A Holiday Fund appeal

Things are tough all over.

In Mountain View, the city is again facing $5 million or more in budget cuts, and the day worker center must divide among a hundred or so workers job requests that number in single digits. When one employer wrote a bad check after hiring several workers and declined to make good on it, the director drove all the way to Monterey County to collect. Things have become so bad that day workers are giving up and going back to Mexico and other home countries.

And in Los Altos, the house at 47 View St. appears to have been taken off the market after its list price was knocked down from $27 million to $19.9 million. (The absurdity of this property revealed itself again on Thanksgiving night, when a homeless veteran died in a bus stop just one mile away).

Some of you may need special encouragement to open up your wallets for charity this year, so here it comes:

It is time for NOE readers (and contributors) to support the best thing the local papers do all year -- the Holiday Fund drives through which the Voice and Town Crier fund a combined 22 local charities. The economic downturn is doubly painful for those who rely on these charities, as an increasing number of clients must share fewer resources. Even the Holiday Fund drives themselves have suffered, both at about 60% of last year's total. Please go to the websites now, read the profiles of the charities, and make a donation. For further inspiration, you can look to the example of Bob Schick, who made his dedicated his donation to the Voice fund to the memory of the prune trees in Cuesta Annex.

Me? A hothead?

As BigDra recently reminded me, and as I recently for some reason mentioned during an interview with a judge, I have a blog. I suppose I should post something.

It has been a busy few weeks: a certain individual visited, and I earned my first ever red card this Sunday while politely explaining to a referee why he had misapplied a well-known rule.

Speaking of mistaking reasoned analysis for anger, the Voice celebrated the unveiling of Mountain View's new child care center in Rengstorff Park, crediting "cooler heads" for the completion of the project. Readers familiar with the project may remember that city used millions in taxpayer dollars and eliminated an acre of parkland in the part of the city that can least afford it in order to subsidize one private company over others in the same industry.

Being cool-headed himself, perhaps The Professor can explain why we shouldn't use the word "boondoggle."

UPDATED UPDATE: To be fair, for once, the Voice refers specifically to Jac Siegel's concerns about parking and Matt Pear's "grumbling" about liability, presumably for the cost of the loan should the operator go belly up. While those are hardly the best arguments against the project, I don't think they indicate a lack of cool-headedness. Pear's previous complaints that the project was "cradle-to-grave" socialism, on the other hand, might qualify.

Maybe a giant birdhouse or the world's largest jungle gym

Everybody's got an idea for what to do with Hangar One, at least so long as somebody else is paying.

Imagine for a second that the hangar never existed. Now imagine that somebody offers to pay the Navy $500,000 for the right to build a giant steel skeleton that is going to cost somebody -- either the public or some enterprising business -- more than $10 million to either use or demolish. Is that a deal the public wants the Navy to take?

The Navy announced last month that it could strip the hangar's contaminated siding and clean its steel frame for about $500,000 less than it would cost to take down the whole thing. (Notably -- and I'm only pointing this out to needle my sister's fiance -- the costs of demolition are more than twice the Navy's original number, but the estimated costs of fully restoring the hangar are also much higher than previously suggested).

That simple comparison tends to obscure the point, though. If the Navy goes with its preferred option, at some time in the future somebody is going to have to put up a whole lot more money either to replace the siding or to take the structure down.

Anna Eshoo, resisting calls to get the federal government to be this somebody, framed the issue to the Voice's Daniel DeBolt as follows:

Further appropriations money "would have to come up in a new Congress," she said. "I don't think it's news to anyone that dollars are scarce. When the country is spending $2.5 billion a week on the war it really hits home. Funding for infrastructure, funding for education -- as sad as it sounds all of these areas are really pushed. If this is to be a priority I will work on it. But it's tight, everything is tight."

I'm not ready to admit that tearing down Hangar One is the best option, but it is refreshing to see a Democrat actually stand up against earmarks. I suppose that it is a little easier to do so when nobody is even in place to benefit from this one.

Now you guys are just baiting me

The days appear numbered for La Costena, a fixture in the Latino community for decades. Naturally, the Voice article quotes only a customer with a Jewish last name.

The paper also boldly refuses to examine the factual claims it attributes to the restaurant's owners.  One would think that, of all publications, the Mountain View Voice would look in its archives to see whether the restaurant actually has won eight Best Of contests in a row.  (It hasn't).  On the other hand, a very quick check of the Voice website also confirms that Las Costena did in fact set the record for world's largest burrito.  But who has five minutes to look these things up? 

What's scaring us: Art & Wine edition

I've been a little under the weather the last few days, so it feels like the right time for a linkdump, in the form of a list of things people are afraid of this week:

The Bush Administration: The Environmental Protection Agency protecting the environment.

Speaking of which: Jesus.

Congress: Big campaign donors being unable to use "I was just following orders" as a defense for helping the government spy on citizens.

Remember when people said that was not a defense?

Los Altos Hills residents: Toni Casey running for office

Personally I hope she does, because I am curious whether Los Altos Hills is conservative enough that her affiliation with George Bush might actually be to her advantage.

Los Altos residents: Mountain View residents

Don't worry Mom and Dad, the police think she was adopted.

Mountain View residents: Brown people, and also gays

Last week, I lamented that people were more upset about the Voice's use of the non-word "preggers" in a headline than they were about a double-murder that orphaned an 8-year-old boy. Readers of the Voice site responded (with some prodding from yours truly) in a flurry of posts insanely blaming the tragedy on low-income housing and federal immigration policy. (Not a single poster said anything along of the lines of 'I hope the police catch the people responsible for this.')

'Preggers' headline shocks city

A gruesome double murder last week left two siblings dead in Mountain View last week, after the 911 system completely failed them. While a little boy slept in the next room, Omar Aquino and Teresa Sanchez became the victims of Mountain View's fourth and fifth homicides this year. The tragedy came only a few days after Leonardo Dizon Hilario was stabbed to death at his girlfriend's home.

Also, the Voice used an arguably inappropriate word in a headline.

Guess which one readers are upset about.

Don't get me wrong: I thought the "preggers" headline was juvenile and the article -- a short breaking-news type of story about the fact that women have babies -- was pointless. But also: really? That is the thing we're all concerned about?

The (white) couple behind the day workers

If I didn't know better, I'd say Mexicans are boycotting the Voice. The last three articles about the Latino community have relied almost exclusively on people from outside the Latino community for information.

But this is one of the few times in my life that I do, in fact, know better. The best book I ever read about journalism contained a list of what readers like, with talking heads at the very bottom, ahead of only "numbers." (At the top of the list? Furry animals, followed by small children). As you might imagine, though, it turns out that it's much easier to get a quote from a talking head than from somebody you've never met before that isn't accustomed to talking to the press.

That's why the most recent feature story on the day worker center was about a white couple from Los Altos, a story on the deportation of day worker and youth leader Luciano Casiano-Miranda relied on Phil Cosby for perspective*, and a story about the graduation ceremony of sorts for English learners quoted only Maurice Ghysels and Judy Crates (and that one was about Latinos who speak English, no less). Ironically, only the story about the couple from Los Altos had an original quote from a Latino, and it was from Maria Marroquin, director of the center.

Don't get me wrong, I like white people as much as the next guy. But if 40 percent of students in the Mountain View school district really are Latino, it would be nice to hear from one of them once in a while. Unfortunately, given its reliance on real estate advertisements, the paper is more likely to boycott Mexicans and other non-home-buying populations, rather than al reves.

UPDATE: The story on Caciano-Miranda included a lifted quote from him, though the source unknown. And Maria also has a quote -- as does John Rinaldi -- in a story about the unexpected cost of the day worker center's new location. Looks like it's time to get in touch with those white folks from Los Altos again.

Stupid idea finished, woe is us.

It's time for another NOE Reader Quiz.

A headline in last week's Voice declared "Tunnel's done, time to celebrate." Before I give you the link, guess whether that headline appeared in the news section or the editorial pages.

...

You were right.

I'm as big a fan of the Stevens Creek Trail as anybody, and I understand the importance of maintaining good relationships with people at City Hall. But, just off the top of my head, I can think of enough potential criticisms of this project that it may not be the best candidate to induce the paper to drop all pretense of objectivity. (The article, of course, mentions none of them).

• $3.5 million is a large amount of taxpayer money to spend to extend the trail a very short distance.
• The city used eminent domain to complete this section of the trail, which should always give us pause even when it's justified.
• And, as the residents who posted comments on the Voice website pointed out, the city has yet to address concerns about inadequate lighting, lack of emergency phone access and displacement of homeless people.
  

Does anybody have an image of the page from Our Dumb Century in which the Onion ran a photo of the Hindenburg going down in flames underneath the headline: "AWESOME! Nation wowed by tremendous Hindenburg Explosion." I feel like that would be appropriate here.

Even gang members recognize bad journalism when they see it

Usually, when local papers write about gangs, they generally focus on what gang activity means for white people. They include the perspective of police, teachers, non-profits and government officials, but almost never gang members themselves.

This is not surprising, as most reporters generally don't have a lot of contacts who belong to the economic class that makes up gang membership. And with local newspaper profits largely dependent on real estate advertisements, publishers have little incentive to include the perspective of people who can't afford to buy houses.

So when two recent shootings renewed my alma mater's interest in gang activity in Mountain View, the only person who seemed to be concerned enough to do something about the unbalanced coverage was a Norteno.

The Voice received an unexpected visit last week from a Mountain View Norteno who says he is trying to clean up his life for the sake of his child.

...

The gang member, whose name is being withheld for his safety and his family's safety, wanted to shed light on the gang culture ...

The article goes on to cite a single anonymous source, even when he makes factual claims that could be easily verified or disproved. You almost have to admire a story that is this open about how little work actually went into it.

We shall overcome

In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., I figured today would be a good time to direct readers to the lawsuit LASD has filed against the County Board of Education for its preposterous approval of Bullis Charter School's effort to restrict poorer kids from enrolling.

After the Voice editorial blasted LASD for picking a fight with rich people, one commenter equated the lawsuit to "ultimately the greatest sin in American history."

That felt weird

Let's get back to founding principles...

The Voice is running a three-part series on the problems media consolidation poses for democracy. Part one includes the following:

"Award-winning media critic Ted Glasser says the Bay Area's media consolidation is emblematic of a larger problem and leads to three things: fewer journalists, homogenization of coverage (with the same story appearing in multiple newspapers), and poor media coverage of journalism itself."

Glass houses, guys.

The article is written by the publisher of the Pacific Sun, which was an independent paper up until a few years ago, when it was purchased by Embarcadero Publishing Company. The story has already appeared in other understaffed EPC papers, including the flagship Palo Alto Weekly (where readers had plenty of critiques of the article itself), the Pleasanton Weekly and the Danville Weekly.

I can't decide whether this is actually ironic, or if it just looks really silly.

Local holiday fund profiles

I figure we might as well kick off 2008 with a positive post.

Two days are left to donate to the Voice Holiday Fund (so named as part of the paper's ongoing War on Christmas). The paper has lined up foundation grants to match donations, so doing so is doubly worth it.

The recipients include:

• Community Health Awareness Council
• Support Network for Battered Women
• Partners for New Generations
• Community School of Music and Arts
• Mountain View Day Worker Center
• Community Services Agency, and
• RotaCare Clinic

The Town Crier's Holiday Fund, which is much older and tends to raise more money, is benefitting 17 organizations this year, including:

• EPA Kids Foundation, Truck of Love, Community Services Agency
• Help One Child, Partners for New Generations, Community Homeless Alliance Ministry
• Rotacare, Mother Branch, Community Health Awareness Council
• Sunday Friends, Challenge Learning Center and Career Closet

(The rest of the profiles either are not yet posted or I just can't find them.)

Catching up with a former Voice intern (unfortunately not THAT one).

The Economist has apologized for plagiarizing a story that former Voice intern David Herbert wrote while in Uganda this summer. Yes, that David Herbert. (Turns out I'm not the only Voice alum who's "basically ethically bankrupt.")

Suggests Herbert, "If you reference this on your blog, try not to talk about my own indiscretions."

Sorry Dave. Maybe next time you'll think twice about telling a higher-up, "That's your lede? Why don't you print that out so I can wipe my ass with it."

Talking to people is hard

This weekend, we return to our roots as I avoid studying and instead make snide and unhelpful comments about coverage of the week's local news. Let's get started.

Anonymity abounds in this week's Voice, as readers never learn the names of the Old Mountain View residents who are trying to relegate day workers to the poorer parts of town. Elsewhere, a profile of a 10-yeard old rapper includes perspectives from everyone but him. (Correction: I'm an idiot.) And the second part of a two-part series on Orion Park (besides misusing the phrase "begging the question") relies largely on old Voice articles for its information.

However, since posting its original article about a nanny arrested for locking a two-year-old in a car, the Voice has added her name, Juhee Hong, and some background information. (Both articles are still online, just in case the story wasn't disturbing enough the first time.)

The Voice's unrequited love

I will give the Voice that Google should be more responsive to the local newspaper. I just seriously doubt that anybody cares.

Here's a fun game to play with last week's Voice editorial complaining about the repeated brush-off: Imagine that an ex wrote it about you, and change the text accordingly. For example, the fourth paragraph becomes:

For my part, I regularly send e-mails to him, inquiring about his plans, among other things. (Like the rest of his gender, he communicates primarily through e-mail.) The most common response I've received is no response at all. The second-most common response is, "I'll get back to you" — followed by silence.

The problem with this analogy is that Google and the Voice were never dating in the first place, despite once contemplating marriage. It has always been hard to get information out of the company, and in many respects was much harder before IPO.

In any case, the jilted lover bit is unbecoming of the editorial pages of an award-winning paper like the Voice, and certainly no way to catch the Town Crier.

I would like to see a story in the Voice to the effect of "Is the GooglePlex good for Mountain View." It is an important question that the Voice is in the best position to answer. Two weeks ago, the Voice listed the tax revenues the city gets from the company, but that was about it. The story neglected to mention the other public agencies that also benefit from these funds, nor any of the other projects, large and small, for which the company should get some credit: outfitting the city with a free wireless network, spiffing up the bookmobile and sponsoring the firefighters' pancake breakfast, to name a few. (I think the Voice's critique of the company for adding to traffic is misguided: Google has long had one of the best transportation demand management programs around).

The company's success is also, it would seem, a contributing factor to Mountain View's ongoing gentrification. This is a good thing if you already own your home, unless you own your home next to the newest location for a whole bunch of luxury homes. If the Voice wants to complain about Google, it should complain about how the city's poorer residents have had to move away or crowd in with their friends and families as their apartments have become more expensive or been converted to condos. It's certainly a more compelling story to tell than the one about the company not returning reporters' e-mails.

"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.

We're getting mixed messages here, guys

Good indicators that a news article is thinly sourced:

• The headline uses the passive voice.
• The thrust of the article relies on anonymous sources
  
• The writer qualifies the second sentence with the word "purportedly."
• A later sentence begins: "It was not confirmed how well..."
• An editorial about the story states "it is not clear how such an action would work."

The Voice went 5-for-5 this week in a follow-up to the Town Crier impression it did two weeks ago, once again attacking the work furlough inmates for their ill-mannered rambunctiousness. At least this time we are given more information about the source of these allegations -- they seem to be little old ladies who don't very much like being around poor people outside of church.

In a schizophrenic editorial, the paper sympathizes with these anonymous sources but defends the program. This is all wrong. If you really want to be the Town Crier, you don't print things in the news section that readers might plausibly interpret to conflict with the opinion of the editorial. Otherwise, what's the point of running a local paper?

To be fair, it does take a certain level of Town Crier-ness to refer to a parking garage as "gorgeous" in a headline. That is how you do cheerleading right -- shamelessly.

Hints, allegations and other things left unsaid

The Voice continues to repeat the allegations of anonymous letters (sound familiar?), this time accusing senior administrators at the elementary school district of bribing HR director Stephanie Totter and CFO Rebecca Wright in order to help inflate their own pensions. The gist of the story is that Totter denies Wright's recent retirement announcement has anything to do with the allegations. That's better than the original article, I suppose, in that at least somebody was given a chance to respond.

But by repeatedly printing denials, the press can create the illusion of a scandal despite lacking the any direct evidence of one.

Of course, as Donald Rumsfeld said, that's not the same as the evidence of absence. This is particularly true when the people responsible for finding the evidence don't really seem to be trying very hard to find it. (While news reporters often fit this description, weapons inspectors do not).

To be fair, the state pension board is looking into matter. But the board didn't make a determination that the allegations were credible. It responded to a request from the superintendent, who may have been simply trying to ward off pressure from the media.

The next time the Voice questions somebody on anonymous allegations, I hope they respond with my favorite line from Blue Chips (one of my least favorite movies). Nick Nolte answers a reporter's question about alleged incidents of point-shaving by his basketball team by saying:

"How long are you gonna keep this bullshit up, Ed? Huh? You know Goddamn well there was no such incident. There was an alleged incident which you invented. In the same way that if I assert that you sleep with sheep, than it is alleged that you sleep with sheep.

(And yes, I realize that I don't exactly have clean hands here, given what my coverage of the allegations about the city attorney Michael Martello's relationship with the head of the garbage company. But, despicable as that coverage was, at least we were clear about the source of the allegations and ran a front-page story when they turned out to be unfounded).

You go to print with the facts you have...

A great day, today. My cousin Sarah gave birth. The Supreme Court rebuked the Bush Administration for its refusal to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. Baseball started. And it was the first night of Passover, allowing us to remember a time when we didn't start all of the wars in the world.

So let's ruin the mood with some mean-spirited blogging...

In rather unsurprising news, Santa Clara County is looking to ax its work furlough center in Mountain View. It basically works like jail, except the inmates get to leave to go to their jobs (and this happens less). The probation department first proposed eliminating the program two years ago, but changed its mind in response to political pressure.

Unfortunately, it seems that somebody from the Town Crier snuck in a paragraph near the bottom of the Voice's recent story:

Though Whisman has always been a mostly industrial neighborhood, a recent letter to the Voice indicates that new residential development in the area could lead to complaints about the facility. The anonymous letter claims that some inmates are prone to "yelling, spitting and making comments towards women who are waiting at the light rail station" in the early morning.

I can't decide what's worse: openly speculating on the basis of a single anonymous letter, or using the news section to reprint allegations that wouldn't have been allowed in the opinion section.