Editorials

Birthdays. Some people love them, some people hate them. For optimists, it’s a chance to have a party, to get gifts and bouquets from your friends, and to look forward with enthusiasm to new triumphs in the coming year. For pessimists, there’s the temptation to be excessively aware of how the time has slipped away since last year, with concomitant worrying about what hasn’t been accomplished. Pessimists are the people who need the parties and the bouquets, but often they greet friends’ efforts to cheer them up on birthdays with surly rejection.  

The Daily Planet’s Re-Birthday is April 1, a day when we’re on deadline for this issue, so we didn’t plan a party for that day. (Just as well as far as I’m concerned, since I am one of the surly birthday types.) We’ll have our cake next week, after our two close-together deadlines have passed, but this is the Official Anniversary Issue, offering the opportunity to reflect on where we’ve come in the last year and where we hope to go in the future. The high-minded editorial about news coverage, reflecting on the importance of the free press in a democracy, ran on March 19. This one is our chance to think about how well we’ve done on the smaller stuff that adds up to the big picture for our readers and advertisers.  

Trying to act like birthday optimists, we’ll concentrate on highlighting what we’ve accomplished so far: 

First, the expanded calendar! We said in our preview edition that “A comprehensive calendar is one of the most essential services of a local paper.” We’ve gotten that, and more, thanks to the dedicated efforts of Anne Wagley and the late Fred Lupke, who is sorely missed. It’s a huge job, assembling, collating and typing all of that information, and Anne is now doing it pretty much single-handed. 

Then, regular columnists. J. Douglas Allen-Taylor and Susan Parker, writers whose work we’d admired in other publications, got in touch with us early on and we eagerly snapped them up as columnists. Zac Unger has managed to work us in for some good columns in between his duties as a firefighter, book author and parent. Joe Eaton and Ron Sullivan, nature writers extraordinaire, have settled comfortably into the back page for our weekday editions, where we hope they’ll be for a long time.  

And features. We said: “We hope to showcase local talent as much as we can. We want to develop an inventory of excellent feature material by local writers which can be used when we have enough advertising to pay for some extra space.” We’ve enticed many local favorites (some of whom have international reputations) to write for us on a one or many time basis. They’re too numerous to mention individually, but we hope they will all continue to write for the Planet when they have time. Some even contribute their pieces gratis, which we especially appreciate. But we could always use more, especially as the paper grows in size. We have been delighted to be able to host the revived Pepper Spray Times, a beloved Berkeley institution that was much missed. 

News from outside Berkeley: In a year which began with the invasion of Iraq, national and international coverage continues to be essential. At readers’ request, we’ve dropped the conventional wire copy in favor of unique perspectives from smaller news services. We’ve added in-depth coverage of state, national and international news, primarily from our good friends at Pacific News Service, and also from Featurewell and Alternet. 

Finally, the real crowd-pleaser: the opinion section. We get more favorable reaction to our super-sized letters and commentary pages than to anything else in the paper. This is Berkeley, after all. News often breaks first in the Planet’s opinion pages; our readers know what’s going on, and they tell us, eloquently. Some of our most distinguished contributors write for our commentary page.  

Are the readers happy? A lot of you seem to be. We get many more bouquets than brickbats. We’re grateful to Dona Spring, Leuren Moret and Zelda Bronstein for collecting some bouquets for today’s paper. We thought about collecting some of the brickbats to give everyone a good laugh, but never got around to it.  

We have a wonderful roster of supportive advertisers, many of whose names are listed in this issue as an “honor roll.” We’d like many more, of course, since the paper is still not breaking even. And that’s where we’d like to enlist the readers’ help.  

A city voter survey discovered that, among regular voters in Berkeley, the Planet is the best-read East Bay paper, a demographic data point that ought to appeal to advertisers. When you shop locally (as we hope you do), ask the people you do business with to think about supporting the Planet with their advertising dollars. It would benefit them, and it would benefit us. 

Are there any negative thoughts amidst all this sweetness and light? A few. We’re sorry that some who hoped that “Berkeley would finally have a progressive paper” took that to mean we would tell only one side of multi-faceted stories and would suppress any bad news about “progressive” politicos. We’re disappointed when successful local businesses don’t think advertising in local publications is something they can afford. And we were profoundly saddened when a loyal advertiser called to say that she’d had calls asking her to drop Planet advertising because we’ve run letters critical of Israel’s policy toward Palestinians. The good news is that she refused.  

Finally, Mike and I very much appreciate the great staff we’ve got working with us, on the editorial side, in sales and in distribution. They treat their work at the Daily Planet as more than just a job—they take it seriously as a commitment to our readers and advertisers. And we are especially grateful to the community volunteers who worked hard for months to get us launched a year ago: people who believed that Berkeley deserved to have a paper, and put their own time, money and energy behind that belief when it counted most. We’ve discovered that despite the April 1 birthday, running a newspaper is no joke, but with a little help from our friends, we’ve done it, at least for one year. 

Becky O’Malley is executive editor of the Berkeley Daily Planet.