Inside UDJ by Editor K.C. Meadows

Thank all you blog readers out there for starting this interaction. I will do my best to answer your questions and keep up my end of the conversation as regularly as possible.

First, to the person who wanted to know if 109 degrees was unusual weather for Ukiah in June. I'd say yes. that kind of weather usually comes in July, but it is not unknown in June.

Next, to the person who said our two board of supervisor stories contradicted one another over the timing of the start of the meeting. While the meeting began with a closed session, the open session began at 10 a.m. I agree the wording was awkward and could have been confusing.

Next, is it a conflict of interest for the Daily Journal's John Graff to work part time for the Employer's Council of Mendocino County? Not in my book. John is an advertising rep, not a newsroom employee. He does not write or influence the news and we will continue to cover the ECMC as always.

About Marie Ulvila. My understanding is that she quit her job as City Clerk because she said she couldn't afford to continue to work part-time. I assume the city will look for another clerk ASAP. By the way, as I recall it, Ulvila is the reason the council asked the residents to approve changing the city clerk office from elected to appointed so that she could continue to work there after leaving the area and moving to Lake County. Now she's leaving and we have the city appointing someone new. We thought the clerk's job should have stayed elected. It will be interesting to see who the city chooses to replace Ulvila.

So we ran that poll about flagpoles and our techie gurus who host our Web site tell us there's no way to simply display the results. We have to build a whole box and blah-blah-blah, which we will do, but in the meantime, here were the results:
Yes (anyone should be allowed to put up any size flag pole in their front yard): 188 votes (52.66 percent)
No (they should not be allowed to do that): 169 votes (47.33 percent)
We now have the specific question about the Piffero flag that some wanted to see up there, so vote.

By the way, there's some debate about how long a poll should stay up. It's certainly not scientific by any means, yet someone told me last week that no poll should be up more than a couple of days. What do you all think?

So I was at Schat's Thursday morning as usual and of course the topic was the supervisors firing CEO John Ball. And Supervisor David Colfax walks in - I have to give him credit for showing up in public that morning - and as he and I were talking (I was telling him he wasn't going to like Sunday's editorial) a fellow named Michael K Johnson, who had earlier come in to hand me a letter to the editor opposed to the majority's decision to fire Ball, came up to Colfax and called him a cockroach and really got in his face in an aggressive way. Colfax semi-politely told him to get away from him. While I completely disagree with Colfax on this one and told him so, I have to say that even a supervisor you can't stand shouldn't have to take that kind of abuse. Geez.

I'm wishing now, too late, that I'd thought earlier this year to try to get a big public picnic together for Todd Grove Park this year for the Fourth. When the chamber announced it wasn't doing the fireworks, we asked readers to suggest new traditions (although it turns out the fireworks will continue thanks to the Speedway folks) and the idea of a big gathering of sort was raised. But then I didn't think again about it until too late. Maybe next year. I think it could be fun. I'll be here at the Daily Journal working away on Tuesday. Whatever you're doing, have fun and be safe!

NOTE: I posted this on Friday morning and corrected Mr. Johnson's name at about 12:30 p.m. Apologies to whoever may be out there with the name Michael Kennedy.

Posted by K.C. at 11:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So I got a personal tour this week with Ric Piffero of his flag and flag pole in the western hills. As I've said before, one of my main concerns is that if I lived nearby and had to look at that giant flag close up and the lights at night I would be disturbed. Interestingly, the flag is positioned so that really none of the five home sites of that development are looking at it. And there's really no other neighbors up there. From the valley, I don't see it as a problem. I do think it's too bad that the dicussion over it has become a kind of test of your patriotism. If you object to the oversized flag pole, you're not a patriot. That's not fair. I thank Ric for taking me up to look at it. Interesoingly there's no law about the size of the flag itself and I have to say that Ric's flag (which he tells me retails for about $8,000 and he got his used from Burger King) really needs a pole about 75 feet high. The day I went up the hill with Ric was the day we had just found out about the death of Sgt. Jason Buzzard in Iraq. I suggested Ric put the flag at half mast and he said he would except it's so big, if he lowers it he's afraid it will hit the ground.

Our reporter Ben Brown got some nastygrams this week from misguided local tribal members who accused him of being racist since he did not use the word "murdered" to describe the two tribal members who were killed up in Covelo a week ago. For some reason they think that we deliberately didn't say they were murdered because we want the community not to think of them as victims, but rather as somehow deserving of their fate. That is just nonsense. The reason we don't use the word murdered in these cases is that according to the Associated Press style book - a dictionary of usage that the AP has collated over the years in the search for accuracy in our business: "Unless premeditation was obvious, do not say that a victim was murdered until someone has been convicted in court." In this case no one has yet even been charged with the shooting deaths (as of this writing). So it's not that we hate American Indians. We use the eact same rule for any one, any color, any religion any sexual preference, age or ability.

Speaking of tribal members, we had some conversation this week with the Round Valley Tribe - through a non-tribal Covelo resident - and the result was the letter you will read in Sunday's Forum section. The tribe had wanted to also to scold the media - and one newspaper in partcular, not the UDJ - for its coverage of the shootings. The tribe believes that the media should get its permission before writing anything about things that happen on the reservation. I responded that we couldn't do that but that we would be willing to talk to any person in authority at the reservation about their view of the events. I was told that they won't talk to us. I reiterated my view that it is difficult to have stories that present their view as they see it if they won't talk to us. I say here again that we are willing any time to contact tribal members about events on tribal lands, but we can't withhold news reporting if they don't want to speak with us.

Someone asked me the other day how bylines are decided. When does a reporter get a byline and when not. Basically a byline indicates that the reporter did the lion's share of the work for the story. That he or she made phones calls, sat through the meeting, did research, got the quotes. A story without a byline means it was a story that contains information that was sent to us and that we probably rewrote for publication without a lot of extra input. Readers see my byline from time to time and that usually means we are shorthanded in the newsroom. Long time readers will remember that I was a reporter here for six years before becoming editor and I still like reporting. In the case this week of the Odyssey project at Masonite, I wrote the story because I knew the history behiond Rick Derringer's previous activities on that property and our new land use and planning reporter James Arens would have had to do so much research, the story would have been an other of couple of days coming. James will, however, take up the story from here, so call him if you have info on anything happening on the Masonite land. He's also at udjja@pacific.net.

KC Meadows, Editor UDJ

Posted by K.C. at 02:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This morning I got a call from a woman who did not identify herself, but left a message complaining about our news poll on the Web site which asks if you think anyone should be able to put any size flagpole on their property.
"Why don't you do a real poll" she said, and ask the readers specifically what they think of the Hull-Piffero flagpole at the top of the western hills. "Of course" no one would agree to let anyone put up a flagpole of any size, she adds, so why stage this (unprintable word) poll.
Well, the reason we asked this question instead of the one she'd like is that the issue of the Hull-Piffero flag pole has become a test of patriotism and something of a popularity contest about Hull and Piffero in general.
What we want to gather from the readers is, if it weren't Hull and Piffero - who have become heroic to many local residents in their efforts to make patriotism a kind of public challenge in Ukiah - would people still think putting up a flag pole of any size in your front yard is OK.
This caller certainly thought not.
Driving through Ukiah, if you even notice the flag, tourists or others not in the know probably think,
"Gee Ukiah's post office is in a funny place," but I don't think I would particularly like to be a neighbor and suddenly have this imposing structure looming over or near my house. And that doesn't mean I don't love my country as much as the next person.
I suspect that a number of people cheering Hull and Piffero on wouldn't hesitate to scream if it was someone in their neighborhood doing the same thing. And once we have the precedent allowing this outsized flagpole, who is going to stop the next person who may not be interested in flying the American flag? How would we all feel if these gentlemen were flying a skull and crossbones up in the hills? Or a flag with a big marijuana leaf on it?
Having said all this. I think we will put up the poll that caller wanted as soon as we give this one a day or two. It will be illuminating to see how much support is out there for this flagpole but not anyone else's.

Posted by K.C. at 11:06 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Well, here I am in - what century is it? - joining the millions of people out there blogging on the Web.
Oh, by the way, this is KC Meadows, managing editor of the Ukiah Daily Journal and this is my new blog.
Here at the Daily Journal we hope to add more bloggers to our site and we want to find those bloggers right here in our community. But we have found (having waited this long to dip into this blogging thing) that most blogs probably aren't that interesting. The ones that seem to do well are those in which the blogger has some expertise in a field that allows them to provide useful information that our readers probably can't get elsewhere. I guess what I want to avoid is a lot of opinion blogs. Those are everywhere. But if you are an expert on something (and you don't have to be THE expert, just really knowledgeable) and you think it would be fun to have a blog on the Daily Journal site, contact me at udjkcm@pacific.net and pitch me your idea.
Remember that blogging is a commitment. It means you have to be willing to go online regularly to add to your site and, don't forget, anyone can respond to what you have to say.
On that subject, you, the reader, are invited to comment on this or any other blog we present on this site and we want this to be fairly freewheeling and useful as an interactive method of communication.
However, I will of course be reading the comments and will be taking down anything I think is over the top. And I urge readers to email me immediately any time you see something you think shouldn't be on the site. You don't have to give your name to comment - but you will have to give us your email address which will not be for publication, but will allow us to track you down and shoot out your porch light if you're misbehaving on the site.
This blog, Inside UDJ, is intended to be a place where I can share with you some of things that happen in our day to day effort to get the news out to you. We make decisions about what's news every day and how to go about getting stories and writing them and goodness knows we're not perfect. But there are days when I say to myself that I wish I could just explain this or that to the readers.
Now I can.
So here are a couple of things I want to explain that happened while I was on vacation for a couple of weeks earlier this month.

First, the Rainbow headline. AGH! If you read the story about the court date set for Rainbow Construction vs Ukiah Unified School District on line, you didn't get the headline that pronounced Rainbow Ag as the company suing UUSD.
First, let me explain that the reporter of that story, Laura Clark, did not write the headline. The reporters rarely write the headlines, so it is important that the editor of the story read the story carefully so as to put an accurate headline on it.
In this case, since I was on vacation, our features editor Richard Rosier was putting out Page 1 on my behalf on a Monday night when there are no other editors in the newsroom. Richard saw "Rainbow" in the story and his brain told him," Rainbow Ag" and that's what he wrote in the headline.
He was as horrified as everyone else in the newsroom when he realized what had happened and that's one of the things that is challenging for newspapers that TV, radio and on-line journalists don't face - when you goof it's in print for everyone to see and hold up to you. How does it happen? Well, while it doesn't make it any better, Richard was not only covering for me that night, he was training a new assistant in the newsroom and editing and laying out a special section at the same time.

The second thing that happened while I was gone was a letter to the editor got in that should not have run. The reason it should not have run is that it made comments about a local law enforcement officer (using a last name only) which I would have edited out. It was letter from a member of NORML, the people looking to change marijuana laws and it was seeking information about possible police corruption in marijuana cases. The letter was emailed to us and it was run on the letters page. After the fact, the person who wrote it contacted us to berate us for running it, saying that it wasn't meant for publication (he did admit to writing it and sending it out). In fact, the person said it wasn't really meant to come to the newspaper in the first place.
That's the problem when you use email. That "send" button is all too handy.
So I am not going to feel sorry we ran the letter for that reason, but I am sorry that the officer's name was used. I would have edited that out.

These are just examples of the kinds of things that happen when you publish a newspaper seven days a week with a small but earnest staff of human beings.
Speaking of staff we have some new staff in the newsroom whose names you will get to know.
Katie Mintz is a journalism school graduate who is covering government for us, including the city of Ukiah, the county and state and federal issues as they relate to us locally. She can be reached at udjkm@pacific.net.
James Arens is another journalism graduate who is covering a newly formed planning and land use beat. His beat also includes environment, and agriculture. He can be reached at udjja@pacific.net.
Also new at the Daily Journal is our online editor Brittany Dashiell. Brittany used to be our news assistant and showed such enthusiasm for all things Internet that we decided it was high time to create an online position. Brittany, by the way, was the one who made it possible for me to start this blog. She is also working on making us capable of running audio and video on our site and other fun improvements - check out our news and sports polls now on the site as well. She can be reached at udjonline@pacific.net if you see an error on our Web site or have suggestions about making it better.

So there's my first blog. I can't guarantee I'll be submitting every day but I promise not to let this site languish. If you're wondering how we do the things we do here, or want to make suggestions just use the comments section for this blog. Remember everyone will be able to read it. If you want to communicate with me privately any time I am at udjkcm@pacific.net or 468-3526.

Posted by K.C. at 06:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

UDJ editor K.C. Meadows will begin her blog on Sunday, June 18.

Posted by K.C. at 11:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)