Manic Monday!

Most common time for time-outs? Definitely the dinner-cooking period.

The Oakland Zoo seems a lot smaller, and it's hills flatter, when pushing only one kid (Arthur's a big boy!) and pushing him in the Chariot.

re: Washington Post: Why aren't newspapers seriously considering going to a non-profit format, like NPR?

Manic Monday!

Anyone know where to get Dots (potty training motivation) in bulk?

I may have to go to Target today.

Redwood City needs many things, but this would be a good one to start with (or maybe it could come right after In n Out).

Top 5 Fridays, late because I was under the laser

stuff Redwood City really, really needs but doesn't have:

5) A Boston Market

4) An independent fabric store

3) A reporter from a local paper devoted to covering nothing but Redwood City

2) A school board member minimum-IQ law

1) In-N-Out

Buh-bye, Merc

Well, we finally did it. After almost nine years of continuous subscription -- and about two of me agitating to dump it -- we finally canceled the Mercury News. I convinced Nathan to let me do it a couple weeks ago, and I finally got around to calling yesterday. Finally, we're free from the tyranny of all those ad inserts and crappy Dennis Rockstrah columns!

Seriously, with the MediaNews buy-out and preceeding and resulting cuts, it was becoming a lousy newspaper. Yesterday's new version of the real estate section just reaffirmed our decision. Now, the only thing we'll really miss is the Fry's section.

7-year-old defied redneck dad, sources say

Just your run-of-the-mill dumb Cheesehead story. Then, I saw the headline on the video.

"Child tied up for allegedly not wearing Packers jersey"

Childbirth outsourced to India

This story is another case of the reporter feeling obligated to look for some dissenting voice in order to have a "balanced" story -- in this case, this Lantos joker from Kansas City (red flag, hah hah). The whole deal really sounds like a win-win to me.

After spending about $20,000 -- more than many couples because it took the surrogate mother several cycles to conceive -- Sodhi and her husband are now back home with their 4-month-old baby, Neel. They plan to return to Anand for a second child.

...

Suman Dodia, a pregnant, baby-faced 26-year-old, said she will buy a house with the $4,500 she receives from the British couple whose child she's carrying. It would have taken her 15 years to earn that on her maid's monthly salary of $25.

Dodia's own three children were delivered at home and she said she never visited a doctor during those pregnancies.

"It's very different with medicine," Dodia said, resting her hands on her hugely pregnant belly. "I'm being more careful now than I was with my own pregnancy."

Patel said she carefully chooses which couples to help and which women to hire as surrogates. She only accepts couples with serious fertility issues, like survivors of uterine cancer. The surrogate mothers have to be between 18 and 45, have at least one child of their own, and be in good medical shape.

...

if commercial surrogacy keeps growing, some fear it could change from a medical necessity for infertile women to a convenience for the rich.

"You can picture the wealthy couples of the West deciding that pregnancy is just not worth the trouble anymore and the whole industry will be farmed out," said Lantos.

Yeah, this is what we need

"The FCC has never attempted such a brazen act of defiance against Congress," said Democratic Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein. "The law does not say we are to serve those who seek to profit by using the public airwaves.

"The law says we are to serve the public interest," Adelstein continued. "And the public has repeatedly told us they are not interested in further media consolidation."

Chronicle to cut staff by 25 percent

Scary stuff.

O'Reilly uses name-calling about once every seven seconds

From Romenesko:

An Indiana University study finds that Fox News personality Bill O'Reilly calls a person or a group a derogatory name once every 6.8 seconds, on average, or nearly nine times every minute during the editorials that open his program each night. "It's obvious he's very big into calling people names, and he's very big into glittering generalities," says IU j-prof Mike Conway . "He's not very subtle. He's going to call people names, or he's going to paint something in a positive way, often without any real evidence to support that viewpoint."

Top Ten Signs Your Newspaper is in Trouble

10. Covers all news that happens within one block of the office

9. Today's exclusive -- "Nixon Dead!"

8. Reporter sent to jail for refusing to divulge a source... Oh, and he also killed a dude

7. All horoscopes: "Now would be a good time to get out of the newspaper business"

6. Paper's motto: "Suck it"

5. Every "hot" gossip item is about Jack Klugman

4. Managing editor and guy who wheels around breakfast? Same guy

3. Under "Weather," it just reads "Yes"

2. Instead of "Garfield," has a comic strip called "Garfunkel"

1. It endorsed Dennis Kucinich

Outrage over Reilly case misplaced

Bay Guardian editorial:

In the days following the historic settlement of Clint Reilly's lawsuit against the Bay Area's newspaper barons, the local dailies, the media blogs, and the trade publications such as Editor and Publisher were buzzing with debate and speculation over a few of the agreement's terms.

Would Reilly actually get space in the local papers to make his political points every month? Where would that space go? Would it be paid ad space, or would he get it free? Would he be able to appoint a citizen member to the editorial boards of Dean Singleton's dailies (including the San Jose Mercury News and the Contra Costa Times)? Or could the papers' managers reject his nominations?

Back and forth, back and forth. And all of it entirely missed the point.

This was the fine print of the deal, the stuff that, a few months from now, nobody will remember or care about.

You could get the real news from the headline in a blog post by former Chronicle city editor Alan Mutter: "Hearst-MediaNews deal scuttled."

That's what happened here: Reilly, acting with his own money, with no support from the federal or state regulators, broke up a deal that would have put the owners of the Chronicle directly in business with Singleton's MediaNews Group, the owner of almost every other major daily in the region. It would have been the end of daily newspaper competition in the Bay Area.

The Hearst Corp., documents that came out during the suit showed, wanted to combine some printing, distribution, and sales efforts with MediaNews Group. And Hearst wanted to convert an investment in MediaNews into direct stock in the company's local papers. That would have, in effect, made one of the last non-MediaNews papers in the area part of the same business group.

As G.W. Schulz reports in "Beyond the Reilly Settlement," on page 11, if Reilly hadn't intervened, nobody would have known about it until it was over and too late to stop. That's the point here, and that's what journalists, political scientists, and critics ought to be talking about.

Instead, we've heard outrage from some editors over the fact that Reilly might get some space in the papers. It's really a nonissue; he could have bought ad space for his opinions anyway, and all that the settlement did was give him that space free. And a lot of papers ask citizens to serve on advisory boards; Reilly's nominees are very unlikely to change anyone's editorial policies.

Meanwhile, where is the outrage over the original Hearst-MediaNews deal, which would have ended editorial competition the same way the 1965 joint operating agreement between the Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner did?

'Most E-Mailed' List Tearing New York Times' Newsroom Apart

This is a great Onion article because it really could be true. And I found it on Romenesko, so I was actually fooled for a second.

I also love how the Onion homepage has been redesigned to more closely resemble the NYT homepage.

Good forbid some college kids have fun!

Can't people just learn to relax and take a joke?!?

Score one for the reader (finally)

This week a judge recognized Dean Singleton is out to screw the average Joe (whether he works for a newspaper or not) in order to fatten his own wallet.

MediaNews and Hearst had sought to dismiss Reilly's suit, arguing that individual readers have no stake in antitrust laws because they suffer no harm from any alleged reduction in newspaper competition.

Oh that's interesting. As a reader, I shouldn't give even a little rat's ass if my local paper is going down the crapper.

But U.S. District Judge Susan Illston said federal law recognizes the public's concern in maintaining competition and diversity in the news media....

law shows that "Congress values the existence of separate sources of newspaper content in a community, and that loss of separate sources injures consumers," Illston wrote.

More generally, she said, a consumer in a market that is threatened by anti-competitive activity has the right to sue for antitrust violations.

So, good luck to Clint Reilly, who should get a plaque or something for trying to help the rest of us get decent news coverage of our area.

Something fishy at the Murky News

This morning I was actually reading the print edition of the paper when I came across this story on the front of the local section. It seemed at first like an ordinary story about modern parenthood and kids' over scheduledjou lives, but then I opened to the jump on Page 6 and was created almost two full pages of of full-color ads for various summer camps! I think this would seem suspect even to the less media savvy of the South Bay. Dozens of giant ads right next to a story about the same topic? Close reading of the story itself reveals a rather one-sided view of parents scheduling each week of their summer vacation with video-game camp or Mandarin immersion overnights. I guess it's necessary for dual-income parents of school-age kids. But whatever happened to spending some summer weeks at Grandma's house? My kid's only a year and ahalf, but I know he -- and Grandma -- would love that!

Baltimore Examiner publisher uses his paper to sell his home

The utter absence of journalistic ethics in the Anschutz-owned Examiner chain from coast to coast is amazing.

The Baltimore Examiner recently ran a full-page piece (with four color photos) on a home that's selling for $606,000. What the paper didn't disclose is that the person trying to sell the "prime property," as it's called, is Examiner publisher Michael Phelps. The paper called on the guy who owned the house before Phelps to describe all of its charms, reports Laura Vozzella.

Movie reporters too neat

If I'm an opossum who has been recently displaced by construction work, I'm going to the nearest newsroom and making a home within the work space of one of the cops or courtroom reporters. You could burrow a basketball-size hole, feed off half-eaten ham sandwiches and birthday cake and raise a nice opossum family.

Judges go after reporters

First amendment doesn't apply in Kansas and Minnesota, apparently.

The Midwest is a scary, scary place.

Two words: Box turtle

Santorum in talks to become Philly Inquirer op-ed columnist


Former U.S. Senator Rick Santorum says his talks with the Inquirer are "informal" and the column "may or may not happen." Publisher Brian Tierney confirms "low-level discussions" with Santorum, but puts the chances of the politico's column ever appearing at "one out of 1,000. We'd probably be more likely to have Dan Rather write a column for us. Seriously. And I'm not being facetious."

The Fang's prove once again to be bumbling idiots

AsianWeek Editor at large Ted Fang said Tuesday he regrets publishing a controversial column titled "Why I Hate Blacks" in this week's edition but has not decided whether to keep its author, Kenneth Eng, on his staff.

To read an excerpt of the column, click here and scroll down to the 2.24.07 post.