The slow death of a daily, Part 2: the grouchiness continues

You'd think that with all the talk about print newspapers going under, everyone would be looking to improve their news product.


But I guess people here don't want a better product - they'd rather complain and call the Daily News "The Snooze."


I don't know if you've ever noticed that I've never once called it that.


But it does become complacent unless some other entity is on its tail. Jim Roy with The Liberator is now on its tail; the Current is back on its tail - a place that, again, a weekly really has no place being.


It's not the fault of the reporters; it's the powers that be. The average person has no idea how much what a reporter files is changed before it gets to print. But the reporter gets the complaints.

What is the reporter supposed to say? "That's not what I wrote?" (That's what we say.)

In fact, I actually wish there was some kind of organized group of all us reporters.


I will back off my frequent statement that sometimes when I read an account of a meeting in the DN, I wonder if the reporter was at the same meeting as I was.


Now I've got the editor of the Current going to meetings with me and - lo and behold! - our accounts and impressions of what was important to pass on about the meeting are different.


And that is why you need to read more than one paper - or, in this case, both papers and every blog post written about a meeting.


An example: the recent hearing about the wind energy ordinance.


I reported one way, editor reported another way and Mary Baker Eaton was struck by other stuff (here's the story that ran in the Current). I will state here that I tried not to get carried away by the emotion -


To wit, while I totally sympathize with the Back Bay residents who have the top of an enormous turbine in their line of sight, I also totally sympathized with the guy out here on the island whose house now is in complete shade all day because someone built a monstrosity in front of it.


The guy thought the lot in front of him was not buildable - a situation that changed after the municipal water and sewer was put in.


I think it's fair to say he thought his life was never going to be the same since he moved.

The same person who said her life would never be the same also said she had already been ripped from one home in the city because of eminent domain (which is what struck a chord with Mary) ... well, yeah, but so was I, and so were lots of other people ...


There comes a point - and I think coverage of this issue reached it a while ago - where people stop getting your news angle because you're still carrying on about emotional issues.


I thought a dead flat, straight out account of the hearing was the way to go at this point because OK, the city gets it now that they may have goofed and people are trying to fix it so the same mistakes aren't made again.

(I have to explain at this point that I somehow totally missed filing my piece on the turbine hearing until the next morning - Thursday - when the editor questioned me about where it was. She had already written something up so she plugged in parts of my dead flat story, and quotes.)


As for not being notified ... well, maybe they did not all get registered letters (direct abutters did), which is bad, but hell, even I knew there was a turbine on tap for the Richey property and I wasn't reporting on Newburyport at the time (and I wasn't reading the DN regularly). So I take issue with a lead in a news story that says, "They never saw it coming."

So now I'll say that I last year applied to the Daily News and was put off. Does that mean that everything I say, no matter how valid, can be dismissed?

Well yeah, according to some people.

I didn't knock the Current last year because I didn't read it - it wasn't worth reading recently, until Barbara Taormina took over as editor.


Someone the other day told me that the Current has to work double-time now to make up for the credibility it lost last year.


And I'm getting complaints about the Current's coverage of the turbine issue being too "one sided."

Now the Current is a major source of my income, Barbara reads the blog and I can't complain about the Current ... you have no idea how much that bugs me (no offense intended, Barbara).

So I knock my own stories, when I think knocking is due.


That does not include the ones that were changed substantially, because knocking them would mean knocking the person who hands out the assignments, or her boss ... AARGGGGGGHHHHH ...