Someone has asked a logical question regarding the recall petitions against Oceanside Councilman Jerry Kern.
If some petition signers were “tricked” into signing by being presented multiple petitions on various subjects — as the councilman and his defenders have asserted — then shouldn’t those erroneous signatures be easy to prove?
Presumably, a reporter could track down Kern recall petition signers at random and ask them if they intended to sign the Kern recall document.
Unfortunately for this project (but not for the general privacy rights of petition signers), the identities are protected.
Oceanside Assistant City Clerk Holly Trobaugh told our reporter Ray Huard that signed petitions are confidential under state government code 6253.5. And, also by law, the signed petitions must be preserved for eight months then destroyed.
“We don’t even look at it,” Trobaugh told Huard.
Archive for the ‘Editor's Corner’ Category
Polling recall petition signatures not possible
By: Kent Davy — August 26th, 2009To a reader asking about the edit page
By: Kent Davy — August 24th, 2009After a reader sent a complaint to our corporate office about his perception of liberal bias on the editorial pages, I sent the following response (and thought you might also be interested):
Dear sir:
I appreciate your being a loyal reader and taking the time to write to our corporate office, which has forwarded your comments back to this office and finally to me.
I want to assure you that as the editor of this paper for the past 13 years, I take reader comments seriously. However, I think your criticism that the editorial page has drifted to the “progressive” side of the universe is invalid.
First, while the editorials of the institution itself (”Our view”) remain focused on local issues, they general fall into a pattern of supporting market-based solutions, not governmental ones (for instance, our push for public employee pension reform, the argument against the proposed rule against coastal power plants using once-through sea water and our general stance of protecting property rights).
Second, we monitor the Left/Center/Right views of the syndicated columnists we publish on the editorial pages and the Sunday Perspective section. That analysis puts the array at 19 left/ 15 center/ 18 right for the past 30 days. The right category includes: Michael Barone, George Will, Michael Gerson, Larry Elder, Bill O’Reilly, Michelle Malkin. The center category includes Dan Walters and Thomas Elias (the former clearly being tough on the state’s budget, pension and union follies). The left is obvious, too: Marie Cocco, Ellen Goodman and like.
There are some caveats, though. When Kathleen Parker (usually in the Right column) writes a bash Rush Limbaugh column, she’s recorded in the Left column, just as when Richard Cohen (normally in the Left column) hits Obama, he is recorded in the Right.
Of course, I understand there is always going to be an “eye of the beholder” problem in making these judgments, but I think we do a fair job.
Finally, the letters presentation is an open forum. We publish letters received as quickly as we can put them back out on a first-in/first-published basis (assuming they fit our general rules for length, civility, libel, etc.
We do not screen letters for any point of view balance. The left tilt that the letters pages show sometimes is a function of the left writing letters while the right sits on their hands. I have pointed this phenomenon out to county Republican Party critics but I don’t think they hear me. Sometimes, the right will push letter writing campaigns as well.
The place where maintaining a left/right balance is the hardest is with editorial cartoons (when we lost Mark Thornhill to retirement, we tried to balance by running more from Michael Ramirez, for instance). However, since editorial cartoonists mostly tweak at those in power, Obama and the Democrats have been much in the crosshairs lately prompting complaints of bias from the left.
Best,
Kent Davy
Local blogger listings?
By: Kent Davy — August 21st, 2009I’m interested in compiling an active listing of Southwest Riverside and North County bloggers. If you know of one you appreciate (or are a blogger yourself), please drop me a line at kdavy@nctimes.com. Thanks.
Oceanside building
By: Kent Davy — August 21st, 2009A note last week (MEDIA: NCT puts Oceanside office up for sale) announced the North County Times would offer for sale its building on Coast Highway.
I’ve heard a couple people worry out loud that this was a signal that the North County Times would be leaving the city.
That’s not the case.
While the press operations (we had two printing presses one in Escondido and one at the Oceanside building) have been consolidated to the inland plant, the paper doesn’t need so much space and, once the building sells, will move to other office space in the city.
Keeping reporters in Oceanside is a top priority. It’s way too hard to cover the coast from the Escondido shop, after all it’s about 20 miles to get from Grape Day Park in Escondido to Oceanside City Hall,
Why aren’t the comics in the same place every day?
By: Kent Davy — July 13th, 2009Or the weather page, the editorial page, etc.? It is a common reader complaint exacerbated by the occasional flubs on the A1 index.
The arrangement of pages in the newspaper is a function of several competing forces: What the newsroom needs, or at least desires; what the demands of adversting are (particularly for full color spots); and, the physical limitations of the two presses we run.
We normally run “collect” runs which produce four sections with equal page counts between the first and third and the second and fourth sections (if the paper has additional sections, those are run in another press run and inserted). In running the press that way, not every page has color available to it.
So as the page layout department assembles the list of advertisements and the newsroom requests, they electronically map the newspaper (sans stories, etc.). In order to shift things around to best accomodate all requests.
For instance, many advertisers prefer being in the A sections with the news report.
What is Twitter?
By: tgreer — February 9th, 2009There’s been a lot of talk about Twitter lately, and the North County Times has started using the service. But what is it? And how can you use it?
From Twitter.com:
Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?
Tweetnet.com has a more detailed explanation, along with good links to more resources:
Twitter is a social networking and microblogging service that allows you answer the question, “What are you doing?” by sending short text messages 140 characters in length, called “tweets”, to your friends, or “followers.”
How we’re using Twitter
NCT has a Twitter page at www.twitter.com/nctimes. The online staff will add updates or “tweets” throughout each day with headlines and links to full stories. If you have a Twitter account and “follow” the NCT page, you can log on to your page and see our tweets.
I have been using my personal Twitter account as something of a news aggregator. I am following several local and national news organizations in addition to my favorite sports teams and some journalism groups, and this means I get a steady stream of headlines to my account home page. When I want to read more about a story, I simply click through.
Two things to know about navigating Twitter
First, people can direct their tweets to a certain person by using the expression “@username.” For example, I may be hungry and tweet “Who wants to go for pizza?” One of my friends might respond to me “@tracy — I do! Make mine pepperoni.” By using the @ symbol followed by my username, I know their tweet is intended as a response to my tweet.
Second, Twitter users have developed a way to easily find tweets related to a particular subject by using the expression “#word.” This “hashtag” using the pound symbol makes it easy to search for related tweets from everyone across Twitter, not just your followers. For example, during the recent presidential inauguration, people at the event or just talking about it used the hashtag #inaug09.
Send us your news!
NCT is using the hashtag #nctimes to solicit news tips from Twitter users. Are you sitting on the 78 because of a bad accident? Your kid’s classroom is closed due to mold? Tweet about it and add the hashtag — we’ll get the info to a reporter to follow up.
Follow us! www.twitter.com/nctimes
More TV book thoughts
By: Administrator — August 6th, 2008How dumb is this:
Even as television proliferates in choices (the 500 channel problem) and total viewership (even though the individual channel slices are shrinking), the newspaper industry has devoted gobs of expensive newsprint to promote their chief competitor.
What else would you call a television listings book but layer upon layer of free promotional material advertising what’s on CBS or AMC or ESPN at 8 p.m.?
Unfortunately, newspapers never figured out how to cash in on this great giveaway and now that newspapers are trimming or eliminating television books, their readers are blaming the newspapers.
In fielding about 150 complaints this week, I haven’t heard a single complaint lodged against television itself for not providing an easy to use listing service.
Figures.
TV book trauma
By: Administrator — August 6th, 2008This week has been an object lesson in the concept that there are three kinds of owners of a newspaper: The owners by title; those who write, edit and produce the paper; and, mostly importantly, the readers.
In this case, an attempt to trim costs in the newsroom by eliminating eight pages from the weekly TV book (the movie synopses were cut out) has sparked at least 150 angry telephone messages mostly by older readers.
Their complaints are mostly that television is their primary source of entertainment and that they have no other source of information to see what movies they may wish to watch, being part of the pre-computer demographic slice.
The anger is justified — nobody likes losing a useful and favorite feature of the newspaper — but in the end may not be assuaged.
The savings in newsprint is equivalent to two reporters, and pushed to that choice I would rather have reporters.