Swellness abounds

The Merc's special "report" on Los Altos describes in detail the way in which nothing bad ever happens here. The article begins by glorifying the asinine practice of staking claims on downtown streets in advance of the Festival of Lights Parade, while the map accompanying the story makes the two cities appear to have two country clubs and only one school.

It's a different story in Mountain View, where the city just experienced its fourth and fifth homicides of the year.

Perhaps I'm missing something

Last Friday, the Mercury's top story was about immigration status of the driver who killed a 12-year-old bicyclist in front of her school on the last day of class.  The Merc made a self-fulfilling prophecy about the story "renewing the debate on whether undocumented people should be allowed to apply for driver's licenses."  Lo and behold, after some interviews suggested they should be, several letter writers wrote to argue the point.  Voila: debate renewed.

Appearing immediately below this story was an article about the sheriff's deputy who killed two bicyclists receiving only misdemeanor charges.  (This is not a surprise.  Given our district attorneys' track record of failing to prosecute drivers for killing bicyclists and pedestrians, the easiest way to kill somebody and get away with it is to do it from behind a steering wheel.) Nowhere did the article suggest that we should have a debate about whether sheriff's deputies should be allowed to apply for driver's licenses.  

Perhaps we should be debating whether people who kill other people with their cars be allowed to have driver's licenses.  I will start: no.

A skull-cracking analysis of what ails the Mercury News

After trying and failing to explain to a confused out-of-town guest why the news section of the Saturday's San Francisco Chronicle consisted of only eight pages, I sat down this morning to thumb through a hard copy of the Merc for the first time since I got home two weeks ago. My mom took the front and my dad took the "local," leaving me with sports. A teaser on the front page of the section read:

"The Giants' young lineup did not score till the ninth inning."

There are far better reasons to mock the Merc, but none that require so little work on my part.

Sad news for the reality-based community

The once great San Jose Mercury News is surreptitiously trying to poll readers on how it should destroy itself. I suppose it's better to do these things intentionally and all at once, but that hardly makes ideas like naming the sections of the paper Live, Play and Innovate or scrapping every section but Business any less tragicomic.

If they are having trouble figuring out how to support their operation, they should call Bob Novak, who somehow manages to get paid for columns like the one he wrote this weekend. It consisted of a claim that some anonymous had told Novak that some another anonymous person or people had told him that anonymous people who work for the Clinton campaign had some unknown information about Obama but weren't telling anybody what it was. I can't imagine any other profession in which you could turn out that kind of work product and still keep your job.

Or if that fails, maybe they should take the advice of my former boss and try to "make it not suck."

Nevermind

You guys remember how concerned I was when the Mercury continued cannibalizing itself in the name of high profit margins by firing 31 reporters a few weeks ago?

Nevermind.

"Goof" vs. "fuck-up"

"Goof" -- intentionally spreading false information for purposes of a joke. Saying that the city may change its name to Mountain Dew, California, or that it is recruiting a minor league baseball team to play in McKelvey Park are both examples of goofs.

"Fuck-up" -- spreading false information while thinking it's true. Maintaining that Mountain View has made approval of Home Depot's proposal to move into San Antonio Shopping Center contingent upon the company paying the city a quarter of a million dollars to establish a permanent day worker center, or that Home Depot has given the city a quarter-million unsolicited -- that is a fuck-up.

[UPDATE 7/13: This post has been edited in response to criticism in the comments section].

Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom ... of the press ... to destroy itself

The Mercury News celebrated Freedom Day by firing 31 reporters Monday, seemingly weakening our democracy once again. Together with the 15 people who voluntarily took severance packages in the last months, the Merc lost about 20 percent of an editorial staff still recovering from many rounds of cuts.

This is a shame. Many of those reporters -- S.L. Wykes, Kate Folmar and Dylan Hernandez come to mind -- are particulary good at their jobs. But the simple fact is that news is continuing to get cheaper. Consequently, the news-gathering function is worth less and less. Before anyone (Joc) replies that this is all the fault of greedy owners, please read the Mountain View Voice story about the city's lawsuit with Shoreline Amphitheater auditing firm Daoro, Zydel & Holland and ask yourself how much time it take for you to get this information yourself?

Mountain View city attorney Michael Martello "announced" the trial date.
What appears to have happened is that the judge announced the trial date, and at some point Martello told the Palo Alto Daily News (which not located in Mountain View, nor Palo Alto, for that matter), which wrote a story and thereby alerted the Voice. While I don't have a reason to think Martello's lying, I decided to confirm it with the court's Website. I timed myself. Took me two minutes.

Daoro attorney Farley Neuman "is a self-described specialist in accounting malpractice."
In fact, Neuman has written several articles on the subject, so we shouldn't be relying on his own descritpion of himself. Type his name into Google and follow the first link.

"He said he has filed a summary judgment [sic] that describes in good detail the complex accounting issues that go back over a decade."
First of all, he has filed a motion for summary judgment along with a brief in support of it, which isn't a huge error but does indicate either shoddy editing or a lack of effort to understand this (or any) case or both. More significantly, this sentence makes it clear that the reporter never even looked at the document, nor knows for sure that it exists, despite what appears to be an invitation to read it. (It doesn't appear to be on-line yet, but it's not difficult to ask the lawyer for a copy of it or go to the courthouse).

Let's not pretend like we couldn't get the same quality of information from someone getting paid half as much in Bangalore or, for that matter, somebody getting paid nothing at all and writing on their blog.

As a sidenote, the top story on the Voice's Web site right now is about 7-11 doing a promotion for the Simpsons movie.

An unnecessarily complicated attempt to brag about my sister without sacrificing my usual mean-spiritedness

We here at NOE seek to be educational as well as entertaining, so here are some tips for aspiring journalists:

1) Myspace is not a source. But if you for some decide to use it as such, say, for an obituary about a sergeant in the U.S. Army, and it tells you that the sergeant was actually employed as a papier machet artist, and -- not getting the joke -- you print that information without verifying it, don't get defensive when the grieving family calls and ask you to correct what you've written.

(To be fair to the Merc, they corrected the story and ran an excellent article excellent article by Patrick May about Will Sigua's memorial celebration.)

2) If you are going to run an article about an award your paper won, say, for a story written by my sister Jocelyn, you should probably have the article on-line somewhere so that people don't have to go to an anti-immigration message board to read it.

3) Keep your opinions about squirrels to yourself.

The Mercury News is a slu-ut

Hola Amigos.

Please accept my apologies for my failure to comment in recent weeks on all the big local news: An anonymous water polo teammate's devious scam finally led to the collapse of Tower Records. My fellow UCLA students organized a protest against the police department's multiple uses of a Taser on an unarmed and non-violent student only to implore rally-goers to "talk to your parents [and] have them call the chancellor." (Viva la revolucion). San Jose Mercury News reporters were told to wait by their phones to find out if they would keep their jobs. And the corner bar across the street from my apartment changed ownership but still refused to add a single window.

Yes, much has gone unremarked. Luckily for you all, today's Mercury News has something that is just too good for even a diligent student like yours truly to pass up without commentary.

According to the story, Stephanie Herrerra -- a "Christian mother with values" -- was terribly mortified to discover the toy Little Mermaid doll she bought her daughter as a present was saying impolite things about her daughter's sexual habits. Herrerra was appalled, but the worst part is that now her daugher got stuck with some lame nativity scene instead.

The funny part about this story is that it took an astute reader to point out the very strong possibility that Herrerra is using the Merc in order to drive up the price for the dolls she had already been planning to sell on E-bay. I suppose it's possible the writer may have been trying to hint at that in the story as a way of getting back at whoever assigned it to her. Or maybe debasing the paper is some new hardball strategy in the labor negotiations with MediaNews. Still, somebody should have caught this before the story ran.

Not so long ago, the Mercury was shining light on the toxicity of consumer electronic waste and linking the CIA to the spread of crack in the inner-city. Now it is giving ink to small-time con artists like Herrerra and Anna Ayala, the woman who falsely claimed to find a finger in her bowl of Wendy's chili. Ayala got on the front page at least 11 times last year. So we probably haven't heard the last of Herrerra.

First, make sure not to get fatally ill.

Death and pestilence correspondent Erik Koland wrote in with this tidbit over the weekend:

The Mercury News came with a special insert today, "Your Guide to
Pandemic Flu." It was a poster-sized fold out that helps you guide your
way through the upcoming pandemic flu in which deaths could be in the
millions.

It was sponsored by the Department of Health, Santa Clara County.

So, hang on to that, I guess. Thankfully, the Merc got back to being its new self as the week progressed. For more of the news that makes Silicon Valley tick, go the Merc's Web site, where some of today's top stories include a controversy around A.C. Slater's dancing techniques and coverage on the overly aggressive squirrels in Cuesta Park. (We actually got a letter about this at the Voice many months ago expressing fear that the city would not do anything until a squirrel attacked a kid).

All the news that's fit to reprint

The Mercury News must really be hurting for local content. A day after running a story from the Palo Alto Daily News about a sex assault on Del Medio Avenue in Mountain View , the paper played up the story by running it word for word the exact same story again.

The only difference you can tell on the Web is that the editors decided after running the story twice they ought to give a byline to Luke Stangel (a Daily News reporter who apparently works for a no-longer-existent company called Knight Ridder). The real reason is that they either forgot or neglected to run the suspect sketch on Thursday, despite it being the main point of the story.

(Lacking a scanner, I have to ask you guys to trust me on this one).

A longer and slightly different account appeared in the Voice.

The penis mightier

Looks like reporters at the Mercury and other local Knight Ridder can't put away those post-getting-fired plans just yet.

Gary Pruitt, CEO of McClatchy, made history yesterday by becoming the first person ever to declare that San Jose is not sprawling enough. So, after buying 32 papers, the company that makes its money selling papers in rural areas getting overrun by development is selling off 12, including Nemesis of Evil nemeses the Mercury News and the Palo Alto Daily.

Far be it from me to add to the incredible amount of coverage about this maneuver -- as Lou Alexander, a former Mercury ad man blogging on Grade the News, put it: "It is like all of the journalists in the world have suddenly had to confront their mortality and have felt compelled to write about it."

I will say, though, that those concerned that the new owner might be noted paper-destroyer ANG should take heart. Where else but ANG do you find a story like this one my predecessor Grace Rauh wrote for the Fremont Argus last year.

(Why is that so many of my co-workers have gone on to bigger and better things, so to speak?)