My town’s newspaper looks to be on the block. Not sure who I want to buy it.
Tag: Santa Cruz
Shakespeare Santa Cruz
Summer 2006 schedule.
My trip to the Resource Recovery Facility and Recycling Center
[UPDATE: If you Google “santa cruz dump” then you find this post. Funny how that works.]
First of all, it’s a dump.
Seriously.
What is this “Resource Recovery Facility and Recycling Center” you speak of, city of Santa Cruz?
Do you have any idea how difficult it was to use teh Internets to figure out where the heck to find the dump?
A quick fix: throw some meta keywords in the header code for that page, guys. Maybe something like “santa cruz dump,” which is what any sane person types into a search engine to find the thing.
That said, the dump was great. I didn’t mind paying ten bucks to drop off the old futon mattress and a long-dead vacuum cleaner. It made me feel like I was using a service, which is really what it is. As a kid in Miami unincorporated Northeast Dade County, the dump was, really, just a big ugly pile, and anyone could pull up and toss cans of paint thinner or rolled-up carpets into the mix without much fuss.
The, uh, resource recovery facility just north of Santa Cruz on Hwy. 1 was already crunching and smashing like clockwork when I stopped by at about 8:30 this morning.
Lots of huge bins for every possible recyclable, neat crushed 8-foot-tall cubes of cans and cardboard, and a dude in a big crane-claw thingie scooping up all the crap tossed by civilians like myself onto a staging area.
Smart.
The Mystery Spot and other poorly-kept secrets
It took me almost three months to finish this roll of black & white film, (That’s the old stuff with the sprocket holes, kids.) but I like what I’ve got, despite having to run everything through a little extra photoshopping to get rid of some weird scanner gridlines that were overlaid on top of everything.
The Mystery Spot, hero of bumper stickers across this great nation, is neither a mystery, nor a spot. Discuss.
We didn’t really come out of the short tour feeling any more mystified, although nausea and dizziness did play a role in the experience.
If you go, I recommend not eating lunch before the trip.
Also pictured in some of the photos are my wife, her youngest brother, our cat, and our feline houseguest, who seems to think that our bed belongs to him. We had a hard time talking him out of that one last night.
“I live here, cat,” I said.
“Roooowwwwwwwrrrrrrllllllrrrrrr,” he replied.
Meanwhile, back at our second annual attempt to get outdoors more often in the summertime, we inaugurated our hiking season on Memorial Day with a trip to Big Basin.
Lucky for us, I made a wrong turn at the first fork in the trail, and we ended up headed for the set of waterfalls which I thought we had seen before.
I was wrong.
Sure, you can take the trail that just goes straight to Berry Creek Falls, hang out at the viewing platform, and turn around, but you’ll be missing the set of Indiana-Jones-jungle falls just up the creek.
I was expecting the familiar redwood-shaded falls these hills often yield, but instead it felt like we were in some sort of Central American jungle, with ferns and golden rock everywhere, smooth flat stone at the base of the falls where the creekbed should have been.
Toss in the steps carved into the trail, and the whole scene felt totally foreign – more Old California than NorCal.
I was shooting 400 ASA Tri-X, pushed one stop, with a yellow filter of some sort on my 28-200 zoom lens.
I like the contrast I get out of that configuration, and sometimes I throw on a red filter if there’s a big sky involved in the day.
My photog friends know that I’m trying to figure out what I need as far as a digital camera goes. Our point & shoot hasn’t been the same since that rainy night when a tree fell on our car. (The car was fine; the camera got pretty wet while I took flicks in case the insurance folks needed them.)
But I can’t really rationalize spending the cash for a dSLR right now, at least not until I either have a regularly-paying job, or a job that justifies buying the Big New Camera.
So we’re leaning toward a new digital point & shoot, keeping the budget low-but-functional. I’ll post something as soon as I’ve got the new machinery in hand, and I’ll throw in a review if I have the time. (Hint: I probably won’t.)
For more about hiking in the general area of San Jose and Santa Cruz, check out Tom Mangan’s Busy Being Born blog.
Sentinel publisher focuses on consumers
Q & A with the new publisher of the Santa Cruz Sentinel
Cheers and jeers: Local media coverage of student protests for immigrant rights
Thousands of California high school students walked out of classes on Monday, adding their voices to the weekend’s protests against proposed legislation, still pending in the U.S. House of Representatives, that would make being an illegal immigrant a felony.
Sounds like a great story, right? Lots of minority teenagers organizing on their own to take civic action and participate in politics. This is exactly what they’re supposed to be doing, according to everyone who always is saying that young people are apathetic and ignorant when it comes to politics.
Unfortunately, some Central Coast media chose to focus on the negatives of the protest: kids not being in school, getting into fights, blocking highways.
Right. It’s a protest. That’s what happens.
Anyway, I hadn’t been paying that much attention to local coverage of what happened this week in Watsonville, where 75 percent of the population is Latino (according to 2000 census via wikipedia), until I noticed this item in the Santa Cruz Sentinel’s Editors’ Notebook.
Sentinel Managing Editor Don Miller wrote:
The sight of students blocking traffic, waving Mexican flags, and fighting and failing to heed police and school officials is probably not going to win many converts.
Right. Okay, now let’s check out the stories the Sentinel wrote about the student protests:
- Students’ peaceful immigration rights rally turns ugly (Monday 3/27, probably posted online only):
- Looks like this was posted as “breaking news” online during the day on Monday. A police captain is quoted, but no students. The story starts off explaining why they’re out there, and then says things “turned ugly” in the fourth paragraph with no explanation of why things are happening “as the students threw bottles and fists.”
- The lead mentions traffic jams, but no violence, and does mention why the students were protesting. Mentions of arrests and police action come before the first quote from a student about the protests. In the eighth paragraph, the writer says “the proests seemed to lack leadership” without any attribution or evidence. There are plenty of good student voices, though, and the story doesn’t seem tilted that hard in any direction.
- In the lead, the students “ditched class.” Again, the police captain is the only source quoted. After the lead, there’s no mention of why the students are protesting, and no quotes from students.
- The lead has the students “precariously close to clashing with dozens of officers.” The story mentions the immigration issue in the lead and the first few paragraphs. There are no student quotes about the issue; the rest of the story details the protest march and arrests, mostly from the police’s point of view.
Danah Boyd, a Berkeley researcher who studies youth and social networking, wonders aloud about why some of the press took such a condescending attitude toward the protestors. Was it because they weren’t white? Would the reaction have been the same if thousands of students walked out of their classes to protest the war?
Boyd asked:
By trivializing the youths’ participation, the press failed to capture the significance of this political act. How long has it been since so many students took a public stance? Has it been since Vietnam? What is gained by belittling the students, punishing their act, and pooh-poohing their engagement with the public sphere?
As an aside, especially to my classmates in 290 spending a portion of their spring break working on our youth & media lit review, the students used cell phones, text messaging, and their MySpace accounts to plan the protests…
But back to the local media critique:
The Salinas Californian took on the protest story with a positive angle, leading off their Wednesday coverage with “The student walkouts and rallies for immigrant rights that swept across Salinas and the nation this week mark a level of Latino activism unmatched in decades.”
Where are the students ditching school? The conflicts with police? The violence? Oh, you mean that wasn’t what the story was about? It was about politics and culture? Oh.
In another Wednesday story, the Californian has the protests being “marred by minor violence” in the lead, but gives a balanced account, including quotes from students on why they walked out. The bottles being thrown in this story are clearly tagged as water bottles (think plastic) and it’s clear where, when, and at whom they’re being thrown. The story also ties the protests in with others around the region, giving the story context.
Watsonville’s own newspaper, the Register-Pajaronian, took a balanced tack on the protests, with a detailed story full of quotes. The writer manages to work in the chronology of events without depending on the police captain for much, with lots of quotes from students about the issue and the march, not to mention quotes from an actual farm worker who participated in the protests.
Even in the Register-Pajaronian’s stories that take adult angles on the protest, dealing with traffic here and consequences here, I feel like I’m getting much more of the story than I did in the Sentinel.
What’s the moral of the story?
As one familiar voice at our student newspaper would say, “You need some more student voices in there.”
Protests happen all the time. Tell us what’s different about this one, and tell us what it’s about. The fact that there is a protest is not news; the fact that thousands of students all over the state walked out IS news. The fact that protesters and police clashed — is completely normal. Tell us if there are any arrests or injuries, and move on. Focus on the issue – why are they there?
Cheers to the Watsonville and Salinas papers, an honorable mention to the Monterey County Herald, and jeers to the Sentinel.
Blue Plate Special: Editor Blogs
Over at the Blue Plate Special, which still has that “new blog” smell, Jay Rosen and some of his students are breaking down the details on newspapers that blog.
Here’s a great post on John Robinson, editor of the blog-happy Greensboro News & Record in North Carolina.
Briana Mowrey, a grad student in NYU’s j-school, writes:
He says he created The Editor’s Log primarily to talk to the public. But Robinson is the first to admit that sometimes they—the public—are the very reason that more editors aren’t blogging. There are a lot of people out there “eager to bring you down,” he says. Of course in any town with a monopoly newspaper the newspaper editor is not just a public figure, but a person with power, an authority figure. And so when the person with power starts a weblog, there’s a chance to topple an icon, or at least chip away.
The boss also gets extra scrutiny from readers. “There is an assumption that what you’re saying is ‘corporate speak’,” he says. “People really do dissect everything I say and then apply it to the newspaper.”
That’s really what I’m looking for in an “editor blog,” and that’s why I found what the Santa Cruz Sentinel is doing to be so odd.
Sentinel Editor and blogger Tom Honig responded in the comments to my post:
Since I’m the main opinion writer of the newspaper, I figure it wouldn’t be honest to refrain from opinion. I’m actually hoping that I get enough responses to try to get opposing views in the actual paper. I also hope to get stuff in that doesn’t make it into the paper — behind the scenes stuff like who gets mad at me and who says something funny. Unfortunately, much of what I do has to do with personnel here at the paper, and believe me, there’s nothing interesting about that.
Tom, you’re right, you should be voicing your opinion on your blog, and you’re free to treat it like a column, but what’s the value of that for your readers? I think trying to push blog readers to stories in the print and online editions by teasing them is good, too, but your best stuff comes out in posts like this and this, where you write about issues that you are most familiar with as the editor of the paper.
I really don’t need to read what you think of the population of Santa Cruz (in number or politics), for that, I’ll check out your column. And if I want to read about what the San Francisco city council is doing… wait a minute, I live in Santa Cruz. If I want to know what SF is up to, I’ll pick up the Chronicle.
Here’s Blue Plate Special’s list of a few other editor blogs. (Note to Prof. Rosen: How about a longer list?)
The editors are blogging – and they have opinions. Should they?
The Santa Cruz Sentinel is running a pair of blogs.
(Full disclosure: I live in Santa Cruz, and rarely purchase a print edition of any of the three papers I can easily find at the corner store.)
One of the blogs is an “Editors’ Notebook” written by Editor Tom Honig and Managing Editor Don Miller. It’s not about what goes on inside the paper, unless they’re teasing something coming up in the print edition (hint: if we’re reading the blog, we’re probably not buying the print edition).
The editors comment on news stories from just about anywhere, with their politics clearly coming through at moments. As they should, I suppose, but after reading editor blogs that are a bit more about getting inside the newspaper (like the Spokane Spokesman-Review’s Daily Briefing), I was expecting something more.
Is there any problem with editors voicing their opinions about the community in blog posts? Would the answer be different if it were the Sports editor or the A & E editor?
Luck of the Irish Pub Concept
Rosie McCann’s Irish Pub & Restaurant (my now former employer – more on that in a moment) has won Best Bar in the annual Santa Cruz Good Times Best Of issue. The GT is an alternative weekly…well, less alternative than the Metro, which isn’t that alternative to begin with.
The point is – we won.
So there.
Actually, I recently gave up my shifts there to spend more time with my family. Heh – cool – I sound like a corporate press release, only this time I mean it. I’m excited to spend more than one day’s worth of daylight a week with my wife and cat.
Oh, and by the way, to the Good Times: I’m sure that if I had been around the day you were asking your questions and checking your facts, I would have happily pointed out that the Lost Coast Brewery is in HUMBOLDT County, and you might have been confused when you said it was in Mendocino. The Anderson Valley Brewery is the one in Mendocino.
But whatever. We won. Thanks GT readers.
If everything’s gone well this week (remodeling), Rosie’s should be reopening Saturday April 30th Wednesday May 4th with a bunch of snazzy new wrinkles to it. Go there. Drink beer. Eat food. Tell them Ryan sent you, and you’ll probably just get a blank stare back, but you’ll be hoisting a cold one by then. Cheers.
UPDATE: Rosie’s reopened Friday May 6th – I stopped by this morning to pick up a paycheck – the place looks awesome. Really. New paint, new booths, new style, new light fixtures — the place finally looks like a real Irish Pub. A fireplace. Another flashy flat screen TV. The works. Go. Eat. Drink. Slainte!
Ryan Sholin 