Cherry Peaking
Hey New Yorkers, the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's cherry blossom festival has passed, but the blooms are still peaking according to the garden's cherrywatch web page.
- posted by Amy @ 5/03/2003 09:27:00 AM

 

Honey, Get Me Rewrite - Part II
Hopefully you didn't miss this heartwarming story in today's Wall Street Journal: "After Inflating Their Income, Companies Want IRS Refunds."
- posted by Amy @ 5/02/2003 09:48:00 PM

 

WTC Memories Fading
Last week I visited a friend in Park Slope who has a rooftop garden. It's a very cool place, with an illegal barbecue, loads of plants and patio furniture. It affords of view of parts of Manhattan, the bay as it leads into the East River and even the Statue of Liberty. "And, you used to be able to see the World Trade Center - just the North tower," he said, looking over the top of a church about half a block away. I asked him if it was between the two crosses. "No it was to the left of, or between ... " he said and went quiet. He couldn't remember exactly where it was anymore, though he has lived there for years and even stood in that same place and watched the building burn the morning of Sept. 11.

I've found I've done the same thing while walking across 6th and 7th avenues in the Village or driving down the West Side Highway -- I now have a hard time remembering from a distance exactly which buildings the towers were between. I'd thought I'd never forget, but indeed some images are fading.
- posted by Amy @ 5/01/2003 09:51:00 AM

 

When Pigs Fly
The hunter who "accidentally" shot and killed an endangered California condor south of Bakersfield last month was no one-time loser, according to the Bakersfield Californian.

Britton Cole Lewis was also charged with another misdemeanor crime of unlawfully bringing a mounted white-tail deer head to California after killing it in Illinois while using an invalid Illinois deer permit, the U.S. Attorney's office said.

The LA Times story (via Calblog) says the condor shooting took place during a pig hunt on the Tejon Ranch. Granted, those birds are pretty big and ugly, but they certainly don't have snouts. Despite the fact there are only 79 live condors, Lewis has been charged lightly since he didn't know the bird was endangered:

Lewis was not charged with violating the U.S. Endangered Species Act, apparently because of a little-known 1998 Justice Department policy that seeks a higher level of proof in such cases, according to a source familiar with the investigation. Essentially a defendant must know the animal was endangered, said the source, who asked for anonymity because it is a pending legal matter.

Yeah, I'm sure a hunter from Tehachapi has never heard of the California condor.

The bird he shot, known as AC-8, played a pivitol role in the state's program of saving the birds from extinction.
- posted by Amy @ 5/01/2003 09:25:00 AM

 

Synthetic Candy
Time Out New York puts Daily Candy in its place:

Are those e-mails actually written by humans, or are they just press releases fed through a software engine that renders them in that grotesquely privileged, smug, insinuating tone?

To read Daily Candy's e-mail to me explaining which part of their content is advertorial, click here.
- posted by Amy @ 4/30/2003 11:02:00 PM

 

Road Trip
Little road trip today with a friend who will shortly be moving back to California. You know, it's amazing how short a distance you have to go to be what feels hundreds of miles from Manhattan.
- posted by Amy @ 4/29/2003 08:04:00 PM

 

Gushing with Hometown Pride
Editor & Publisher has named Ginger Moorhouse, the publisher of my hometown paper, the publisher of the year. Rather amazing, actually. Looks like she got it based in part for having the guts to publish the "Lords of Bakersfield" series several months ago, which detailed the legend that a group of powerful gay men covered up several murders.

Here's the summary of the Lords package I wrote for LAExaminer.com in January:

CALIFORNIAN NAMES EX-PUBLISHER IN SEX CRIMES
The Bakersfield Californian ran a fiery package of stories dredging up a lurid murder conspiracy theory that may become the cornerstone defense strategy for a “Police Officer of the Year” now accused of killing the No. 2 prosecutor in the District Attorney’s office. The theory – known as The Lords of Bakersfield – posits that a group of gay men with a predilection for underage boys have conspired to cover up a series of murders and other crimes dating back to the 1950s. Among those named are (now deceased) Bakersfield Californian publisher Alfred “Ted” Fritts (“a party-host of Gatsby-like proportions” whose name “surfaced during a murder investigation involving a 17-year-old male prostitute and a slain, gay government official”) and the paper’s general manager until 1967, Walter Kane (who “was always the subject of great rumors about being a child molester.”) The series looks back at nine murders in the past 25 years, even examining the roles of current tough-on-crime District Attorney Ed Jagels and his political consultant Stan Harper. Judges, businessmen, top cops and boy-toy prostitutes are all named. There are missing photographs, B-list celebrities and even the Boy Scouts. Jagels (whose office took a drubbing in "Mean Justice” by Pulitzer-winning author Edward Humes) is livid. They story hasn't been followed elsewhere, except for an AP report on the September death of Asst. D.A. Stephen Tauzer and the charges facing his former co-worker. The letters pages of the family-owned paper have been jammed with reaction, including one reader who congratulates the Californian for airing its dirty laundry and asks: “I wonder if The Los Angeles Times would have prominently featured the Chandler family in the same way.”

The Californian has a story in today's paper about the award, as well. It lists other reasons she won:

In selecting Moorhouse for the award, Editor & Publisher cited The Californian's journalistic mission, including its fight with the county of Kern to comply with public access laws in revealing the names and salaries of county firefighters as well as the newspaper's repeated challenges to provide public access to court proceedings. The magazine also commended Moorhouse for supporting the publication of the recent "Lords of Bakersfield" series that focused on the deeds of prominent gay men, including her brother, former Californian editor Ted Fritts.

My friend Lois Henry, the paper's assistant managing editor, did a lot of work on the Lords package. Years ago she did a series of stories about public employees (mostly cops) taking stress leave just before their retirement in order to basically double their retirement salaries. She got death threats at home and work as a result. And there was a night she and I were crossing the street in front of her house when a police cruiser with his lights off gunned his engine and drove directly at us - missing us by about a foot. The cruiser stopped at the intersection just beyond us, waited a few moments, turned right and then turned his headlights back on. Hometown justice.

I only interned at the paper one summer while in college, but they have taken some freelance stuff from me over the years, including a story from Czechoslovakia during the three-day coup in Moscow and one about the Greyhound trip I took from Bakersfield to New York days after 9/11.

The Bakersfield Californian is an interesting little paper in that it gets ignored by the rest of the state primarily because it isn't owned by a chain. McClatchy owns a chain of Bees in the Central Valley area (the Fresno Bee, the Modesto Bee, the Sacramento Bee), which means news in Fresno, say, was more likely to get picked up by a sister paper or go out on the McClatchy news wire. You know where big Bakersfield news ended up? In the Associated Press' San Joaquin Valley roundup -- which was a list of briefs heavy on crime, car wrecks and an occasional City Council action from the smaller towns in the valley. The LA Times did indeed have a writer covering the Central Valley, the very capable Mark Arax, but he's a Fresno native and thus didn't have the same interest in Bakersfield as he did in his childhood stomping grounds.

So as a result, even big stories in Bakersfield tend to stay local. When I was working for a McClatchy paper in Gilroy, it was on the AP San Joaquin Valley roundup that I learned one of my high school classmates had been murdered and dumped in a canal when she was eight and a half months pregnant. Her husband, who I think had been a basketball player at Fresno State, went to prison despite his dumb story that he thought she was just off visiting friends. Stories like that tend to get bigger play if they happen just a little farther north.

Congratulations to the Californian on the award.
- posted by Amy @ 4/28/2003 10:16:00 AM

 

Donors Choose
Just yesterday I posted a link to Alibris book store's successful "buy a soldier a book" program and wondered if the same thing would work for schools or other groups. I just stumbled on a link at Howard Sherman's blog to a group that does indeed do something similar for schools: Donors Choose. My mom is a retired English teacher, so I know quite well how much she dipped into her own purse to supplement the school's spending. This site lets New York City teachers post the project they'd like to provide for their students and donors can decide which ones to contribute to. Among the current projects are "Making it Media with a Digital Camera," "Book Clubs," "Sixth Graders in Search of a TV/VCR," and "Water Analyzation Kits to Test the City Lakes and Streams."
- posted by Amy @ 4/27/2003 02:46:00 PM

 

It's Always the Drummer, Isn't It?
From today's Boston Globe's Ideas section:

''THE PRESIDENT LOOKS in the mirror and speaks/His shirts are clean but his country reeks/Unpaid bills/Afghanistan hills.'' These pointedly political lyrics to ''Bombs Away,'' a song on The Police's 1980 album ''Zenyatta Mondatta,'' were penned by the New Wave band's drummer Stewart Copeland, who knew exactly what he was talking about. Born in 1952 and raised in the Middle East, Stewart is the son of Miles Copeland, a notorious American CIA agent. According to a report on the Saddam Hussein-CIA connection issued earlier this month by United Press International, in the early 1960s Miles Copeland was frequently in contact with the future Iraqi president, who'd been smuggled into Cairo with CIA assistance after his failed assassination attempt on Iraq's prime minister. This raises a question: Do any of Copeland's Police lyrics predict the rise and fall of Saddam?

- posted by Amy @ 4/27/2003 12:00:00 PM