Editorials

Are newspapers still necessary? This question inevitably surfaces during a week in the country, where there’s no home delivery of the two papers we habitually read in Berkeley. 

Granted, it’s nice to distract a wandering mind during the ritual consumption of the coffee needed to bring the mind back into reasonable focus, and newspapers are a handy way to do that. I always skim the San Francisco Chronicle first, a task which doesn’t take long these days, especially because I can immediately put the glossy ad pullouts, the sports pages and any auto or real estate sections directly into the recycling box. Then, if there’s nothing more pressing to do, I might dip into the New York Times, but often it languishes unopened in its plastic bag, since I know I can read what I want online when I have time during the day. The Chronicle’s online effort is a different matter, seemingly edited by Cuisinart, forcing the reader to wade through oceans of trivia to get to the news, if there is any. 

What’s interesting about the Times these days, constantly evolving as it is, is that though it pretends to be a national newspaper, an awful lot of what it contains is parochial New York stuff, of interest only to current or former New York residents. Online, it’s easier to skip the NY-specific chatter and go straight to the good stuff: Paul Krugman, though sadly no more Frank Rich. 

The national news in the NYT, print or web, is spotty—Brad DeLong, Berkeley’s sharpest scalpel, frequently pokes deserved fun at its failings on his blog. Its attempt at Bay Area coverage is mostly Lite—stories which seem to be written for tourists, or perhaps newbies recently arrived, excited to be discovering sites and situations which are old hat to anyone who’s been around the Bay for more than two years. 

Looking for something to read in the country, it’s easy and pleasant to substitute very old back issues of the New York Review of Books or a couple of Jhumpa Lahiri’s addictive short stories into the breakfast decompression reading routine. Guests have been known to bring IPADs or Kindles to enable their habitual news consumption online, but that’s chancy because our country phone service and broadband internet are very flaky these days. (Is anyone home at AT&T anymore? We’ve called and called, they’ve come and come, but nothing seems to get fixed.) 

But what about the local news, my news junky friends will be asking at this point. And especially, what about those important developments on the Berkeley scene: home fires, missing persons, the occasional shooting, new restaurants? 

Luckily for me, in my current avocation a lot of the news comes to me. Readers email (when it’s working) or call (when it’s not). The civic stalwarts who have taken on the job of documenting what they care about on the local scene report stories, often in a “news analysis” frame, and send them to the Planet for posting. Bay City News tracks the big crimes and accidents with official sources, and we pass their articles along to Planet readers. A good bit of the local government news, the Berkeley City Council and the Zoning Adjustment Board in particular, can be watched online. 

And increasingly there’s a collection of reports in a variety of locations online which can be patched together to give a picture of what’s news in Berkeley. I dipped into three of them last week to assess what the top hits were on the Berkeley City Council agenda before watching the tedious video, and taken as a group they did a good job of informing me. 

Anyone who really cares about Berkeley doings might look from time to time at these sites: 

Sfgate.com, is the online presence of the Hearst Chronicle, augmented by “blogs” not edited by the Chron. 

Insidebayarea.com, from the Bay Area News Group, is an offshoot of Dean Singleton’s Media News empire, supplying a huge number of “local” papers (e.g. The Oakland Tribune, The San Jose Mercury News, the Berkeley Voice, the Contra Costa Times) with the output of an ever-shrinking number of reporters. One brave guy is still trying to cover Berkeley. 

The East Bay Express, in print and online weekly, continues to improve as it gets farther away from the unfortunate period when it was owned by the shrill and unpleasant New Times group. It offers reported articles covering Berkeley from time to time, and its letters and comments on line are a good source of informative opinion. 

The Daily Cal is U.C. Berkeley’s student newspaper, in print and online. They have a flock of student reporters who often cover things others miss, though not always completely accurately, but who’s perfect? Reader comments tend be rude, often juvenile. 

Berkeley Patch is a newish formulaic online-only offering now owned by the recently combined AOL-Huffington Post empire. There are many Patches around the country (at least two in towns named Berkeley, one in El Cerrito, another in Santa Cruz and many more) and they specialize in low-budget local coverage. Sample reader comment: “What gives Jesse Arreguin the right to say that Berkeley is a "sanctuary city?" What right does she [sic] have to wilfully [sic] violate federal law?” 

Berkeleyside is a serious and frequently interesting web-based endeavor by three local residents to provide hyperlocal news and lifestyle features in a variety of modes. Reader response uses the sometimes confusing Disqus system, which does allow more discussion (hence the name) than similar products. 

But lately anonymous ranters have been hijacking the comments on Berkeleyside.. Unfortunately, what seems to be the same crazies who did their best to destroy the Berkeley Daily Planet have now decided to use Berkeleyside comments to attack the Planet and me personally. They’ve gone after several other individuals as well in ways which tend to pre-empt subject matter discourse, prompting the founders to ban a number of the worst offenders recently. Like many Berkeley residents, I’ve occasionally been moved to add my voice to an interesting on-going discussion on their site, but this seems to set the crazies off, so I’ve decided to refrain from commenting there for the duration to avoid creating a distraction, out of respect for the importance of the forum Berkeleyside is trying to provide. 

So where does this leave the Berkeley Daily Planet? Mike and I originally re-started the print paper in an era when there was no other way for Berkeleyans to find out what was going on.. The Chronicle at the time did mostly Beserkeley stories, and other papers weren’t much better. The situation has improved so much since then that we don’t feel the same responsibility to supply basic news that we did then. 

And it’s a challenge, putting it mildly, for a two-person no-budget enterprise, even with the help of excellent dedicated unpaid reporters, to cover everything. We’ve gradually shifted gears to provide more analytic pieces instead, trying to fill a niche that’s still needed, especially for national and international topics. 

We’ve always been willing to publish all kinds of opinions, even (or especially) those we don’t agree with, though our legacy newspaper format doesn’t allow spontaneous comments. Where we differ from Berkeleyside is that we will only publish opinions, whether long commentaries or short letters, which are signed with the author’s real name. That’s the best mechanism for discouraging the intemperate. Occasionally I’ll send a letter that I don’t like back to a writer with a request that it be toned down, and they almost always oblige and usually improve the piece by doing so. 

But we’d still be happy to publish the output even of those who have been anonymously offensive on Berkeleyside, IF they’re willing to sign their names. Since we’re now non-commercial, we're glad that we aren’t selling clicks to advertisers—running only signed opinions tends to reduce submissions, which could be costly for a commercial site. If you’ve brave enough to sign your piece, just send an email to opinion@berkeleydailyplanet.com, and in due time I’ll put it online. 

My own first love is actually reasoned well-written long-form dialogue about matters of civic interest. Before I got mixed up with the Planet, I’d started an opinion-only website, Berkeley Free Press, which I’ve retained in quiescent form all these years. One Berkeleyside contributor, someone whom I’ve always respected because he signs his own name even though I frequently disagree with him, expressed a desire for a site online where extensive reasoned discussion could take place and survive in easily retrievable form organized by topic. Once again. I’d like to encourage him and anyone else who has similar desires to try out http://www.berkeleyfreepress.com/ .The format, generic Wordpress, could probably stand some improvement, so I’d welcome suggestions.