Posted on

All the news too disturbing to print

On the road tomorrow back to, somewhere. While I am heading back from a week of business. Here are a couple of glimpses from the world in which I was once employed full time. It’s not all that great news, indeed.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune has announced it will cut back to publishing three days a week. It will become the largest U.S. city without a daily newspaper.

And although I have had a love-hate relationship with newspaper copy desks, this news about the Denver Post is nonetheless disquieting. Is that the right word?

Well, what does it matter to me, the person who reads newspapers? Everything. Everything in the world, my friend.

 

 

Posted on

On saying good of the dead

Josh McMahan and Mike “Flathead” Blanchard probably never met.

But in death they are “bros” without the necessity ever coming between them of having a conversation, beer or even a fist fight. This is due courtesy of paid obituaries in two different newspapers in two different American cities which provided more truthful glimpses of their lives than the normal such notices that “God has another angel.”

I dare say obituaries are a passion of mine but have long been required reading. It’s not just that I am aging. Of that, it is true. I want to find out who died and if it is anyone that I know. And I say died as a lesson learned long ago from my gruff but prescient journalism professor who taught that clarity is essence in news writing.

“You don’t say, he passed-a-way,” Dr. Francine Hoffman said in her near phonetic delivery, “You don’t say, he en-tered the sweet, loving-arms-of-Jesus. You say-he-died.”

Of course, news stories or news obituaries are rarely a nutshell look at the departed — with a standard “he loved little kittens” thrown in — that is the paid obit. If one pays, practically anything within reason, good taste and libel standards, are fair game. I never saw the official obituary for Dr. Hoffman, who died only a few years after retiring from Stephen F. Austin State University, but perhaps it could be forgiven if an extra modifier was used to help describe a remarkable teacher.

Understand that obituaries, like funerals and memorial services, are not for the dead but for the living. Although, the notice may be the only time one gets his or her name in the paper. That first, perhaps, maybe second to making the local police blotter. One may also never realize until reading the obituaries that people you’ve seen in your town but don’t know lived an incredible life or did great things.

But it is even rare to read in a news story on local homicides that the victim was a “scoundrel” or a “skank.” The victim seems to be perpetually feeding the elderly or had a winning smile. This topic was once discussed among friends around a campfire after I had worked in the news business for awhile. We determined the perfect response for a reporter’s query about a victim of a shoot-out with police should be: “He was really quiet. He sat around cleaning his guns all the time.”

The two candid obituaries were found on a journalism news Website thus someone in the business figured others in the business would find them newsworthy, if not amusing. True, the obits for Josh and Mike solicit a laugh at a time in which our society, for the most part, would find inappropriate. We aren’t supposed to laugh about someone dying, especially when they might have put themselves there prematurely. Most of all we are to avoid truth at all costs when speaking of the dead. Didn’t your mother teach you: “It’s not nice to say bad things about the dead.” To which your smart-ass brother replies. “Joe Blow is dead. That’s good.”

It seems that same society tolerates the honest epitaph a bit better such as when little Johnny walks among the tombstones with his parents and spots a particular headstone. It reads: “Here lies a lawyer and an honest man.” To which Johnny remarks: “Mighty small grave for two men.”

Posted on

Much drama, yet it’s just another Friday storm

Dark clouds are gathering outside from the west. It really doesn’t matter from where the clouds are gathering if they happen to be gathering  somewhere inside. Holy moly! There’s a thunderstorm in the living room, Gladys! Whoops, your big ol’ pile of blue hair just went up into a cloud of smoke from that lightning strike.

Obviously it is better when the clouds stay in their place. So they come like angry neighbors ready to do battle over that fence your great-grandpa put up in ’08. That’s 1908.

It is 5:21 p.m. Central Standard Time and it looks like Dark-30 outside. I’ve been watching the Channel 11 KHOU-TV animated weather radar online and I can see a cluster of storms, one of which has just that teeniest-tiny area of violet inside, which can indicate a severe T-storm. This particular bunch is just a hair west of Beaumont. Right where I am at Ground Zero. Don’t you hate that term? The wind is whipping — whipping good — blowing rain and tree limbs to and fro. I am watching Channel 6 KFDM-TV in Beaumont on the tube, with the mute on I might add. It is nice to know I sit in a motel room only two buildings away the banality of the 5 o’clock show, which goes on with nary a hitch.

The real storm hasn’t arrived yet, according to the Houston radar which I just quickly flipped on for a look. Traffic looks kind of thick on the I-10 service road at 11th Street. I am glad I have nowhere to go.

Maybe this seems a bit dramatic, or perhaps I am making it a bit so. But it is just a spring storm in Southeast Texas on a Friday afternoon. Unless the storm, which the radar says is still just to the west of us, blows the roof off the place or some place else, all shall be just as it should be.

I really like, love even, the rain, the thunder, the lightning is even cool to watch. Especially since the drought is a non-hazardous storm welcome. Anything is cool as long as we can watch and don’t have to worry about seeking shelter.

Well, I think the storm is finally here. Happy weekend.

 

Posted on

The CNN Newt: Oh my

Which is worse?

a) Fox Newt b) President Newt c) CNN Newt.

That is a really difficult question when the Newt of which one speaks is Newt Gingrich. Obviously, a great many Americans believe with deep conviction that the prospect of, b) President Newt Gingrich, would probably be one of the worst occurrences possible. One must think the question through very carefully, however. Here is a sad political tale that just might help answer that question.

Like most other prominent conservative conservatives, who may or may not but probably are of the Republican persuasion, “The Newt” as I like to call him, used Fox News to communicate with other of his ilk. This was as a so-called “Fox News Contributor.” A Fox News Contributor is usually a Republican or disaffected Democrat who can appear to give their two cents’ worth in order to add up to approximately one dollar’s worth of right-wing propaganda. But The Newt has a perpetual wild hare and this wild hare, whose name is Callista, woke up one morning and told The Newt he needs to do something different.

“Sell some more books or bring in some more speaking fees or sell your old recordings of Paul Harvey. Do something Newtie, you’ve got to keep me in diamonds,” Callista said.

So Newt hit upon an idea. After watching how Sarah Palin’s fortunes took off after her ill-fated run for vice president, Newt decided he would run for president.

“Like, yeah, people are really going to elect me,” said The Newt.

Newt paid a price that he didn’t realize at the time. Fox News cast him adrift when he decided to run for president. Perhaps it wasn’t so much that Fox worried about providing equal time for opponents if Newt ran. That did seem like a good excuse and a good way to get rid of The Newt, whom everyone realizes is a gigantic pain in the ass.

Surprisingly, some Republicans actually had an interest in the former speaker for a short time during the pre-primary and primary run simply because of the party had never before experienced such an overwhelming glut of bozos who sought the highest office in the land.

But lo and behold, Newt had his run. He knew things were going pretty badly when his campaign bounced a check in Utah.

Now Gingrich must once again go to work — Mitt Romney being anointed the big, rich white guy heir apparent to the throne — using what little prominence he gathered through his 15 minutes of new-found campaign fame so he might continue buying diamonds for Duchess Callista.

It appears though that The Newt burned some bridges over at Fox News so now he is disowning the Republican Party network. Gingrich has decided CNN is less biased than Fox. Some would say that is old news and perhaps not even so accurate these days. Just watch those cold, hard eyes of Erin Burnett.

Fox shoots back. A network spokesman says Newt just wants a job at CNN after being bounced from Fox. What a low blow. The former Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and a one-time front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, treated like just another old political hack.

“Joining us are our CNN contributors, Democratic strategist James Carville, former press secretary for George W. Bush, Ari Fleshier, and Republican former U.S. House speaker and presidential candidate Newt Gingrich,” says Wolf Blitzer.

And we still have seven months to go. The worst has yet to come, kind of, sort of.

Posted on

A breaking, tragic event, leaves a touch of nostalgia

It’s hard for me to sit on the sidelines on days like today.

A courthouse shooting leaving one dead and four injured, of the kind which makes the national news happened today here in Beaumont.

Here is great breaking news report by Houston-based Michael Graczyk, the sharp Associated Press writer whose byline most people see on stories about the prison system and executions. He has attended just about every execution for AP since Texas restored the death penalty.

Unfortunately, when big stories such as these break, it is usually when people die violently from some source of the other. People still want to know the story — who it happened to and who or what caused it; what happened; when the event took place and the timeline, if pertinent; in what location or locations the event happened; and lastly, why it happened. It might take awhile to learn the latter, whether days, months or even years.

It is a rush reporting a captivating “spot” story whether one is reporting from the field or back in the office doing the rewrite. If you told me 20 years ago I would find rewriting what reporters at the scene report and then timely crafting the information into an interesting and informing story, I might have said you were smoking crack. Either reporting from the scene or back at the desk is a challenge for someone who wants to and has a burning desire to tell a story that is important to untold numbers of people who are trying to find out “what is going on?”

Reading some of the early coverage of this tragic event givse me pause as to just how good social media is for reporting or more specifically, how can it better used? Much of what I saw early on was a conglomeration of disparate parts of the story. Some information came from witnesses, some from someone who held some type of officialdom even though this person may be commenting something that is nothing more than hearsay. For instance, I read a “live” Twitter feed of the police press conference held a couple hours after the incident. It was difficult to determine just who was speaking and just what the relation was between the person speaking and the “newser.”

My “wistfulness” and my take on how journalists were tackling the story isn’t at all to make light of what happened. After all, this is my city and what happened affected my “neighbors” and their families.

If I might, one last time, take from my experience in journalism to look at what happened I would point at where this happened and the immediate event that may have triggered it.

You may think you hear a lot about courthouse shootings. I don’t know how many actually happen a year. When such an incident occurs it automatically is a larger than normal story no matter the city or town where it takes place. Courthouses — whether local, state or federal –are the almost sacred temples of our laws and the people who look to those laws for protection and for fairness. When one is on trial for their life or reputation or is seeking relief over a property or familial issue, one naturally will find high emotion. In the case of this shooting it appears the alleged shooter was on trial for the very serious charge of aggravated sexual assault.

We have armed security and metal detectors in most of our courthouses these days. The Jefferson County Courthouse, where this happened, is no exception. But even those dedicated individuals who guard our courthouses and screen those who enter cannot keep a built-in emotion at bay. So this happens. No arguments about guns because they are useless. The genie is out of the bottle when it comes to guns.

It’s a sad event. But for one who spent a great deal of his life writing about such happenings and surrounded by the drama of the moment it leaves an old newshound with just a tiny bit of nostalgia.

My sorrow for those lost or injured goes without saying.