Tim Redmond

California Democratic Convention, 3 pm

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By Tim Redmond

I’m down in San Diego for the state Democratic convention, which Bob Mulholland, longtime political director for the CA Democratic Party, told me is “the start of the campaign to elect a Democrat to the White House.” Seven presidential candidates will be here, more than have ever attended a state convention. California, thanks to the early primary, is very much in play.

“We’re going to see the next president speaking here tomorrow,” Mulholland told me.

Some reflections:

The event kicks off with state party chair Art Torres holding a press conference that gives him a chance to tlak about how wonderful the state party is. He talks about how he’s thrilled to work on a “58-county” strategy — that is, putitng resources into all parts of the state, the way national chair Howard Dean pushed for spending money in all 50 states. It sounds great — and in a few minutes, he’ll have a chance to completely repudiate that message.

Several reporters ask about impeachment — which, to judge from the signs and stickers around here is the issue of the day — and he says that the party’s executive commitee is on record supporting impeachment, and that he expects this convention will take a similar stance. I ask him if it isn’t contradicatory that the party wants to talk about this issue, but the speaker of the House says it’s not on the table.

“No,” Torres says. “This is the Democratic Party.”

He goes on: “Nancy Pelosi is the speaker of the House. We see a distance between the grassroots and the leadership, and that’s not unusual.”

No, Art, it isn’t.

Will the newspaper barons back down?

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By Tim Redmond

The Chronicle today went to great effort to suggest that Clint Reilly didn’t actually get the concessions he claimed at his press conference on the settlement of his lawsuit against the big newspaper publishers. We just called Reilly, and he’s adamant: The publishers promised him free space in ther papers for a regular column on community issues.

Apparently that didn’t sit well with some of the editors at the papers owned by Dean Singleton’s MediaNews Group, and the publishers have been madly trying to back away. But Reilly says his attorney, Joe Alioto, has been in touch with the publishers, and he’s expecting a formal joint statement later today in which the newspaper barons will retract their comments.

“And if they don’t,” Reilly told us, “we’ve just go forward and take this case to trial.”

Important tenant alert — call Leland Yee!

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By Tim Redmond

A critical piece of tenant legislation is heading for the floor of the state Senate, and so far, San Francisco Senator Leland Yee hasn’t taken a position on it. The bill would dramatically reduce the number of Ellis Act evictions in the city and save the homes of thousands of low-income renters and seniors.

The bill number is SB 464, by Sen. Sheila Kuehl (D-L.A). Contact Yee’s office today and demand that he support it.

You can email him directly from here. Or you can call his local office at 557-7857.

What’s wrong with America, in one simple stat

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By Tim Redmond

The New York Times reported yesterday that the 25 top hedge fund managers in the United States earned a combined $14 billion last year — “enough to pay New York City’s 80,000 public school teachers for nearly three years.”

Think about it. Twenty-five people earned in one year almost three times as much as every public school teacher in New York, put together.

And thanks to Bush’s tax cuts, those 25 people, all of whom took home at least $240 million in compensation last year, wil pay about one-thrid as much tax as they would have paid under such radical left-wing presidents as Richard Nixon.

This is why the public schools are in bad shape, the streets are filled with homeless people, poverty is on the rise across America, a growing number of qualified kids can’t afford to go to college … the list is endless.

And so far, I haven’t heard a single leading Democratic candidate for president talk about raising taxes (not just letting the Bush cuts expire, but actually raising taxes) on the people who “earn” obscene amounts of money.

This is, in my mind, the single most important problem in the nation. It makes me sick.

Editor’s Notes

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> tredmond@sfbg.com

I knew a lot of sick puppies in high school and college – loners, misfits, and social nightmares who wrote short stories and poems about death and destruction and suicide and drew grisly cartoons of people with brains spattered and organs hanging out and strangely mangled genitalia. These days, I fear, a lot of them would have been sent to the campus counseling service. Back then it was all just art.

None of these people (to my knowledge) have ever done any physical harm to anyone. I’m almost certain that none of them have turned into mass murderers. Most are now successful and respected members of society.

And I think anyone who is attracted to the weirder elements and attended a liberal arts college probably has similar acquaintances.

So I’m not going to get all agitated about the fact that Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech killer, was never properly tracked and identified as a sociopath. That’s a tough nut – and if college campuses became places where everyone who bought and sold books about horror movies and wrote alarmingly dark stories in English class was forcibly psychoanalyzed, higher education would be a very different experience.

On the other hand, it’s hard to accept just how easy it was for this guy to get a pair of handguns – weapons of mass destruction that allowed him to kill more than 30 people. The thing is, he apparently did it all legally.

The fact that he was once sent for psychiatric observation didn’t make it into the Virginia database that tracks people unfit to buy weapons. But overall he was just another guy looking for a weapon that has no real purpose except to kill another human being – or in this case, large numbers of other human beings – and in his state, as in much of this country, that wasn’t a problem at all.

The thing that struck me the hardest, and most immediately, after the incident was the statement from President George W. Bush, who (of course) bemoaned the carnage and offered his prayers – but in the same few sentences made a point of saying that he supports the right to bear arms. It was kind of sick: Bush didn’t even have the tact to wait a single day before sucking up to the National Rifle Association.

Let’s be real: if Cho hadn’t been able to buy those guns, the odds are very good that 33 people in Virginia would still be alive today, teaching, studying, and thinking about their future. It’s about time we start dealing with that.

I have good friends who are hunters and own rifles. I’ve happily gorged on the roast pig that came from one hunter’s forays, and I’m not complaining. But hunting rifles aren’t terribly effective for the sort of killing we saw at Virginia Tech; for one thing, it’s pretty obvious when you carry one into class. No, the big problems are handguns and assault rifles – weapons that were not on anyone’s mind when the people who wrote the Constitution talked about a "well-regulated militia."

Don’t talk to me about self-defense, either. I’ve been studying and occasionally teaching self-defense for 15 years, and I can tell you that guns are, by and large, a rotten self-defense strategy, much more likely to be used against you or to be useless than to function properly at a time when you need them.

And yet there are handguns everywhere. God bless America. *

Small Business Awards 2007: Community Institution Award

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It started in 1971, with a handful of people who worked for Socialist Revolution magazine and wanted to sell books that would give the Movement – and back then it had a capital M – some historical and theoretical perspective. The magazine’s editor, Jim Weinstein, provided the rag with a free 900-square-foot space in a building he owned. With $5,000 in raised funds, the idealistic collective opened Modern Times Bookstore in the Mission.

A lot of similar projects were launched in San Francisco during that era – co-operative businesses and ventures founded by activists with a radical social vision – and most of them folded. Modern Times grew. And while independent bookstores around the country are failing by the day, Modern Times is thriving.

"I think it’s because we’ve always had the support of the community," Michael Rosenthal, who started at Modern Times just weeks after it opened and retired this year, told us. "We were always a community bookstore."

And unlike a lot of ’60s-era institutions, Modern Times was open to adapting and changing – while preserving its core beliefs. There have always been books for sale on Marxism and socialist theory, but as Rosenthal points out, "at a certain point, we realized we were just speaking to a coterie."

Taking a broader approach, Modern Times became one of the first bookstores in the country to offer a lesbian-gay section and one on women’s issues. And these days the store has an incredible variety of books from major and small-press houses in all sorts of different genres, including Spanish-language and children’s books, and an extensive rack of zines and cultural periodicals. New College, right down the street, uses Modern Times as its school bookstore, a deal that helps both local institutions.

Modern Times has maintained its worker-ownership structure – and has always been a community resource. Its back room is abuzz with local author book signings and queer experimental poetry readings. Political and community groups use the store for everything from panel discussions on the city’s wi-fi plan to workshops on economics and how-to sessions on bike safety. The site has hosted events featuring the storied radical feminist ’80s performance art and culture-jamming group the Guerrilla Girls, and San Francisco’s innovative Cutting Ball Theater is currently in residence there. Check out the events page on the store’s Web site for a fabulous list of upcoming eclectic and wonderful writers, speakers, and interactive programs.

Modern Times has become more than just a neighborhood bookstore for the Mission. It’s also a crucial part of San Francisco’s progressive community. And it’s a sign that independent bookstores can withstand gentrification and the assault of the big chains – and make a difference. (Tim Redmond)

MODERN TIMES BOOKSTORE

888 Valencia, SF

(415) 282-9246

www.moderntimesbookstore.com

The end of the Blue Angels

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By Tim Redmond

I know the show is cool (even though I’m never chosen as the journalist who gets to fly in one of the planes). And I hate to be a killjoy or anything. But I’ve always wondered why these high-performance Hornet F/A 18 military jets loaded with fuel get to perform dangerous maneuvers right over the third-densest urban area in the country.

There is, of course, the fact that the Blue Angels are really nothing more than a very expensive celebration of military might and a recruiting tool for the U.S. Navy — not somthing you’d think would be terribly approrpiate in a city that’s one of the leading anti-war centers in America.

But as we are now reminded, accidents happen — and if one of those flying bomblets crashed into, say, North Beach, the carnage would be really ugly.

Can we stop media monopoly?

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(chart from dailykos.com)

By Tim Redmond

With Clint Reilly’s case against the Bay Area’s newspaper barons heading for a trial that will start April 30, it’s interesting to note that there’s actually a bill in Congress to limit media ownership.

I suspect this isn’t going anywhere soon — the nation’s political leaders are notorious for their refusal to take on the monopolists — but it’s on the agenda and won’t go away.

Better health care at half the cost

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By Tim Redmond

Just as a universal health care bill by State Senator Sheila Kuehl heads to the floor of the Senate, a fascinating new study shows that Canadians get health care just as good as United States citizens get — at half the cost.

Attack of the crazed bloggers

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By Tim Redmond

Wow, this is special. Two bloggers from The Mayor and the Hair — a sort of deranged pro-Newsom blog — showed up at a bar where some local bloggers were meeting to dump drinks on one of the hosts of GavinSucks.com.

Everyone is having fun with it. I’m just sorry I wasn’t invited, and missed all the excitement.

State Senate race geting crowded

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By Tim Redmond

The race for state Senate in San Francisco is getting more crowded: Joe Veronese, son of former Sup. Angela Alioto, appears to be ready to jump into the race. Fog City Journal had the scoop today:

Fog City has it on good authority (you can bet the farm!) Police Commissioner Joe Alioto-Veronese will, within two weeks, declare his candidacy for the 2008 California Senate District 3 race, taking on incumbent Senator Carole Migden and challenger Assemblymember Mark Leno.

I called Veronese, and he’s not by any means denying it. “We will be making an announcement very shortly,” he told me. I think that sounds like a go.

The politics of this are interesting: The polling data right now shows Migden well ahead in Marin County; Leno says his polls show him ahead in San Francisco. Adding more candidates to the mix in the city makes it all more confusing — and if Sup. Aaron Peskin jumps in, too (which he has threatened to do), that would take progressive votes from Leno and help Migden.

Egads. The election is still a year away.

BTW, I asked Veronese what case he would make for his election, and he told me: “My family has always been about public service.” He’ll need a little more in the way of issue than that.

The difference between Democrats and Republicans

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By Tim Redmond

There are times that I’ve wondered about this, too, and asked whether the two major parties have any real differences. Gold help me, I supported Nader in 2000, out of frustration over the Clinton Administration’s economic policies.

But then you get a reminder like this. No Supreme Court justice appointed by a Democrat these days would have supported an attack on reproductive rights. 5-4, with Bush’s guys in the lead. It’s just going to get worse.

Now the Chron front page really IS a PG&E ad

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By Tim Redmond

We’ve often accused the San Francisco Chronicle of acting like a public-relations mouthpiece for Pacific Gas and Electric Company. But it’s not even funny anymore: The Chron today has a big front-page ad from PG&E — and, perhaps not coincidentally, the paper almost totally ignored the news about a key step toward public power.

The front-page ad, accompanied by a note from the publisher, has turned some heads among local journalists. Publisher Frank Vega says in his note that the Chron is just following everyone else in the industry.

But PG&E’s greenwashing ads? Right on the front page? And where was the story about Community Choice Aggregation?

The green issue

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

Climate change is a global problem. A lot of the solutions, at least in the United States, are going to be local.

And a lot of them are going to start and end with the way we use land.

That’s a critical theme for this year’s Earth Day: cities like San Francisco, which claims to be (and really ought to be) a world leader in environmental sustainability, have to rethink everything from housing and consumption to open space and energy use — and particularly transportation.

Cars — private-use automobiles, the center of so much of American life and public policy for the past 100 years — are also one of the greatest threats to the future of the planet. The byproducts of tens of millions of internal combustion engines on the roads every day are a major component of greenhouse gases (not to mention other environmental pollutants). And the oil that fuels them drives a foreign policy that leads, as we’ve seen, to tyranny, instability, and millions of deaths.

It’s not enough to raise gas taxes or promote hybrids or increase fuel-efficiency standards (although all of those should be on the national agenda). Cities and states have to profoundly change the way people get around and the way they use public and private space.

Some of this is just so simple you can’t believe it’s not already happening. As Steve Jones reports ("The Silver Bullet Train"), a high-speed rail connection from San Francisco to Los Angeles would get almost two millions cars off the road and cut down immensely on the use of airline fuel. It would also pay for itself in a few years. It’s a form of public transit that would work right away: nobody likes to drive to LA. If you could take a train, get there in less time than it takes to fly, and pay less than $50 for the trip, why would you travel any other way?

Some of it requires more political vision (and political guts). If San Francisco wants to fight sprawl and encourage less car use, it has to be willing to build housing for people who work here — and that means, by city estimates, ensuring that two-thirds of all new housing be affordable.

And if San Franciscans want to reconnect to urban land and encourage bikes and walking, we have to think seriously about open space — even if it means that roads and private developments have to be sacrificed. That’s what Deborah Giattina describes ("Open Water,").

Cities and states also have to think about energy policy, and that means reclaiming energy as a public good, not a private commodity. San Francisco’s private utility, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., is spending millions trying to tell us how green it is; as Amanda Witherell notes ("Green Isn’t PG&E,"), that’s a big lie.

On this Earth Day 2007, the time to mess around and debate has run out. Think globally, act locally — and push for a city and state environmental agenda that is more than hot air. *

The word on guns from England

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By Tim Redmond

The Guardian of London has a short but poignant editorial on why the United States, despite a long string of terrible gun-driven tragedies, can’t seem to control guns. The rest of the world seems baffled, too.

Virginia is for (straight gun) lovers

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By Tim Redmond

By the way, Virigina was one of only two states that as recently as 2004 was defying the U.S. Supreme Court and enforcing anti-sodomy laws. So it’s perfectly okay to buy guns and kill people in that great state, but you can going to jail for being gay.

(For the record: Nobody knows yet where Cho bought his guns; if it turns out that he got them in Texas or something, or that he bought them illegally from a dealer somewhere, I will apologize to the Great State of VA — sort of.

The right to bear arms in Virginia

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By Tim Redmond

I’m surprised that this hasn’t gotten more attention: Immediately after hearing of the horror at Virginia Tech, President Bush express his condolences for the victims — then made a point of commenting about “the right to bear arms.”

The president believes that there is a right for people to bear arms, but that all laws must be followed. Certainly, bringing a gun into a school dormitory and shooting … is against the law and something someone should be held accountable for,” [a Bush spokesperson] said

According to the New York Post, the shooter, Cho Seung Hui, had every legal right to buy the weapons he used in the state of Virginia.

He was a disturbed kid, by all accounts, and nobody will ever be able to figure out exactly what made him go off and kill 33 people, including himself. But if the country wasn’t so obsessed with the right to buy and use weapons of mass murder, like automatic handguns, it’s very likely he never would have had the tools to carry out the massacre.

The main reason so many people die of handgun shootings is that these weapons are far too easily available. And that is in part the fault of President G.W. Bush.

Bernal owl dies

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By Tim Redmond

Sad news. For months now, all of us in the neighborhood have enjoyed watching a pair of Great Horned owls, who had made their home in a tree on Bernal Hill. They were a reminder that amazing bits of nature can appear in this crowded city; we all hoped they were a nesting pair, and that we’d see owlets this summer.

But alas, one of the owls was found dead last week. Nobody knows why; they seemed to be quite happy eating mice, voles and snakes on the hill. I hope it wasn’t some sort of pesticide poisoning, which would be a different kind of reminder indeed.

Dr. Jang for mayor!

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By Tim Redmond

You’ve seen the late-night cable-TV ads. You’ve seen the drag queens portraying him on Halloween in the Castro. He fixes my teeth (well, one of his associates does, but I’ve met The Man.) And now Beth Spotswood wants him to run for mayor!.

I love her candidates list: Brian Boitano, Cheech Marin (“you know what the mayor’s office is missing? A bong”), and — of course — George Clooney (“he’s already broken up with Jennifer Siebel.”) But I’m voting for Dr. Jang.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

I get just as crabby and cynical as any other political reporter, but the truth is, on the index of basic competence and lack of corruption, San Francisco city government is doing way better than it was a decade ago.

We’re far from perfect: the Raker Act scandal still sours everything at City Hall, and the mayor hasn’t done much of anything in the past three years. I could go on.

But the reformers have made some tremendous inroads. I don’t know of anyone running a critical department at City Hall who is too drunk to make it back from lunch on a regular basis. Most of the senior staff actually shows up to work instead of spending the day at Nordstrom. The school district has gotten back to educating students, and the public schools improve each year. The supervisors are overall a remarkably smart, progressive bunch. I haven’t seen the FBI raid a local government office in a couple years.

And then there’s the community college district.

The board and the administration that run City College are, I think, one of the last bastions of the kind of inbred, secretive, corrupt rotten boroughs that used to dominate our dear city. Take Lance Williams’s fascinating City College story on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle on April 6.

Williams showed how a college official, assistant vice chancellor James Blomquist, allegedly steered $10,000 in rent money owed to the school into a campaign fund for a 2005 community college bond act. If that’s true — and nobody’s denying it — the deal was not only inappropriate but blatantly illegal. There should have been outrage all around — but so far only the three dissident members of the community college board have said a word. "Nobody else has said anything," said board member John Rizzo, who with Julio Ramos and Milton Marks III has called for a special meeting on this.

Perhaps that’s because what Blomquist allegedly did isn’t all that unusual at City College, where bond money is moved around and treated like personal scrip by the administration and some of the board members. Remember, these are the folks who promised the voters that they’d build a performing arts center, then turned around and spent the money on a gym — and later agreed to rent out the new pool to a private school across the street (see "Field of Schemes," 9/22/04).

This is the crew that has resisted sunshine, that has run roughshod over neighborhoods and pissed off thousands of people — for absolutely no good reason.

The district attorney needs to investigate this latest scam and ask, among other things, which board members knew about it — because I suspect this wasn’t just a junior official operating unilaterally.

This shit has got to end, folks. The chancellor, Philip Day, needs to go. The board members who have been involved in these past shenanigans (Natalie Berg, Rodel Rodis, and Lawrence Wong) all need to go. The progressives have to make this a priority; City College is a civic gem and a crucial part of the city’s future. It’s infuriating to see it run by political hacks.

And as long as this crew is still in charge, I hope they know better than to come around with their hands out, asking for more of the taxpayers’ money. *

green, and affordable

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By Tim Redmond

Casey Mills, the former managing editor of BeyondChron, has a great piece today that explains how too much of the “new urbanism” fails to consider affordable housing:

A disturbing trend already underway involves sustainability and ‘green’ advocates aligning with developers to promote density above all other considerations. Requiring developers to contribute towards affordable housing, for example, simply represents a roadblock to the more important overall goal – brining more housing downtown. If affordable housing becomes viewed as a necessary component of sustainability, not a roadblock to it, this sort of alliance would be impossible to maintain.

He’s right: as market-rate housing in urban centers drives out poor people (and it does, always), those people have to live further and further from work. Since there will always be a need for less-well-paid service workers (not to mention the likes of bus drivers and teachers, who can’t possibly afford any of the new housing we’re building) in cities, gentrification and displacement are significant causes of sprawl.

And yet San Franicsco continues to build housing for people who don’t live here (or even work here), driving out the people who do work here and promoting exactly the kind of sprawl everyone at City Hall is officially against. Insane.

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

The latest count of homeless people in San Francisco is in, and already the bureaucrats and the news media are misquoting it to make their political points.

"Most of San Francisco’s Homeless from Other Areas," the headline on KCBS.com read. "City Attracts Homeless for More Than One Reason," the San Francisco Chronicle concluded. "Homeless folks tend to migrate to San Francisco," Trent Rhorer, the head of the city’s Human Services Agency, told the Chron. "In a sense, we’re swimming upstream here."

Well, what the survey actually showed is that the number of homeless people increased slightly this year, to 6,377. That’s a pretty bogus number, since it’s hard to count the city’s entire homeless population in one night with a bunch of volunteers who don’t even interview most of the people they count. They also don’t count people who are living in cars (it’s often hard to find them), and they don’t count people who are crashing on somebody’s floor or couch, or multiple families crammed into single rooms, or a lot of others who technically don’t have a home in San Francisco.

But it’s a number that scares the mayor a bit, because it suggests that his much-vaunted program to deal with homeless people, Care Not Cash, isn’t making huge inroads. So it’s easy (even though the city hardly gives out any cash anymore, and services are stretched thin, and compassion is harder and harder to find) for Gavin Newsom’s staff to say that it’s impossible to really solve the problem because so many new homeless people keep flocking to this city.

In fact, that’s what a follow-up survey of some of the homeless people suggested: about 31 percent of them said they had come here from somewhere else.

A bit of reality here: more than 31 percent of the people who work at the Guardian came here from somewhere else. This is a city of immigrants. It’s a place where people come to reinvent themselves, where people who are down on their luck and can’t handle the stress of being different in a white-bread community arrive in search of a better life. It’s hardly surprising that a lot of the homeless people are also relatively new arrivals.

But what’s far more staggering to me is that 69 percent of the people who are homeless aren’t recent arrivals. These are folks who have either lived on the streets of San Francisco for quite some time — or lived here in some sort of tolerable condition and recently become homeless.

Rhorer’s got it backward: the trouble isn’t that some people who lost their homes in another part of the country decided they’d have a better shot in San Francisco. It’s that so many San Franciscans have become homeless.

And I think I can hazard a guess as to why.

Let’s face it: housing costs in this city drive people onto the streets. The tenant activists like to say that eviction is the number one preventable cause of homelessness, and I agree. We can complain about San Francisco being a homeless magnet (which will probably never change), or we can recognize that public policy (too easy evictions, too little affordable housing) is the root cause of a lot of the homelessness that begins right here at home. *

The weakly sunblock

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By Tim Redmond

Yeah, so the SF Weekly is taking a swipe at Kimo Crossman (and, naturally, at us) this week. Will Harper’s item isn’t terribly insightful or funny, and just plays into the Phoenix-based paper’s general distaste for unconventional activists.

But Harper (and a lof ot the others who think it’s fun and easy to whack away at the likes of Crossman and his over-the-top battles for open government) forget where all of this came from. Kimo Crossman got obsessed with government secrecy because he had such a bad experience trying to get public records. He wanted to find out about the Newsom wi-fi deal (which, true to form, the Weekly also loves). And he kept running into brick walls.

I understand. I find the same thing at City Hall, all the time. Under City Attorney Dennis Herrera (and his excellent and principled press aide, Matt Dorsey), it’s gotten a lot better, but overall, most city departments still make it far too difficult for the average citizen to get basic information about what’s going on.

If anyone is to blame for Crossman’s somewhat unwieldy campaign, it’s Mayor Newsom, who insisted that Google and Earthlink had the right to keep their wi-fi proposals mostly secret.

There has always been an easy solution to people like Crossman: Just give them the damn records. Nothing bad will happen. Really.

PS: Someday soon, when metadata is regularly released as part of public-records requests, Will Harper or someone else at the Weekly will use that info to write a really good story about City Hall. You suppose they’ll thank that crazy Kimo Crossman?

Editor’s Notes

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› tredmond@sfbg.com

David Lazarus, who is a pretty good consumer reporter over at the San Francisco Chronicle, got himself badly singed in a blogosphere flame war a couple weeks ago when he wrote a column arguing that newspapers should start charging for their content online. No more free newspaper Web sites; if you gotta pay half a buck to the buy the print product, you shouldn’t get it electronically for free.

It’s kind of an insider industry debate, and frankly, this stuff is starting to bore me, and nobody else should care much — except that in his fights with bloggers and in a follow-up column March 23, Lazarus got into an issue that is crucial for all of us to think about and understand in the new media world.

Lazarus argues that if the Web content is free, there won’t be any money to pay professional reporters (like him). Some of the folks who went after him said, in effect, so what? With tens of thousands of bloggers out there working for free, who needs David Lazarus? Who needs to pay for any news on the Web? Who even needs newspapers; why can’t the blogosphere just make its own news?

What that argument amounts to is a failure to understand that there will always be — and must, for the sake of democracy, always be — people who work in the news business. By that I mean people who are paid full-time to follow politicians, monitor city hall, and investigate wrongdoing.

They may not work in what are now traditional newsrooms or at traditional news outlets. But the typical blogger, who comments on other news reports and does some citizen journalism while holding down a day job or going to school, isn’t going to fill the role of full-time reporters. It’s not that the bloggers aren’t smart or good writers or, frankly, better reporters than a lot of the pros out there. It’s just that this job can’t be a part-time gig.

Lazarus misses the fact that giving away newspaper stories isn’t anything new. The alternative press figured out years ago that newspapers can operate like radio stations — put the content out free and sell ads around it — and make enough money to hire staff.

But the bloggers don’t seem to understand that hiring staff is key. Look at Daily Kos. It’s a huge success in part because Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, who runs the site, is a great writer and very talented, but it’s also because he does it as a full-time gig. He doesn’t charge for anything; he takes ads. But that pays for at least one full-time staffer and soon, I think, will pay for more.

The time will come (and I bet it’s sooner than later) when Daily Kos or another similar site will have enough money to decide to hire a full-time political blogger to, say, cover the presidential race. That person may not be someone who went to journalism school, and he or she may not write with the style or sensibility of the San Francisco Chronicle or the New York Times or the Washington Post. But that reporter-blogger will be able to do what most citizen journalists can’t — that is, devote full time to the job — and thus will get original stories, real news. That’s never going to change. *

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