I am scheduled to appear on the Lockridge Report on Road Dog Trucking Radio, Sirius channel 147, to talk about the proposed changes to trucking parking ordinances here in Hesperia.
I am scheduled to talk about the proposed changes during the 11 a.m. hour (PST).
Another example of why I love American Journalism Review:
The Philadelphia Daily News played it big on its April 23, 1998, front page for everyone to see. “Squeeze Play on Tap: Suds Fans Cheated 2 OZ. Per Cup At Vet, Adding Up To Big Bucks,” the headline read.
“In a town where beer is a fundamental part of baseball lore..failing to give an honest pour is worse than striking out with the bases loaded.
“It’s un-American.
“Joe Sixpack uncovered the rampant short-cupping during Tuesday night’s game against the Reds,” the story went.
Don Russell wrote that story. Wrote all of the Joe Sixpack stories, as a matter of fact. Still does, once a week, for the city’s pugnacious tabloid. Became so associated with the hometown hero most folks just call him Joe Sixpack. He left the newspaper racket after nearly 30 years to do Joe Sixpack full-time. The Joe Sixpack column, a Joe Sixpack Web site (joesixpack.net) and, coming in March, a book: “Joe Sixpack’s Philly Beer Guide.”
“The beer business in Philadelphia is a very tightly knit community, and Joe Sixpack is an absolutely huge part of it,” says Tom Peters, owner of Monk’s Café in center city Philadelphia, one of America’s great beer bars. “But the unique part of it is that the column is directed at a broader audience.”
Calling Joe Sixpack a beer column is a little like calling Mike Royko’s a tavern column or A.J. Liebling a boxing writer. Like all the best columns, Joe Sixpack is about people and place. “He tends to tell Philadelphia stories that just happen to be about beer,” former Daily News Editor Zack Stalberg says.
Where Joe Sixpack’s investigation of the short-cupping at Veterans Stadium leads is worth the price of admission. A fun article about a very interesting columnist.
I guess I’m a serious word nerd, but I find myself in agreement with a New York Times article cheering an unexpected appearance of the semicolon on the New York City subway system:
It was nearly hidden on a New York City Transit public service placard exhorting subway riders not to leave their newspaper behind when they get off the train.
“Please put it in a trash can,� riders are reminded. After which Neil Neches, an erudite writer in the transit agency’s marketing and service information department, inserted a semicolon. The rest of the sentence reads, “that’s good news for everyone.�
Semicolon sightings in the city are unusual, period, much less in exhortations drafted by committees of civil servants. In literature and journalism, not to mention in advertising, the semicolon has been largely jettisoned as a pretentious anachronism.
Americans, in particular, prefer shorter sentences without, as style books advise, that distinct division between statements that are closely related but require a separation more prolonged than a conjunction and more emphatic than a comma.
“When Hemingway killed himself he put a period at the end of his life,� Kurt Vonnegut once said. “Old age is more like a semicolon.�
In terms of punctuation, semicolons signal something New Yorkers rarely do. Frank McCourt, the writer and former English teacher at Stuyvesant High School, describes the semicolon as the yellow traffic light of a “New York sentence.� In response, most New Yorkers accelerate; they don’t pause to contemplate.
Semicolons are supposed to be introduced into the curriculum of the New York City public schools in the third grade. That is where Mr. Neches, the 55-year-old New York City Transit marketing manager, learned them, before graduating from Tilden High School and Brooklyn College, where he majored in English and later received a master’s degree in creative writing.
But, whatever one’s personal feelings about semicolons, some people don’t use them because they never learned how.
In fact, when Mr. Neches was informed by a supervisor that a reporter was inquiring about who was responsible for the semicolon, he was concerned.
“I thought at first somebody was complaining,� he said.
A surprisingly fun and funny article, even if you don’t care about the semicolon. (Although you should.)
Once upon a time, bigger newspapers routinely had reporters write up the obits or, at least, flesh out the ones of general news interest. In Sunday’s Los Angeles Times, James Healy gets just such an obit.
A brief excerpt:
When he wasn’t defusing roadside bombs, Army Sgt. James K. Healy often could be found drawing, taking out the stress of each day by creating cartoon characters of family members and friends.
“Any time he would sit down in the evenings, he would have a sketchbook with him. He was always drawing something,” said his wife, Shannon, 23. “I have books and books full of his drawings.”
Family members said Healy, 25, an avid “Star Wars” enthusiast from Hesperia, was the unofficial artist for the Ft. Knox, Ky.-based 703rd Explosive Ordnance Detachment while it was fighting in Afghanistan. He designed a logo for his company and made signs that some of the soldiers hung on their doors.
At home with his wife and 15-month-old son Wyatt, he “would draw Wyatt and I as comic characters and himself as well,” his wife said. “He would do little comic strips of the three of us . . . as he did one of us when Wyatt was first born.”
Healy was killed Jan. 7 on his second tour of duty when his vehicle struck a roadside bomb in Laghar Juy, Afghanistan, southeast of Kabul and in a mountainous region on the eastern border with Pakistan. Also killed in the attack was Army Maj. Michael L. Green, 36, of Chagrin Falls, Ohio.
Well worth the full read.
Well, OK, Orange County Register publisher Terry Horne didn’t say that exactly, but pretty close:
Horne believes the combination of offerings will fill gaps for both readers and advertisers. The subscription-based Register will include premium content targeted at a mostly older readership. Free community weeklies go to a broader base with a hyper-local focus. OCregister.com will provide free content to a younger audience. Local advertisers will have a similar choice to get their message out on any or all of these platforms.
The strategy is in response to what he calls the perfect storm: advertising revenue is down 14 percent; newsprint price increases have added $5 million to annual costs with more price hikes on the way; and paid circulation continues to decline, down 3 percent in the six months ended Sept. 30.
Horne implemented a series of changes last month to address the immediate crisis, including 25 layoffs, consolidation of the stand-alone business section into the main news section, elimination of the stock tables, the end of Business Monday and a new system dividing local news into six separate geographic zones.
“We’re trying to create a newspaper to serve Orange County given the economic challenges that we face today,” Horne said.
Nothing like this has been announced in the High Desert — or, if it has, no one is telling me — but I could certainly imagine something like this working here. The other day, Peter was just commenting that it seems like our online audience and our print audience overlap, but are, for the most part, very different.
If I were publisher — and that’s as funny to me as it no doubt is to you — I might have Star-like papers in Adelanto, Apple Valley, Barstow, Hesperia, Oak Hills, Victorville and maybe one or two other areas. There would be no Daily Press news staff. Every day, an editor in Victorville would grab the day’s stories from each of the outlying regions, and stick it in a (slimmed down) Press-Dispatch, but the focus at each of the bureaus would be the weekly free publications, which would run longer stories of local interest that might (or might not) matter to anyone else in the High Desert. Online, a similar structure would exist, with the Press-Dispatch site working like HighDesert.com does now, and just serve as a portal to all the individual sites, showing new stories as they appear.
Readers would win, because they would have their choice of daily regional coverage (for a modest fee) or free weekly coverage of exclusively local information. Advertisers would have a choice of reaching either a general audience or a very narrow, very specific one. (It’s probable that different advertisers are interested in residents in Apple Valley than are interested in Adelanto residents, for instance.)
I’m sure there are problems with this model: I don’t have access to all the information about costs or long-term contracts or what have you. Still, I bet the OCR plan works to a large degree. We shall see.
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