Rottenchester

Though I do agree that there's far too little hairy clam in the D&C, I think a lot of the criticism it receives is unfair. The D&C is a run-of-the-mill mid-market daily paper. In my view, they are doing well by just reprinting national, international, sports and business wire reports.

I don't even expect really thorough local coverage of minor issues. Let's face it: most of what happens in Rochester is pretty dull stuff, and spending more time and effort to cover it would be akin to gilding a turd.

No, my beef with the D&C is that they consistently fumble the big local and regional stories.

Let's start with the ferry. I know we're all sick of it, but if the D&C had been on the job, perhaps we wouldn't have been so surprised when it collapsed.

In the past few months, the D&C has been full of "newly discovered" facts about the complete rimjob that the city, county and state gave CATS. After this mother of all sweetheart deals blew up, and after auditors and politicians weighed in on the fuckup, the D&C was finally able to report a couple of choice facts about the financing and terminal deals.

Hey, Karen Magnuson (D&C Editor), where were you when these deals went down? Oh, that's right, you were on your knees blowing Bill Johnson and his political cronies.

Look, Karen, it is one thing to blow politicians on the editorial page - that's your right and you're welcome to it. But your bj shouldn't slobber over to the news pages the way it did during the run-up to the ferry. Why is everything being discovered now - two years after it happened? Because your reporters didn't do any digging! They didn't ask any tough questions, they didn't look through the filings, and they didn't talk to fast ferry operators around the world to judge if what they were being told by the politicians and CATS made sense.

Kodak coverage is the second place where the D&C shits the bed. You'd think that Kodak's hometown paper would have a little insight into the big yellow box. Perhaps, over the years, the reporters on the business beat would have cultivated a few sources who would give them a heads-up on how Kodak works. You might expect the D&C's coverage of Kodak to be just a tiny bit better than Times or the Wall Street Journal.

But you'd be wrong. I had to laugh at the coverage of Dan Carp's retirement. It might as well have been a reprint of the Kodak press release. Oh, what's that? The stock price went up a couple of bucks with the announcement? Total surprise! The D&C has no idea why that happened: Dan Carp was great, just ask all of the local stock "experts" that they interviewed.

I'm not passing judgment on Carp: maybe he was great and the stock market was wrong. My point was that there was that the story covering his retirement was superficial and no better (actually worse) than the coverage in the national dailies (WSJ and NYT).

Carp's retirement is one small example. The whole coverage of Kodak's "digital turnaround" just skims the surface. The last story I saw on this topic, which heralded the news that Kodak is #1 in digital, was again no better than a press release. Does this mean that the digital turnaround is happening? Or is Kodak losing money on digital and doing anything to gain market share? Who knows? Not the D&C. They didn't bother to do a little analysis, they just cranked out a few easy paragraphs and moved on.

Hey, Karen and the rest of you slackers at the D&C: I'm not asking you to do something hard or expensive. Pick a couple of major stories that only you can report well, and dig a little bit. Put a couple of bulldogs on the fast ferry and double-check the bullshit that the politicians are feeding you. Cultivate some inside sources at Kodak who can give you the straight skinny about the place.

Even the stinky hippies over at City are writing circles around you. Don't you have any pride left?

Sunday is the Lord's day and I kept it holy by having a hippie suck me off (thanks for the tip, Park Ave), drinking beer, and staying away from the devil that is Craigslist. Amen.

But now it is Monday morning, and today's rave is gonna have to be quick, because someone else is waiting for my stall, and the guy two crappers over must have eaten at Don Pablo's last night.

My topic is movie reviews. I love the movies, and I love reading about movies, thinking about movies, and talking about movies.

That's why I'm no fan of Jack Garner. His reviews are soothing and bland. Now there's nothing wrong with bland reviews, if that's your thing. Like bland food, which is good for folks with geriatric colons (for example, my friend a couple of stalls over), bland reviews are good for folks who want to go to a movie to enjoy the popcorn. If you have a geriatric mind, Jack's your man, but if you love movies, he's a buzz-kill.

The dirty hippies over at City are no better. Some of their reviews are longer than the scripts of the "films" (not movies, "films") themselves. And all of their reviews smack of self-importance and navel-gazing. A word to George Grella: if you were really as smart and literate as you think you are, perhaps you'd be writing the movie rather than writing about it.

The good news is that there's an alternative, and it is Rochester-based. Planet Sick-Boy is a site run by a local guy, Jon Popick, who writes great reviews. If you don't like to read, you can listen to him on WBER Friday mornings at 8:15.

Popick used to write for City, but apparently he was too good for them and his reviews aren't published there anymore. My guess is that Grella was intimidated and got Popick fired.

Unlike the pablum published under the Jack Garner™ brand, Popick's reviews are willing to call crap by its real name.

Lest this sound like a plug from a shill, I've got nothing to do with Popick. For all I know, he's a stinky hippie. I just wanted to send out a rave to a Rochester original who does it out of love.

Both can be changed by voting.

Yesterday, someone asked a good question about the Afghanistan War:

So, do you think Georgey boy is reading Rochesters CL R&R? I doubt it, I don't think he knows how to use the internets. Again, what do you suggest we do about it?

Let's take a concrete example: Randy Kuhl, the new representative for some of us who live in Southern Monroe County. Project Vote Smart has his record here. He replaced Emo Houghton, the last of the moderate Rockefeller Republicans in the House. Check out Kuhl's record in the House. Is he the kind of politician you want representing you? My take is that he's a Bush rubber stamp, and we deserve better.

As a first-term rep, Kuhl is more vulnerable than Emo. If the Democrats field a viable alternate candidate, contribute and work like hell to get that person elected. It isn't simple, sexy or easy, but it is the only road to change.

Now, WBER. Today, someone mentioned that they thought that 'BER was playing more thrash metal and less alt acoustic (or however you want to classify it). I hadn't noticed, but they offer a lot of latitude to their DJ's, so it might be that the DJ who's working while you're listening likes that kind of music.

That said, WBER is highly responsive to listener feedback, and they have a page on their website devoted to prospect song polls. I run through the list a couple of times a month and vote for the songs I like. Your vote really counts here, so give it a shot.

Here's my challenge to anyone defending the Shitty News: When's the last time you got a good laugh out of that rag? Think hard, now. I'll bet the answer for most of you is "never".

That's because Shitty News is the oracle for the slightly-out-of-mainstream but still comfortably liberal point of view. And, whatever else it might be, that viewpoint is politically correct and exceedingly humorless.

Let's take a recent cover story by Rochacha's heroine, Jennifer Loviglio: New battleground for human rights: the bathroom / Transgendered employees, acceptance, and corporate America.

That headline sounds like a Masters' Thesis, not a newspaper article.

ZZZZZZZZ.

Oops, I feel asleep at the keyboard reading it. Sorry. The jist of the story is apparently that boys who want to dress up like girls have a hard time choosing which toilet to squat on, people make fun of them, and some homophobes even attack them at work.

In the immortal words of Homer Simpson: Doh!

In addition to belaboring the painfully obvious, the story contains paragraph after paragraph of quotes from corporate flacks talking about how their beloved corporations are struggling mightily to overcome the tide of discrimination against transgendered folks, blah-blah-fucking-blah.

Look, Shitty News, you gotta realize something: the topics of your stories have been done to death. If you're going to cover a done-to-death topic, you need two things: an angle, and some humor.

Being an alternative newspaper should set you free! Every alternative newspaper I've seen in other cities come across like the writers had some fun producing that week's issue. Take a look at this week's edition of Seattle's alt-weekly, The Stranger. The cover story is on military recruitment, but the headline asks whether the promise of new dinette sets will make a difference. That's at least a different angle, and a bit funny. I'm intrigued. If Shitty News did the same story, the headline would be something like "The Shameful Come-On / Deceit, Deception and Military Recruitment".

The Stranger also has some great columnists, such as Dan Savage, who writes the sex column Savage Love. Savage is gay and has a sense of humor. He's also a liberal who isn't stifled by political correctness. For example, he used to ask everyone who wrote to him to begin their letter with the salutation "Hey, Faggot!" He did it to take the bite out of that word. Whether or not you agree with him, he's always interesting and usually funnier than hell. I could not imagine the current Shitty News having a sex column, much less one written by an irreverant guy like Savage.

Shitty News, you take yourself way, way too seriously. Loosen up and have some fun, for the love of Jebus. Start some fucking controversy! You'll know that you're successful when you piss off some of your readers. Right now, you're just boring them to tears.

I thought the article was hi-fucking-larious, for a number of reasons.

First, Shitty had to acknowledge their situation. For those of you who don't want to read the article (I sympathize), let me summarize: they're fucked. Not only do they have the Outsider (oops, I mean Insider) sucking away all of their ad revenue, now they have CL giving away want-ads. Poor little Shitty, getting it from both ends. It would make me sad, if it weren't a fate so richly deserved.

Funny that they chose to illustrate this point with Dan Savage's t-shirt. He's a columnist from Seattles' alt-weekly The Stranger. Apparently they never considered printing a column that was 10% as good as Savage Love and thereby gaining some readership. They'd rather print a pic of his t-shirt than emulate his success.

The second laugh-out-loud moment was the treatment of CL as some kind of new phenomenon: "Gawsh, we were looking on the big-ole Internet and stumbled on this new fangled Craig's List. What's that all about?" Why, Shitty News, aren't you just right out on the cutting edge! Craig has only been in Roch for what, four whole fucking months? Nice of you to wake up to the fact.

Of course, in typical Shitty style, they saved the best for last:

Rochacha and Rottenchester got into it a couple of weeks ago over City Newspaper and the D&C's Insider. They spoke to us. They advised us. It was weird. Not as weird as it could have been, considering we are a newspaper and get anonymous comments all the time. But weird to just be surfing the whole wide anonymous Web and see a big old "HEY YOU" that's actually addressed to you. And it was just luck. These people have no reason to believe we'd actually be reading. They just wanted to say it out loud, I guess.

That said, I still think Craig's impact on Rochester will be huge. He's only been in town for 4 months, but there are parts of CL that are already becoming useful. The housing section is reaching critical mass for "trendy" city neighborhoods like Park Ave. The "for sale" sections actually have some real items for sale. Even the jobs section is starting to contain some real jobs (mostly in the tech sector).

Craigslist has around 20 employees, and is funded from operational profit. In other words, Craig can stick around Rochester as long as he wants. Craig has a long-term, sustainable business model that provides services at a tiny fraction of the cost of the incumbent.

If you're one of Craig's competitors, using the Craigslist of today to judge the Craig of tomorrow is extremely dangerous. Craigslist is a bottom-up phenomenon. In San Francisco, it started small and grew by word of mouth. Today, in the largest cities in the country, Craigslist is the place for classified ads for 18-40 year olds living in the urban core. That's huge for a 20 person operation.

When Craig reaches critical mass in Rochester, the Insider will be half of its current size, and Shitty News will no longer run classified ads and personals. The target demographic of both of those publications will use Craig for most of their advertising needs, because it is cheaper (mainly free), faster and more convenient.

As for Rants & Raves: I think it is underappreciated. On the Internet, people with shared interests have a number of places to congregate. Yahoo Groups is a good example of a special-interest gathering place. But general interest forums just don't work - they tend to be clogged with trolls or full of flamewars. RNR is one of the few general-interest forums that works about as well as such a forum can work. The lag in posting keeps it from being flooded by trolls, spam is removed pretty efficiently, and the topics are varied enough that it is usually worth a look every day.

Craig is the one of the few successful hippie/capitalists, and, yes, Craigslist is Godzilla.

Karen, I understand: your paper fucked up like the rest of them. You didn't need to print a picture of 20 other newspapers' headlines to prove your point. And you sure didn't need to compare your paper to the Los Angeles Times - that made me snort OJ through my nose because I was laughing so hard. (I'm still feeling the burn, btw.)

But, Karen, if you really want to do something to make up for your mistake, let me suggest a different course of action. Call up the Associated Press and ask them to write a story that answers these questions:

• Have mine accident rates gone up in the past five years, while the number of citations for mine safety violations have gone down?


• How many other mines have received a huge number of citations like the Sago mine? If there are a lot of them, are the feds going to do something like, say, shut them down until they improve?

And don't call your readers "news consumers" like you did today. That's both awful prose and condescending. We're readers, with brains, who think. We're not baby birds, waiting patiently with mouths open, willing to choke down whatever pap you choose to regurgitate.

Last year, I posted that Craigslist coming to town is like Godzilla, and that the loss of classified ad revenue for newspapers would be deadly. Well, I'm not the only one: tech columnist Bob Cringeley agrees that Craigslist is one of the factors that will put local papers into their grave.