• If you look carefully, you can see the newest lane of Interstate 205. Although I get the feeling that we'll need 4 lanes in each direction as soon as teh 3-lane model is up and running.
• Will the city's new "high performance training" yield high performance results?
• Downtown's being turned into the center for all things bean in California. And you know what? I'm actually looking forward to it. Some more chili cooks wouldn't hurt, though.
• It's completion was always a foregone conclusion: Tracy Hills is back on the City Council's radar. And Evelyn Tolbert's abstention from Tuesday's vote might even be a signal that she's ready to run for mayor and away from that contentious issue.
• Friday night lights tonight mean fall's here, regardless of the calendar. And I've been waiting since mid-April. Because that's when the S.F. Giants' season was effectively over.
• I can't wait to see how everyone spins this one. Let the shirk-off and BS-fest begin.
• Calvin and Hobbes quote of the week: "I don't need to compromise my principles, because they don't have the slightest bearing on what happens to me anyway."
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3 comments:
I was curious if you might have an opinion on the perception that TP is increasingly looking like a right-wing conspiracy theory forum rather than a balanced presentation of news, facts and opinion? I ask this because it seems like loons like David Kerst, Scott Hurban and Frank Acquila are increasingly getting significant play in the opinion section.
One theory is that TP has decided to court controversy in an effort to build readership, following the models of O'Reilly, Coulter or townhall.com, where outrage serves to generate interest and profit, all at the expense of reason.
TP is looking much different from most small-town newspapers in that regard, where local interests take center stage and opinion editors do a better job of refocusing on local matters.
For me, I can spend a few moments now and again writing notes in opposition to this dry rot, but better editorial filtering would also add value.
Do you think TP is on the right track?
I think it's starting to look like a right-wing forum because those folks evidently have a lot of time on their hands (and motivation) to spew their vitriol to the world.
I don't know why certain folks seem to get a lot of page time in the TP, as it isn't my decision (I'm thankful they give me a platform, though). But having once run a newspaper and opinion section myself, I would guess that it's because they're the ones writing in. It's the extremists who tend to be the loudest voices in the crowd.
If there were some commone-sense conservatives or liberals writing, I'm sure that they'd get published, too.
Thanks. Based on this I processed my recent experiences and decided that perhaps the policy was as follows: all critique of individual missives is now delegated to the comments. Published materials must reflect something other than mere critique. The effect of this is that prolific (prolix?) conspiracy theorists get more column space and responses to them are left to the response section. So, yes, it depends on the volume of submissions. The weird thing is that I would have suspected advocating really extreme views (Al Galviz (???) on using WMDs against...well, everyone) would have been filtered in the public interest.
But, of course, it is not my paper though I hope it survives all the changes to the industry from technology and competition. Diversity is good.
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