Asking tough questions is part of journalism

SACRAMENTO, Calif., USA - The shooting in Folsom, Calif a few days ago - the shooting in which a 23-year-old man with a knife was shot and killed by three Folsom police officers - is a good example of a kind of journalism to which readers should object.

Shooting story

While The Sacramento Bee is congratulating itself on its investigative work on a Child Protective Services' story - and the resignation of the CPS chief - it is letting lesser stories slip through without forcing issues, asking the tough questions.

What's wrong with the shooting story?

From the outset, the story takes on a clearly subservient tone to the Folsom Police.
"Folsom police have released few details..." And later, " Beattie did not name the three officers involved in the shooting."

Well, that may be so. Police departments are usually quite secretive about their actions and inner workings.

But please! Three police officers apparently blasted a 23-year-old man with a knife, after unsuccessfully using a taser on him. Is it too much to know who the three officers are?

Credit should be given to The Bee for following up on the sketchy story that was originally published.

But now it's time to turn up the heat on the Folsom Police and let readers know what happened. Perhaps instead of saying, "Folsom police have released few details..." The Bee could say that the Folsom Police are REFUSING to release details, REFUSING to say what police were involved in the shooting.

And maybe the reporters and editors who did the tough work on the CPS story can put those investigative skills back to work before the three unnamed Folsom Police officers have trouble getting their tasers to work properly again - and shoot another resident with their service weapons.

Amigo retires from The Sacramento Bee, just ahead of the tsunami

SACRAMENTO, Calif., USA - A friend of mine is about to retire from The Sacramento Bee newspaper, not too far ahead of the tsunami that has been slowly swamping the print industry for the last couple of years.


Howard Weaver

Howard Weaver, 58, who has been the top news executive for the entire McClatchy chain since 2001, has opted to pull the plug by the end of the year, a reaction he says more because of losing a younger brother last year - and understanding that life is getting short - than a bailing out on the industry.

Weaver had the fortune - and misfortune - to be part of the newspaper group that went out and bought up newspapers all over the country in the last couple of years, at precisely the moment that the future of the newspaper industry starting looking its most bleak. And just a few days ago, a group that rates the futures of newspapers says its likely that Weaver's home newspaper - The Sacramento Bee - is likely to go into the tank, very soon.

Goodbye Bee?

Howard was the editor of the editorial pages of The Sacramento Bee in the 1990s when I worked as a fill-in editor at the newspaper, doing the Sunday Forum section, Op-Ed and occasionally the letters to the editor.

Every day I would have to walk my page proofs by Howard's desk for an ok, which he gave quite perfunctorily.

Until one day. That day he said, "The only reason I look at these pages is to make sure you don't say 'fuck' in a headline."

I never did use any epithets in headlines and he never complained about a single page header, page design or editing job I had done in the years I worked with him.

Howard was a great editor and I missed him when he moved up to the corporate offices.

I suspect he will be greatly missed by all, now that he has moved on.

Story with a happy ending - for now, anyway

SACRAMENTO, Calif., USA - The saga of Corti Brothers being forced out of its Folsom Boulevard location ended happily in early September when the people trying to force him out by taking over the store withdrew their offer.

So for now, at least, it seems like the store will remain.

The Sacramento Bee's account is here:

Victory for Corti's

I dropped in to Corti's just twice since being back and the mood in the store is so positive, the already very attentive staff has gotten even more attentive.

Bravo...

When 'just business' isn't a good enough answer

SACRAMENTO, Calif., USA - A small neighborhood grocery store and deli operation is suddenly being forced to move out of a building it has occupied for 38 years, bumped with just a couple of months notice to make way for - another small neighborhood grocery story and deli operation.

The full story about it is detailed out in The Sacramento Bee here:

Corti's gets the boot

All of this is distressing for several reasons, not the least of which is that I have shopped at that market for years, as it offers some of the best food in the entire Sacramento area. Its staff are/were professionals and treated customers with a kindness and genuine helpfulness that you rarely find anywhere, anymore.

Corti's brothers prepared foods were a staple in my household's diet.

But more distressing is that the store is being forced out in what appears to be a predatory business strategy, the kindest description I can give to it.

The mouthpiece for the new store that will go in - called Good Eats - just a few months ago touted how he was going to remodel a restaurant called Andiamo's just 20 blocks away. He got lot of free advertising and was played up as being a really 'good guy' because he was going to remodel and renovate the site. Another company, Whole Foods, said if it could get the land, it would level it and build a new modern building.

Column on Good Eats

But suddenly that renovation seems to be forgotten and instead, Mike Teel has engineered the unceremonious ouster of the one store that would have provided a level of competition, one could deduce.

'Just business,' I suspect Mike Teel would say.

Teel is the presumptive heir to the Raley's Grocery Store fortune, news accounts always say, though his rather unceremonious departure as CEO of that chain of stores a few years back has many people wondering if the family would prefer to give all the money to the Hare Krishnas, rather than him.


Smiling at the demise of Corti Brothers?

But if anyone was surprised by this, they didn't watch what this same man did at Prosper Magazine last year, the magazine of which he was the major owner/publisher.

In that unsavory debacle, Teel shocked the staff of the magazine - a very solid group of people - by suddenly announcing last November that it was folding. The staff had no indication that he was about to dump the project. And why would they? It wasn't many months before that Teel stood center stage at one of the most extravagant and well-staged downtown parties I have ever seen in the state capital to announce a redesign of Prosper. And a lot of those comments were about what great future the magazine had, how much faith he had in the staff... and, and, and...

A great future predicted

The good news out of all this, I suppose, is that the customers loyal to the Corti Brothers store will seek out the place, no matter where it moves. The good people who have worked there - some their entire working lives - deserve to land on their feet. And I think they will.

And Good Eats? Well, it would be bad karma to wish Mike Teel and his associates in this business any ill. Or to wish that bad things befall Nancy Cleavinger, the landlord who grabbed at getting a higher rent payment, even it meant slapping the community (and a tenant of 38 years) in the face. I think both Mr. Teel and Ms. Cleavinger are about to come under the microscope for all their business dealings.

Too bad Prosper Magazine isn't still in business. This is just the kind of juicy story the editors like to get ahold of.

Oh, maybe that's why the magazine was closed down.

Gonzo journalism might be newspapers' last hope

WOODY CREEK, Colorado, USA - It was here just three years ago that Hunter S. Thompson blew his brains out, unable to face, well, we'll never really know, except that he was afraid of advancing age, worried that his best years were so far behind him in the rear view mirror that he could barely glance at them.

And then there was the drugs and the booze, of course. There was always the drugs and the booze.

Thompson haunts many journalists because he broke every rule ever taught and in doing so produced some incredibly brilliant writing, brilliant enough that his work flew off the shelves in the late 1960s and through the mid-1970s when the world suddenly became as strange as anything Hunter could imagine.

It was almost as if what many novelists said in the 80s and 90s - real life was so bizarre, who needed fiction?

But a San Francisco Chronicle review of a documentary "Gonzo" - plus the forced 'retirement' of an amigo at the Sacramento Bee - made me wish Thompson were alive to comment on the sad state of journalism in the U.S., and how those in charge of 'saving' it are so unlikely to do so.

Gonzo review

Hunter S. Thompson

Thompson had something nearly every journalist/writer today lacks - a voice. You could read a piece of his and know it was him without glancing at the bylines or any of the illustrations Ralph Steadman frequently published with Hunter's scribblings. He had many imitators, but they were just that, imitators.

Today's journalist/writer - with few exceptions - are mostly worried about mortgage payments, alimony, how their mug shot looks with their column - and simply ensuring that their corporate masters don't get angry and outsource their job to some conglomerate in Bhopal.

Not that it will make any difference, because in the world of corporate journalism, the emphasis is on corporate, not journalism - profitable corporate, profitable at an overall rate that oil companies envy.

And so readers are left with such predictable journalistic Pablum that it seems almost like an insult to that bland breakfast cereal.

Which brings me to my amigo, Bill Moore, who a few days ago left the Sacramento Bee newspaper, a bit of collateral damage to the colossal blunder of that corporation to go into deeply into debt by buying a newspaper chain, then suddenly realizing it was grossly overextended and starting selling assets like at a desperation garage sale.

It's stock went down so fast after that purchase it made Rite Aid look like a winner.

So, as it is with corporations, the people making the biggest salaries find a way to cut the jobs of the people way down the food chain, hoping the stockholders will think that these tiny economies - coupled with redesigns, re-packagings and more public relations - God yes, more and more public relations - will somehow fool readers and the public into thinking that less news, written by more timid (and usually largely uninformed) writers into smaller news pages will be worth looking at.

Yeah, right.

Hunter S. Thompson would probably admire the balls of these people to sell less for more, even though he would hate what they are doing.

So what about this fellow named Bill Moore? Who the hell is he?

Bill Moore had a long career with the newspaper, spending some time out on the news desk before making a gaffe one Sunday many years ago in story choice and placement, a gaffe that eventually pushed him out of news and into the editorial department where he eventually took over as editor of a Sunday section that looked at the world - Forum it was called.

And, as the expression goes, when it was good, it was very, very good. And when it was bad, it was awful.

But Bill had a quirky creative mind and it scared a lot of corporate journalistic types. He fell from grace again a few years ago in change of editors and ending up shuffling letters to the editor in the editorial section of the newspaper, keeping his head down, doing his job, working hard.

And now he is retired, but really just shoved out the door - just when the newspaper needs him the most.

Needs him the most?

This morning, as I was reading the latest batch of 'save-the-newspaper's-ass' columns from various editors:

The new Forum

From The Editor

I was struck by how at the exact moment they were turning Bill Moore loose, he is exactly the kind of creative lunatic the Sacramento Bee needs to get them off their collective, smug asses and start publishing stories and photos and information that people would really want to read.

Could he produce, edit, suggest true Gonzo journalism to make the Sacramento Bee readable? I don't know for sure. But I think so.

But now that that the newspaper has sent him to the unemployment office, it won't either.