?

That was the first article. The current piece has Hymowitz exploring the (really rather startling) not-so-underground Man Web and finding that a lot of these guys are treating women like trash because the women (they feel) are trashing them right back. Nobody’s acting very mature here, so she could just as well have titled her piece (actually called "Love in the Time of Darwinism") "She Started It!"

Women, say the young men, want it all and switch the rules on you without warning. They want equality except when they don’t, and then you’re in trouble for not bringing roses. Plus, they’re attracted to jerks, they sneer at nice guys, and then they blame you for acting like a prick.

This state of affairs, the shifting rules and roles, may have brought us to this point, writes Hymowitz (and others), where the gulf between male and female mores and modes of expression is wider than it has been since before World War I, and a certain amount of aggression, contempt, and rude gamesmanship (see both The Rules and Rules of the Game ) is both expected and to some extent accepted. I leave it to Hymowitz to troll the gamier recesses of the Web for sites like AlphaSeduction and Eternal Bachelor ("Give modern women the husband they deserve. None."), but you shouldn’t be too surprised to hear that this stuff is out there.

Are these dispatches from the new war correspondents accurate? Somewhat. As much as can be expected from lifestyle journalism, anyway, which by definition requires a phenomenon, the more disturbing the better (would you read weekly articles in The New York Times titled "All Well in Pleasantville?"). Is this state of affairs universal? Certainly not. Is it inevitable? I think not. What’s that everyone’s been saying about hope and change?

Love,

Andrea

Got a salacious subject you want Andrea to discuss? Ask her a question!

Sensational trans-bashing at SF Weekly

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OPINION SF Weekly published an article Nov. 26 with the headline "Border Crossers." The subhead explained the thesis: "Long rap sheet? No problem. Transgender Latina hookers in SF are successfully fighting deportation by asking for asylum."

The title successfully encapsulates the Jerry Springer-like journalism masquerading as a feature article in an alternative weekly in San Francisco. While I would normally just dismiss this as another example of how SF Weekly is turning into the National Enquirer, the article is important in that it reveals the intense discrimination transgender immigrant women who do sex work face in San Francisco — and unfortunately, quite possibly jeopardizes an incredibly essential legal protection.

The writer, Lauren Smiley, apparently believes she has unearthed a shocking secret: that transgender women may receive asylum in the United States based on intense discrimination in their home countries. So trans immigrants can avoid deportation even when they have been arrested for prostitution and have rap sheets.

As Smiley notes, immigration judges and asylum officers have the discretion to grant asylum when a transgender woman presents a showing of a well-founded fear of persecution based on gender identity. Even Smiley admits that transgender women face violence and intense discrimination in their home countries; however, what Smiley finds the most egregious is that some small subset of the asylum-seeking women have been prosecuted for sex work.

What Smiley single-mindedly ignores is the astonishing statistics that show an unemployment rate of more than 50 percent for transgender women of color, and perhaps even higher statistics for undocumented women in San Francisco. Instead of pointing to the well-documented obstacles transgender women face in employment, Smiley interviews one transgender woman who was able to get a job as evidence that transgender women really do not have to be "hookers" to survive. (Yes, she really did use the word "hookers".)

Without any context or analysis, Smiley quoted Dan Stein, president of the "Federation for American Immigration Reform" (FAIR) as a credible critic of the practice of granting asylum to immigrant transgender women. The Southern Poverty Law Center recently officially designated FAIR as a hate group, but nowhere in her article does Smiley mention that the organization is considered one of the least trustworthy, if not laughable, sources for information on immigration.

What concerns me most is not the cheapness of the shot, but rather that — like so much sensationalist journalism — a piece like this gives fuel to right-wing activists like FAIR. Even Smiley notes that the Republican Party has included in its platform an end to the practice that has literally saved many lives.

What is even more astounding is that last year, Smiley received an award from the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation for an article about how doctors were using a new treatment for transgender children so that they wouldn’t develop into their biological sex until after puberty — which would give those kids the choice to transition later.

Yet in the Nov. 26 piece, when describing the landmark case of Geovanni Hernandez-Montiel, who was the first to get asylum based on gender identity, this award-winning writer frequently refers to Giovanni using the male pronoun "he." While I would not expect most journalists to give a nuanced perspective on Giovanni’s gender identity, I do expect a journalist who has received an award from an LGBT media watchdog group to allow for a more fluid understanding of Giovanni’s gender. I called Smiley and she acknowledged that she should have better described FAIR. When I asked her about the other problems, she simply said I should write a letter to SF Weekly.

In San Francisco, can’t we expect and demand better?

Robert Haaland is co-chair of SF Pride at Work, a LGBT labor organization. Alexandra Byerly is program coordinator, EL-LA Program Para Trans-Latinas. Nikki Calma is a member of the Commission of the Status of Women. Cecilia Chung is chair of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission

Meatballs

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› le_chicken_farmer@yahoo.com

CHEAP EATS Earl Butter made the sauce and I put meatballs in it. You could smell this on the stairs. Between the first and second floors it was something, and between the second and third it was something else. The meatballs had beef and pork and cheese, garlic, parsley, an egg, some old bread crumbs … basically, whatever I could find in Earl Butter’s kitchen. I browned them in bacon fat; then, while they were bobbing in the saucy gurgle, I washed the soccer off of me in Earl Butter’s shower.

Five zip we’d lost. I tossed a salad, boiled spaghetti, Wayway brought the bread, and it was Sunday afternoon all over again. My hair air dries. I do not use hair dryers.

I use a towel.

The occasion: a visit from our own private Idahoan, Johnny "Jack" Blogger, né Johnny "Jack" Journalism, né Johnny "Jack" Poetry, the master of doing what he does, and being what he does, and words and I guess horses.

There were eight people total gathered around a couple of makeshift tables, spinning mismatched forks and raising glasses and bottles and eyebrows to bad jokes, good food, and questionable politics. We laughed until it hurt, ate until it hurt, and then one of us had to go give a massage, another was late for load-in and sound check, a couple needed a nap, and dirty dishes beckoned.

Somehow Johnny "Jack," our guest of honor, wound up doing most of them. I helped. When I go to Idaho, Johnny "Jack" and his wife, Mrs. "Jack," always have a big pot of something or other waiting for me. Mac and cheese. Red beans and rice. It’s a long drive.

When he showed up here, a couple nights before spaghetti, I had jambalaya, which is my new favorite thing to make. And eat. I am eating the leftovers as we speak, and I gotta say: yum. Every time I make jambalaya I have to call Crawdad de la Cooter five times to ask about this or that or rice, and I suppose that’s partly what I love about jambalaya. That tech support comes with it.

You can toast the rice first, or not, or sauté it a little with the "holy trinity" of onions, celery, peppers, and garlic, and, oh, you can imagine how a chicken farmer loves four-thing trinities!

But this time Crawdad called me. "What are you cooking?" she asked.

"Jambalaya," I said. "Here. Talk to John." And I handed him the phone. My two favorite laughs, his and hers, but I could only hear one of them and wished I had a speaker phone.

At the show that night three of our spaghetti friends were playing in two different bands. Everyone was there and I talked to a lot of people I hadn’t seen in some time and lost my voice. That’s just one reason why this column isn’t exactly saying anything.

On the way back to the woods we stopped at a late-night Chinese joint for something to eat. Up high near the ceiling in a corner was a medium-size fish tank with medium-size fishes swimming back and forth, winding around like letters, trying real hard to spell P-O-R-K and B-E-E-F and even C-H-I-C-K-E-N, and really only looking like fish in a fish tank. And tasty ones at that. Which reminded me of this article even before I started to write it.

Johnny "Jack" Blogger has been blogging and talking a lot about nostalgia. This ain’t that. My own happy happy sizzly sadness is set some time in the future. I don’t want to be fried, or cooked in a clay pot either, but there is something delicious in my medium-size heart, flop and roll and apropos of none of the above. I twist, I turn, I sink and spin, and can’t even begin to spell it.

My new favorite restaurant is Lee Hou, which claims to be "the very first Chinese restaurant on Clement." So … OK, so they’ve had a long time to perfect their salt and pepper chicken wings. We also got lamb sticks, because that seemed like good road food, but the wings were 10 times better and soared us, and we got crumbs and bones all over Johnny "Jack"<0x2009>‘s car, not mine. Damn it! Some things we didn’t eat: snails, duck tongue, and goose intestines. Oh, and fish. *

LEE HOU

Sun.–Thurs., 8 a.m.–1 a.m.; Fri.–Sat., 8 a.m.–2 a.m.

332 Clement, SF

(415) 668-8070

Beer and wine

MC/V

SPJ honors ‘The Vanishing Journalist’

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

(Scroll down for the full SPJ awards program, press release on the winners, and Tom Honig on “The Vanishing Journalist”)

The Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists held an inspired and inspiring Excellence in Journalism awards program last Thursday night at the Yank Sing restaurant in San Francisco.

The room was full of reporters and editors who have been laid off or merged out, and many others fearful of being laid off or merged out. This point was made eloquently by Bruce Newman, who won the criticism award for his movie reviews in the San Jose Mercury News, and announced in his acceptance remarks that his position of movie critic had been eliminated five weeks ago.

Yet, despite the problems of the media and the economy, the award winners and their work this year were extraordinarily worthy. The program was excellent. The food was good. And Ricardo Sandoval, the incoming SPJ president, and Linda Jue, the outgoing SPJ president, and many of the award accepters made the crucial point: that the worse the news is, the more SPJ and good journalism are needed.

And so SPJ chose this year to give its premier award, the Journalist of the Year award, to “The Vanishing Journalist.” And they chose Tom Honig, the distinguished former editor of the Santa Cruz Sentinel, to accept the award. Honig was the classic California community journalist:he started on the old Palo Alto Times in sports, then to the Sentinel in l972, to the cops and courts beat to reporter for eight years, to assistant city editor and then to city editor, copy desk chief, managing editor in l99l, and then editor in l992.

He left the Sentinel on the last day of November, 2007. His exit was illustrative: His Singleton/Media News publisher had told him he would have to lay off at least three more editorial staffers from the newsroom, after previous cuts had reduced the newsroom from a high of 43 in 2005 to 30 last year. The Sentinel’s accountant pointedly told Honig that if he left, that would save three positions. So Honig made the ultimate sacrifice and laid himself off. (He is now in a new career, as an account executive in Armanasco Public Relations in Monterey.)

“The people that run newspapers today–describe them how you will–might understand finance and they understand budgets,” Honig said. “They do, after all, understand that news organizations are in trouble. What they don’t understand is that the indiscriminate budget cuts are only hastening their own demise. You know what? You need good reporters and editors. You just do…

“It’s us– the journalists–who carry with us the knowledge and integrity that money simply cannot buy. We carry on because we know the power of questioning authority, questioning those even that we agree with –and giving those we disagree with a fair airing of their views. The talking heads on television and radio can’t do that.”

Here are Honig’s complete remarks:

by Tom Honig

I’m accepting this award on behalf of the hundreds – thousands – of veteran reporters, photographers and editors that have helped and inspired me over the years. We’re honoring the vanishing journalist tonight, and I do want to say a few words on his and her behalf.

I’d have to say that the most noteworthy thing about my career is how unnoteworthy it really has been. Some reporters go to war zones. Others call the White House their beat. But for most of us – it’s the school board. The library board. The fire that leaves a family homeless. We are the people who get it done, day in and day out – giving people the opportunity to understand their own community.

I’m truly honored that I would be asked to accept this award on behalf of all those who have come and gone before me. I once looked at my decision to spend my career in a small town – Santa Cruz, California – as something to be slightly embarrassed about. I now think of it only with pride.

I think of the writing advice I got from editors older than I who taught me strategies to get out of my own way and let the story tell itself.

When you work at a community paper, you don’t need focus groups and readership studies. People talk to you in the super market. Actually, they bitch at you in the super market. Or at the gym. Or when you’re out grabbing a sandwich at the deli. You do an investigation into misspent funds in a small town and you get a good story, but you also get a tearful phone call from a city manager who’ a really nice guy but who knows he fouled up. You do the story anyway, but you feel bad and later you keep running into him and you hope he’s doing OK.

But you do your job, and some days you don’t think much about it. But when it’s all over, you take some time, look back and realize that you’ve been part of something very special. You did good journalism. You did what the best investigative journalism does – reveal the truth to those who may or may not want to hear it.

The public doesn’t often understand the value of their local newspaper – even as they rely upon what’s there. I’m partial to local newspapers. The kind of journalism we achieved over the years in Santa Cruz I would stack up against any of the big boys. And being right there as part of the community … we knew about credibility long before the think tanks started doing their studies.

The people that run newspapers today – describe them how you will — might understand finance and they understand budgets. They do, after all, understand that news organizations are in financial trouble. What they don’t understand is that the indiscriminate budget cuts are only hastening their own demise. You know what? You need good reporters and editors. You just do.

Many of you are embarking on new ventures, on new forms of digital and online journalism as traditional outlets start to disappear. Some of you are launching these ventures on your own. We have Knight News Challenges and we have startups and we have incredible energy from those just embarking on their careers. That’s all to the good. It’s us – the journalists – who carry with us the knowledge and the integrity that money simply cannot buy. We carry on because we know the power of questioning authority, questioning those even that we agree with – and giving those with whom we disagree a fair airing of their views. The talking heads on television and radio don’t and can’t do that.

It’s the story – in whatever form it takes – that’s king. It’s the truth that we seek. As we move forward, we won’t have the old support system around us, the older, wiser editors who have seen ’em come and seen ’em go. We won’t have the structure that has carried us forward all these years. It’s breaking down, and it’s not our fault.

I couldn’t be more encouraged by the energy and the values of young journalists. But I’m also encouraged by others – those, like me, who are certified vanishing journalists who are still around, still available to help, still thinking that there’s good work to be done.

We still know a few things. We know about comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. We know the value of explaining a society to itself without fear or favor. Those are values we can’t afford to lose. Dean Singleton can try to take it all away so he can make up for his poor business decisions and cover his huge debt. We can’t let him.

Again. I accept this award on behalf of all the great journalists I’ve known and learned from. It’s truly an honor to be the one accepting on their behalf, and I thank you very much.

“A first-rate love, all the way”

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Guardian contributing videographer Lisa Pickoff-White, along with Marnette Federis, Gaelle Faure and Elizabeth Shemaria, has been following newlywed couple Jen and Iris around — and has put together an amazing multimedia biographical journalism project about their same-sex wedding. (You can view the entire fabulous project here.) Jen and Iris came from Atlanta to tie the knot in good ol’ SF, where it’s legal — at least for the next four days. And yes, this is another plea to help out the No on 8 campaign.

Watch below as they describe what a difference marriage makes in their lives …

CFAC’s Sunshine and Darkness awards

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OPEN-GOVERNMENT GROUP GIVES “DARKNESS” AWARDS ZAPPING ORANGE COUNTY
JUDGE, CAPISTRANO SCHOOL BOARD, SAN BERNARDINO ASSESSOR

The California First Amendment Coalition has named the 2008 recipients of its “Darkness Award,” given in recognition of conduct that thwarts freedom of speech and the public’s right to know. The awards, to be presented Saturday, October 18 at UC Berkeley, are given to:

— Riverside Superior Court Judge David C. Velasquez, who attempted to bar the Orange County Register from covering public testimony in a lawsuit against the paper. His attempt to impose government censorship in the form of a prior restraint was quickly knocked down by the Court of Appeal.

— San Bernardino County Assessor Bill Postmus, a former chairman of the Board of Supervisors who: 1) refused to disclose his activities and e-mails during a two-week period when wildfires raged in the county, 2) as assessor hired an “executive support staff” that, according to the Grand Jury, did “public image work for him, and 3) employed an aide who is being prosecuted by the District Attorney for alleged destruction of public records.

— The Capistrano Unified School Board, which was so indifferent to anti-secrecy laws that the Orange County District Attorney issued a public report outlining the board’s many violations of the Ralph M. Brown public meetings law. In a follow-up inquiry, the District Attorney found further violations and concluded that the board had proven itself “incapable or unwilling” of complying with the law.

In contrast to the Darkness Awards, CFAC also today named the 2008 winners of awards that affirmatively honor service in the cause of free speech, open government and the public’s right to know. Attorney Hal Fuson, the Chauncey Bailey Project, the San Francisco Chronicle, Associated Press reporter Linda Deutsch, and legislative advocate Jim Ewert are being recognized for their dedication to First Amendment principles.

—Hal Fuson, vice president and chief legal counsel of Copley Press, will receive the annual Bill Farr Award, presented jointly by CFAC and the California Society of Newspaper Editors. The award recognizes Fuson’s career-long contributions to the principles of free speech,
free press and public access to government.

—The Chauncey Bailey Project and the San Francisco Chronicle will receive CFAC’s Beacon Award. The Chauncey Bailey Project, representing 25 journalists from multiple Bay Area news organizations and journalism schools, produced more than 140 stories that
illuminated the circumstances around the 2007 assassination of Chauncey Bailey, an editor for the Oakland Post who was investigating Your Black Muslim Bakery. Working independently but likewise relying heavily on public records, the San Francisco Chronicle generated 103 stories and probed deeply into the case.

—Linda Deutsch, the legendary court reporter for the Association Press, is a Beacon Award winner. Ms. Deutsch has not only brought some of the nation’s most celebrated trials to our doorsteps, she has fought valiantly for openness and press freedom, earning among other things the Society of Professional Journalists’ First Amendment Award.

—Jim Ewert, legal counsel and legislative advocate for the California Newspaper Publishers Association, is being honored with a Beacon Award. Ewert is in his second decade of protecting reporters, standing up to censorship, and elevating the rights of student
journalists and their advisers.

The awards will be presented at CFAC’s annual Free Speech and Open Government Assembly, to be held this Friday and Saturday at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. The award presentation is on Saturday. The program and free online registration are available here:

The full citations for all awards follow.

Secrecy: a root cause of the financial crisis

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This piece by Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition, is one of the best I’ve seen on the financial meltdown. Scroll down to register for the free CFAC assembly this Saturday at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California-Berkeley.

Disclosure–or the lack of it–is a root cause of the current financial crisis

By Peter Scheer

Economists and historians will be debating for years the causes of the financial crisis that, like a global array of dominoes, now threatens to take down the “real” economies of countries big and small, both “developed” and “emerging,” in a massive flight from investment risk unlike anything experienced since 1929.

To the experts’ lists of causes, let me add a lack of information–specifically, the systemic failure of lenders to disclose ample information about the risks of the mortgage loans being made to thousands of borrowers whose homes have since tanked in value, resulting in unprecedented rates of default. These defaults leave the holders of the affected mortgage investments–primarily banks around the world–with sizeable loan portfolios that they can’t value and for which there is no functioning market.

Click here to continue reading.

The Chronicle manufactures a crisis

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OPINION “Illegal Alien.” “Drug-dealing illegal immigrant youth.” “Criminal youth.”

How many times have these dehumanizing words appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle in the last few months? Through unbalanced and sensationalist coverage of this handful of youth, the Chronicle is manufacturing a crisis in San Francisco. Writers like right-wing Chronicle columnist Cinnamon Stillwell and others are creating a mob mentality that is driving city policy and aims to distort and gut the intent of the Sanctuary City laws, which exist to preserve public safety in face of the challenging consequences of globalization.

Globalization has shown us that our world is a web of dynamic relationships. The consequences of the economic decisions made by governing bodies around the world include both the facilitation of movement for goods and services across national borders and the increased policing when that movement involves people; access to inexpensive products due to exploitative labor practices; and the exacerbation of global poverty, a form of systemic violence.

As we locally tackle the challenges imposed on us, we need to speak out against fearmongering journalism. Demonizing youth will not bring justice to families who have experienced loss from the actions of documented (or undocumented) individuals. That pain is real and cries out for redress. Individuals are accountable for their actions. While the Juvenile Courts are not perfect, they are where minors accused of committing crimes are held accountable.

The city needs to return authority over these children to the appropriate courts, which are legally mandated to consider the circumstances of each minor on a case-by-case basis to make a ruling, which may include placement in foster care, in a group home, release to a local family, or return to a family out of the country — and if the young person is found guilty of a felony, a transfer to federal immigration officials.

The unhappy reality is that there are undocumented, unaccompanied children in our community who resort to drug sales or other unsafe, illegal activities to survive and help support their families. The way in which queer youth seek sanctuary here from homophobic families parallels the struggles for survival of undocumented youth. The LGBTQ community recognizes our shared everyday struggle with immigrants, our right to exist in healthy, loving families, and as individuals with a healthy sense of self and dignity, even when those rights come under assault through the acts of individual, societal, and governmental bigotry, discrimination, and intervention.

The LGBTQ community recognizes that true justice requires that we transform social conditions. We call on all San Franciscans to stick to the ideals that underlie the democracy we so cherish, and call on our city officials to reassert our commitment to Sanctuary City and human rights.

Implementing the municipal ID program is a positive step. Any delays in its implementation undermine the public safety goals our city is attempting to achieve. As we seek to establish order in this mess — brought about through the criminalization of people’s movements — let’s stick to our principles, with the fullest regard for equal rights and due process for all of our youth.

Robert Haaland is a labor organizer with Pride at Work. Sofia Lee Morales works with the Queer Youth Organizing Project.

 

Dick Meister: Sarah Palin and Frances Perkins

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Dick Meister is a rarity in U.S. journalism. In an era when the media is hiring more business reporters and doing more business reporting, it has cut out almost all labor reporters and labor reporting. However, Meister has been covering labor and political issues for more than 50 years from his San Francisco base. He was a former labor and political reporter for the Associated Press, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Guardian, and KQED. His weekly column will appear regularly on the Bruce blog and the Guardian website. You can see previous columns on his website at DickMeister.com. B3

A FIRST FOR LABOR, A FIRST FOR WOMEN
By Dick Meister

Amid the speculation that Sarah Palin could become our first woman vice
president, don’t forget the first woman who actually did serve in a
president’s cabinet — Frances Perkins, one of the most important
leaders, woman or man, to ever hold any federal post.

Perkins, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first – and only – secretary of labor, had
a tremendous impact on government policy and the status of ordinary
Americans. Her politics were far different from Republican Palin’s rigid
conservatism. Perkins was a liberal Democrat, a very liberal, politically
astute Democrat who devoted her entire career to improving the lives of
America’s working people and helping provide them and others true economic
justice and security.

Big censored story of the Republican Convention

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By Bruce B. Brugmann (Scroll down for the alternative coverage)

While the Republicans were turning into instant reformers and mavericks inside the convention hall,
outside the St. Paul police were roughing up demonstrators and arresting journalists committing the grave sin of journalism.

Somehow, none of the reformers and mavericks inside referred to the violence outside nor tried to stop it and very few of the mainstream papers or broadcasters thought it worthy of coverage. Fortunately, the press rallied nationwide and, led by the Free Press Organization and the Society of Professional Journalists, collected more than 60,000 protest letters in 72 hours and delivered them to City hall in St. Paul this morning (5/9/2008). The letters called on Mayor Chris Coleman and law enforcement officials to drop all charges.

Locking up the press

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› sarah@sfbg.com

On Aug. 20 the San Francisco Chronicle reported that video blogger Josh Wolf, who spent 226 days in federal prison in 2006 for refusing to testify before a grand jury and hand over his video of a protest turned violent, had begun working as a reporter with the Palo Alto Daily Post.

"Video blogger gets job as ‘real journalist,’<0x2009>" crowed the headline.

The article noted that some critics believe Wolf was a protest participant and not an impartial news gatherer, and accurately observed that his case fueled the debates over what defines a reporter and who deserves to be protected by the reporter’s privilege to protect confidential sources.

But it failed to mention that one of Wolf’s harshest critics was Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders, nor did it clarify that in recent years several federal courts have found that reporters — all reporters, even from major newspapers — can be forced to testify before grand juries.

California doesn’t allow its courts to compel journalists to reveal unpublished information, but the federal government has no such shield law. That’s why prosecutors could jail New York Times reporter Judith Miller, charge Chronicle reporters Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada with contempt, and slap USA Today‘s Toni Locy with hefty fines — all for refusing to disclose confidential sources and materials.

And as reporters continue to face contempt charges in federal court cases nationwide, Congress has been considering two very different versions of a federal shield bill.

These two versions take widely varying approaches toward who and what is protected. And thanks to Senate Republicans, who blocked all business not related to energy legislation before Congress’ August recess, a vote on the Senate bill did not occur at the end of July.

As a result, if the Senate doesn’t act by the end of September, both versions of the federal shield will likely die. And, depending on whom you talk to, that may or may not be a good thing.

The Free Flow of Information Act of 2007 (HR 2102), which the House of Representatives passed in October of that year, only protects journalists if their work is done for a substantial portion of the person’s livelihood or for substantial financial gain. In other words, no protection for Wolf, for most bloggers, or for many freelancers.

The good news is that the House bill extends protections to any documents or information obtained during the newsgathering process.

By comparison, the Senate bill (S 2035) only protects the identity of confidential sources, and any records, data, documents, or information obtained under a promise of confidentiality.

The Senate shield would cover any journalist who "engages in the regular gathering, preparing, collecting, photographing, recording, writing, editing, reporting, or publishing of news or information that concerns local, national, or international events or other matters of public interest for dissemination to the public."

But it no longer requires the government to prove by preponderance of evidence that the information it seeks is essential, or that it has exhausted all other methods. And it makes more difficult any challenge by the reporter, based on whether the information involved is "properly classified" or whether its disclosure would harm national security.

It also expands the list of exceptions for which protection would be precluded: if disclosure could prevent criminal activities, terrorism, kidnapping, or imminent death or bodily harm; identify a person who has released some categories of private business and medical information; and where reporters witness criminal or tortuous conduct.

"I can’t overstate how much better the House bill is," Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, told the Guardian.

Although Dalglish is hopeful Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) will schedule the bill for a vote, she fears there won’t be enough time for a conference committee to iron out the differences between the two bills before the end of September, which means that only one version will have a chance of passing into law.

"My guess is that it will be the Senate bill, because the House will pass the Senate bill in a heartbeat, but the Senate will never pass the House bill," Dalglish observed.

Reached on break from his reporter gig, Wolf voiced his opposition to the Senate bill. "A shield law riddled with holes is no shield at all," Wolf said.

"It boggles my mind that any journalist could support the bill the way it is written," said Wolf, who would like to see a common law reporter privilege similar to the one for psychiatrists and therapists. "This is a shield law, in which, as best as I can tell, every single federal contempt case is carved out as an exception," Wolf opined.

While Dalglish acknowledges that the Senate shield only addresses subpoenas that seek to identify confidential sources (about 20 percent of subpoenas), she believes the Chronicle‘s Williams and Fainaru-Wada would have been protected, as would Locy.

"But Josh [Wolf] would not have been covered because he was not protecting confidential sources, and Judith Miller would have had a shot, though her case would have a more difficult time because of national security implications," Dalglish said. "And while by far the most subpoenas don’t have to do with confidential sources, they are the holy grail of journalism ethics, and you certainly have to, at a minimum, protect them — and the Senate bill is minimal."

Dalglish believes that both the Senate and House bills would allow the truthful, accurate, and independent gathering of information to go public, so the public could use this information at ballot boxes and in city halls, and ensure that people who have information to share could share it with reporters and the public.

"It’s not about protecting reporters," Dalglish added. "Reporters are not that special, in any shape or form. It’s about protecting the right of reporters to freely work on the public’s behalf, without being viewed as agents of the US Attorney."

Noting that the law in the Senate is not going to change what happened to Wolf in that instance because he was not protecting a confidential source, Dalglish’s message for reporters facing subpoenas, first and foremost, is: "Resist, tell them you don’t have it.

"Your obligation is to be independent, not an agent of the government," he continued. "So take your video, put it on a Web site, and make sure the public gets to see it at same time as the US Attorney."

RNC: Protest Amy Goodman/Journalist arrests

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By Bruce B. Brugmann

Coming to work this morning, I listened with outrage to the Thom Hartmann radio program on Air America (960AM) and his chilling interview with Amy Goodman, who detailed her arrest with her Democracy Now/Pacifica Radio/KPFA crew at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul.

Here are the details of this important story the mainstream media is paying scant attention to. And what you can do about it. Watch for protests from the Society of Professional Journalists and other journalism and free press organizations.


Free Press Action Alert:

Yesterday, police in St. Paul arrested several journalists, including Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and an AP photographer as they were covering protests of the Republican National Convention.

Stand Up for Independent Journalism

Amy Goodman and others were released last night, but the story is not over.

We need you to cosign our public letter demanding that press intimidation cease immediately, and that all charges be dropped. It will be delivered immediately to St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman, the RNC Host Committee and the local prosecuting attorneys. We need 10,000 signatures in the next 24 hours, so please take action now:

Sign the Letter: Drop All Charges Against Journalists

In addition to these arrests, police with firearms drawn raided a meeting of the video journalists’ group I-Witness and arrested independent media, bloggers and videomakers. We’re also receiving late-breaking reports of other arrests.

By signing this letter, you’re sending a powerful message: Officials must rein in aggressive and violent tactics by local law enforcement, stop the targeting of journalists and immediately drop all charges against them.

Reporting by independent journalists is vital to a functioning democracy. Americans must have access to diverse sources of information to hold their leaders accountable. Journalists must be free to do their jobs without intimidation.

Please Take Action by Signing this Letter

Don’t wait. We need a free press now more than ever. Tell your friends and take action now!

Thank you,

Josh Silver
Executive Director
Free Press
www.freepress.net

1. Watch the video of Goodman’s arrest.

2. See other journalists being arrested as reported by UpTake.

3. News of the AP arrest.

4. Learn more about the arrest of an ABC News producer during the Democratic Convention in Denver.

5. Watch the video of the police raid of I-Witness journalists (Caution: strong language).

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