Let’s say you work at City Hall or the state house or the White House. Let’s say you have a story that you know will get to the press soon and you’d prefer not a lot of people see or hear it. Let’s say you’ve decided it’s better to give it to a reporter instead of having the story discovered. You make the call to a daily reporter on Friday – a.k.a. “take out the trash day” in the world of press secretaries and communication directors.
You see, you want the story to appear on Saturday—the day when fewer people read the paper, listen to the radio, or watch television news than any other day of the week. We’re going to Little League games or Costco or, in the case of some former elected officials, helping with not-so-voluntary community service projects.
Last Saturday, The Mercury News was a great example of City Hall putting out the proverbial trash. Two stories were released on Friday and appeared the following day:
1. eBay decides to move its gala dinner for an upcoming convention from the McEnery Convention Center’s aluminum tent which was constructed especially for the event to the Santa Clara Convention Center. (Link)
2. The salary setting commission recommends raises for the mayor and council – a no-win situation for elected officials. (Link)
When I worked at City Hall, we timed a couple stories for Saturday publication. So I admit that we took advantage of daily reporters and their editors being trained to get the story in the paper pronto. However, I never really understood why the Mercury News didn’t hold some stories until Sunday – the highest readership day – since there’s no direct competition in a one newspaper town for local news.
If City Hall really wants to take advantage of the Mercury News, they should move the council meeting to Friday. Fewer people would be aware of negative local government stories. Our weeks would be blissful. Then, one day we’d wake up and wonder why our libraries and communities centers have been replaced by aluminum tents.
I’m not concerned with what appears in Sat papers. I’m concerned with the scandals and bad stories that don’t appear at all.
Maybe this site is the right place for them. Can you guarantee anonymous quotes remain anonymous? How about setting up a whistleblower hotline?
We’ve got the same problems at VTA as CityHallGuy does at CH. We need help! There are some serious problems and major, major conflicts of interest that are costing county and city taxpayers hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. The Grand Jury Report didn’t investigate anything. They should be examined. Here as some problems more following later. For example, kick backs, overpriced and unneeded projects, hiring and promoting of upper level management—these people have created a Ponzi-type pryamid of hiring and promoting themselves. Matthew O. Tucker is the main cause, or architect, with Cipolla as the fall guy. But it is a lot deeper. This will be exposed as the closer we get to any new BART tax and the upcoming elections.
Stay tuned for the facts and the direct evidence.
The hotline better have “operators standing by” to handle the likely volume of calls. A lot of people have been waitning a long time for this chance to finally expose what is going on inside CH.
To (any) VTA whistleblowers:
There is a web site which currently exposes what is going on (good and bad) with the VTA.
http://www.vtaridersunion.org/
We also have an email list where these things are discussed. Several reporters from throughout the South Bay (including the Merc) are on the email list as well.
Please feel free to send the latest VTA scandals (with evidence of course) our direction. We were the first to report how BART critic Greg Perry was silenced in that “forum” last Thursday which the press eventually picked up on.
We look forward to working with any concerned and informed citizen inside VTA.
Hey CityHallGuy (and all you other anonymous posters),
We want this to be a public forum for everyone to post. We take anonymity seriously and will not give up any information on people commenting.
Unless you include it, we won’t even see your email address. So… if you post here anonymously, it’ll stay anonymous.
“The criticism I have,’’ Reed said, “is that this budget does not really address the problem we are creating for ourselves by continuing to build things we cannot pay for.’‘
Ok, we’re only in 2005, but this is the quote of the young century.
– Kill any lightrail expansion related activities – now.
– Pull the plug on VTA – now. Outsource the running of buses to a competent, non-corrupt entity.
– Finsh building and then sell the new city hall to a corporate interest.
– Convert the glass rotunda from a sinkhole of muck where our taxdollars will soon go to die into an icerink that makes money and citizens can enjoy.
– Halt any and all studies, planning, etc on bringing BART to SJ – now.
– Scale back the grandiose airport expansion. (Studies have shown that given a choice, citizens prefer smaller debacles over larger debacles)
grrr.
Jude,
At KLIV we have a simple solution to this game: if the story is important we’ll air it on Monday morning. If, as you point out, most people missed the story over the weekend it’s still news to them.
George Sampson – News Director, KLIV
A good column, Jude. Enjoyed reading it.
C’mon, George, you run every story, no matter how insignificant, for at least thirty hours.
Just like you have run the KRTY commercial about the call you got “the other day” from the woman “blind and in a wheel chair” for several months now, if not a full year.
And can it still be the NEW kliv after several years?
And please inform that weekend kid Jones that 5:00 a.m is not the time to open with “good evening” or worse yet, “good eveneing, uh, good morning”. And have him learn the difference between the proper use of the word “but” versus “and”.
Your station’s traffic reports are great. But for news, it’s KCBS or KGO, or even NPR and KPFA.
John Michael O’Connor