Editorials

First, the breaking news: The Berkeley Daily Planet has captured a flock of prizes in the statewide Better Newspapers Contest sponsored by the California Newspaper Publishers Association. At the awards luncheon on Saturday we learned that we’d won two first prizes, for editorial pages overall and for an editorial cartoon by Justin DeFreitas, second prize for a spot news photo by Jakob Schiller, and honorable mentions (top 10 percent of entries in Northern California, statewide finalists) for local spot news (Matthew Artz), writing (Richard Brenneman) and for another DeFreitas cartoon. Please excuse us if we’re mighty proud of this record, especially since we’ve only been around for two years. 

Now, in classic Berkeley style, let’s all give ourselves a rousing round of applause! I say “ourselves” here because The Daily Planet couldn’t have won the prize for the best editorial pages without our many vigorous and prolific reader-contributors. Not only that, our brilliant editorial cartoonist Justin DeFreitas also contributes to these pages (as well as helping me edit them). Well done, gang. Even if We (that’s the regular editorial “we” now) sometimes think some of You (opinion writers) are dreadfully wrong-headed in your opinions, we appreciate your sending them along to us. 

This provides yet another opportunity to reflect on why we’re all gathered here together, a favorite theme on this page. I’m currently reading a new book, A Matter of Opinion, by Victor Navasky, a man described affectionately by Calvin Trillin as “wily and parsimonious.” He was for a number of years the editor of The Nation, and then around about 1994 he shifted gears and became its publisher instead. The chapter that most interests me is the one entitled “The Editor As Publisher”—I’m looking for tips on how he pulls it off, and in particular how he managed to bring the magazine into the black in short order after he took over the business side of the endeavor. That’s the wily and parsimonious part. But it’s at the end of a long book, and so far I’ve only gotten through the earlier chapters, where he explains why he’s doing it. 

He is a fan of Jurgen Habermas, a German philosopher whose theory Navasky sums up as “the idea that to flourish, democracy requires a continuous conversation, open argumentation and debate.” That’s the idea on these pages too. In a seminar at the New School which is transcribed on the Internet, Navasky elaborated on it: 

“The point is that in the present circumstance, with all the post-Cold War unresolved issues, with all of the issues that divide the tiny staff of editors at a magazine like The Nation, or like The National Review, that divide the country, and the world, and with the conceptual difficulty that characterizes this period as we attempt to get a handle on these issues -- that is a time that is ready-made for these journals that really do specialize in opening up the public arena, to public argument and discourse. So, that is the business we're really in….” 

Now, quite a number of fine journals have specialized in opening up the national public arena. But it’s much harder to find one which works on the local level to do the same thing, even though local issues tend to repeat themselves all over the country. Many newspapers have converted to the sound-byte school of letters to the editor, and their op-ed pages are dominated by syndicated or staff columnists. Instead of opening up the public arena, they’re closing it. We’ve been trying to reverse the trend, and based on the opinion of the contest judges (who came from all over the country) we might be doing something right. 

A major difference between what we’re doing and pure journals of opinion is that they can bounce off the widely disseminated national “hard news.” We’ll leave aside for a moment the fascinating topic of whether there’s any such thing as “objective” news coverage, and just point out that the public can’t engage in argument and discourse about current events if they don’t even know what’s going on. So we try (in 28 pages max) to do it all: to give readers enough solid factual information about what’s happening locally that they can form opinions and turn them into letters and commentaries for the public arena. Our news coverage is central to our mission. 

And we’ve learned something: Sometimes the readers are ahead of the reporters in knowing what’s going on. There was a fascinating little story in one of the dailies which pointed out that the major first reporting on the London bombing was sent in as cell phone text messages by on-the-site observers, with the first pictures coming from cell phone cameras. And many have commented on how the online non-professional bloggers were way ahead of the major media in exposing the now-famous Downing Street memo revelations. On the local level, we’ve never needed to do a story on what appears to be a major fiasco in A.C. Transit’s bus-buying because our readers are all over it.  

Although most of our correspondents send in their contributions as e-mail, it appears that a major advantage a printed newspaper has over on-line chats is that contributors are more careful about how they express themselves. They use conventional spelling and grammar for the most part, which makes their letters much easier to read (we do occasional cleanup). They tend to think about what they write, instead of just “flaming” as writers are tempted to do online. And many more readers can pick up the paper for casual reading on the bus or in cafes—we’re not limited to the techno-savvy. We print and distribute close to 30,000 copies of each paper, most of which are picked up, and using standard industry pass-around figures that means that about 50,000 pairs of eyes fall on some part of every issue.  

Which brings us, in a tortuous way, to the vexing question of distribution of free pick-up papers. We’re at the mercy of “the interests” even though we don’t charge for our copies. In the past few weeks both UC and the City of Berkeley have tried to curtail our free circulation. Could it have something to do with the way their recent deal has been hammered in our opinion pages? 

The business manager of the Daily Cal said this in an e-mail: “The Daily Cal has a licensing agreement with the regents which provides exclusive newspaper distribution rights on campus to the Daily Californian.” Do the regents really have the right to create a press monopoly? We can’t afford to litigate it, so we don’t know.  

And an eagle-eyed reader tipped us off that City of Berkeley employees confiscated three of our boxes on College Avenue which had been there for years. The person in City Hall who is responsible for policing boxes had previously promised to let us know if there were problems before seizing the boxes, but he didn’t do it. He now says he’s sorry, but the boxes aren’t back 

The Berkeley Bowl (a frequent topic among our contributors) and Cody’s Books on Telegraph have recently banned our wire racks with flimsy excuses. When we went into Cody’s on Friday looking for Navasky’s book, an employee told us that it was because metal racks set off the security devices at the door. There still were two wire racks for out-of-town papers next to the security device, however, though ours was gone. And no, he said, there was no other place in the store for copies of the Planet. It’s ironic that a business which makes much of the virtue of supporting local booksellers has no room at the inn for the local press. (We found the book at Moe’s, a loyal Planet advertiser, unlike Cody’s, and they have a nice wooden rack for all free papers right by their front door.) 

P.S. Jakob Schiller, our prize-winning news photographer and reporter who started with us as an intern, is particularly good on labor stories, with great pictures of picket lines, including some at the Berkeley Bowl. 

B