Showing posts with label The Advocate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Advocate. Show all posts

Monday, June 22, 2009

O! Suck it up and git 'er done


They're talking about us down on the bayou. Most of what folks are saying is pretty good.

Interesting that, sometimes, visitors in Omaha for the College World Series look at our city and end up having more faith in us than we do. Says Gary Laney of The Advocate in my old hometown, Baton Rouge:
Baseball is about Little Leaguers in Williamsport, Pa., summer leaguers playing around the clock in Wichita, Kan., and collegians spending a couple of weeks at Rosenblatt Stadium — with the lucky few getting to feel the Ivy at Wrigley Field or hear the thud of a line drive off the Green Monster at Fenway Park.

When the Red Sox play the Yankees, the sport does fine. It’s when it goes into these misadventures with the new — overpriced Yankee Stadium seats, shortened college seasons — that it always seems to trip over its own spikes.

It’s within that context that folks here are a little nervous. Rosenblatt Stadium’s days are numbered, to be replaced for the 2011 CWS by a brand-spanking-new downtown stadium, to be called TD Ameritrade Park Omaha, named for one of the city’s Fortune 500 companies. Rosenblatt will become a parking lot for the Henry Doorly Zoo, and the stadium’s other tenant, the Omaha Royals, will move to suburban Papillion, Neb.

The new stadium promises, or threatens, to be everything Rosenblatt is not. Where Rosenblatt has the dome from the zoo as a right-field backdrop, TD Ameritrade Park will have the city’s skyline, and yes, Omaha has a skyline. Where Rosenblatt is in a working-class neighborhood with Zesto’s ice cream stand (where one can spend a couple of dollars for what is supposedly the best ice cream in the Midwest) across the street, the new place will be on the edge of trendy, touristy Old Market with the state-of-the-art Qwest Center across the street.

And, one is named after a corporate giant while the other is named after the mayor who brought professional baseball and the College World Series to Omaha.

All of those thoughts are downright scary for baseball purists. But folks in Omaha are the perfect hosts for the College World Series for a reason, and that’s what gives hope for their new stadium. If any place is going to do a new stadium right, it’s Omaha.
THERE'S A LOT RIGHT about Omaha. And, yes, if any town can make a major change to a beloved baseball tradition -- and, more importantly, make it work -- it's the Big O.

But we're facing tough times. City revenues are tighter than one of Sasha Baron Cohen's "Bruno" getups, and ordinary folk are yelling and screaming for city fathers to take a budget ax and cut right through the bone.

That's because Omaha, unfortunately, is not immune to America's generation-long affliction with taxorexia. It's kind of like anorexia and bulimia combined, except that while you're not taking any nourishment in, you're still purging cops, libraries, yard-waste pickup and street repair.

Funny thing is, it only applies to civic affairs. Show us skyrocketing cable-TV bills and we'll still pay up. We'll bitch, but we'll pay. Upgrade to digital, even.

And we'll sell Junior on Craigslist to fill up the SUV with premium unleaded.

But show us a city that's cut the budget to the point of "You don't want to go there," and we'll say
"Go there . . . we ain't paying no stinkin' taxes." Of course, no one has any useful suggestions about where to cut, but that's not important now -- there must be some more fat somewhere.

Sadly, it's often between the ears of the armchair budget director.

AS I SAID, Omaha's in a tough spot right now, what with anemic tax collections and all. But we've been in tough spots before, and Nebraskans usually suck it up and do what needs to be done.

So maybe we just need to shut the hell up and do it again -- in this case, that would be protecting the city's quality of life, basic services and economic viability just as zealously as we've guarded the CWS all these decades.

What, do you think we got to the point where far-off newspapers run glowing accounts of life in Omaha by sitting on our butts muttering "No, no, never, no"? I think not.

Suck it up. It's important.

Wednesday, September 03, 2008

When you assume. . . .

You know the old saying, "When you assume, you make an ASS out of U and ME"?

Down in Baton Rouge, The Advocate never heard of that one. Before Hurricane Gustav came roaring in, the newspaper's publisher assumed -- with a hurricane on the way -- that the paper's brand-new printing plant would not lose power.

IN A HURRICANE.

Wedne
sday, The Advocate publicly wipes the egg off its face. Not that many of its subscribers ever will read about it:
Capital City Press did not publish a newsprint edition of The Advocate on Tuesday because it did not rent a backup generator to power the presses halted by Hurricane Gustav.

Instead, it posted the 48-page product it put together the night before in a format that retains the layout the newspaper would have had in print and distributed 200 office-paper copies Tuesday afternoon to agencies providing recovery services.

Beginning today, the paper is being printed by The Daily Advertiser in Lafayette until power is restored to Capital City Press’s Rieger Road printing facility, which could take several days or longer, Publisher David Manship said.

The newspaper’s content is produced at the editorial and administrative offices on Bluebonnet Boulevard, which have backup power.

Manship said Entergy Corp. told the paper before the storm that the printing facility could have power back by Thursday, but Manship pointed out the paper will be in line behind hospitals and other emergency service providers and that it could take longer.

Thursday’s paper and subsequent editions will be larger than today’s 16-page paper.

It also will begin running advertising again, though ads will be contained to recovery-related services.

Manship said the paper will be delivered to parts of the metro area where carriers have access. He also said carriers will make papers available at points close to those areas they cannot reach because of downed trees and power lines.

The Daily Advertiser printed 50,000 copies of today’s paper when it finished printing its own, at 3:30 a.m.

Manship said the goal is to have papers delivered by noon.

“We’ll … distribute them as best we can,” he said, noting traffic and fuel availability will be major factors.

Executive Editor Carl Redman said today’s edition seeks to balance much-needed information about the storm with other elements — comics, puzzles and some national sports news — that offer a sense of normality.

He said the main challenge so far is getting reports in from the field because of the lack of power and the unreliable communications infrastructure.

He added the newsroom is using the Web site to get information out as quickly as possible and is posting more photographs than usual.


(snip)

Manship said he had to decide last week whether to pay $20,000 for a back-up generator by Thursday and decided against it because he didn’t think the printing facility would lose power.

“We made the decision that we didn’t want one,” he said, “and it was obviously a bad call on our part.”

While he conferred with a couple of department heads, Manship said the call was his.

“I was the ultimate decision-maker on that,” he said.

Newspapers generally pride themselves on performing their civic function regardless of — and especially during — difficult circumstances.

Tuesday was the first time in memory that The Advocate wasn’t published on a day it was supposed to.

UNREAL. That paper has a new printing plant, and you'd have to wonder why The Advocate's powers that be didn't just eat that cost upfront as part of the build-out. Especially in hurricane country.

But it is what it is.
And the home of "Why Try Harder?" continues its unbroken streak of short-sightedness in breaking its streak of daily publication.

And a fine lot of good plopping PDF files on the website will do for a largely powerless (and Internet deprived) city -- full of subscribers who didn't evacuate out of the storm zone.

Friday, June 13, 2008

Ethel! This here GPS ain't workin' right!


Click on graphic to enlarge.

Tiger fans, if you're looking for the College World Series in Omaha, Oklahoma, you're going to miss the game. But what do you expect of people in Baton Rouge, Mississippi?

What does it take for a newspaper to get the story -- or graphic, as the case may be -- right? Let's see:

Veteran reporter: $55,000.
Graphic artist: $40,000.
Single-copy of The Advocate: 50 cents.

Functioning education system: Priceless.

Wednesday, April 09, 2008

Why try harder?


It's a bad thing when you have to put a story on your web site acknowledging, in the lede, that you just got scooped by . . . everybody. On a story that you should own.

IT'S A WORSE THING that the next most pertinent thing you can think of -- as you work your way down the "inverted pyramid" of newswriting -- would be "The coach is a WHAT?!?"

Way to go, Advocate! Why try harder when your audience is used to mediocrity?