newspapers as product pushers

While browsing Random Pixels for information about former Miami Commissioner Arthur Teele (who put a bullet into his head, standing in the lobby of the Miami Herald building) I came across an unrelated story about former Herald columnist Joan Fleischman, who apparently used her column to promote her friends real estate dealings.
Of course there's no mention in the article but we all know that product placements cost money.

Life of a Story: Is Buckley Towers getting renovated?

On February 3 the Herald reported that Buckley Towers is doing $18 million dollars in renovations, then the article disappeared. This site recorded the article. I wonder what the Herald did with it.

rather encouraging

In response to this Miami Herald article, two users have already mentioned that said article contains little if no information about the subject in question, revisions to Miami 21.

Glad to not be the only show in town laughing at idiot journalism.

so you know i'm not dead

in my city of north miami beach, and actually down the street from me, a new charter school will go.
I could look it up now to make the argument seem reasonable, but instead try this on for size.

Have you heard about the charter schools in dade county being closed down due to inability to turn a profit?
Many details are lacking here, with no clear explanation of who will pay to build the school, it seems that the City of Now More Beautiful will only donate land for the project? Who knows, thanks for trying herald!

Other curiosities:
what sort of presentation did Mater Academy make to the council? How long has the council and the Academy been in dealings over this issue?
Is Mater Academy only operating the school? Who is funding its construction? and then afterwards?

From my understanding charter schools use government money, but run their schools like businesses instead of monopolies. Or that's the fantasy of it.

What's a charter school? Who knows!

Roundup? still working on it

Business isn't what it used to be
In this Miami Herald article, the Herald explains how Miami-Dade County will be appealing the state to allow Miami International Airport to install slot machines in the terminal to combat "its skyrocketing operational costs, which recently reached $600 million a year and are expected to swell to $1.1 billion by 2015."
The slot machines, which are expected to raise as much as $17 million a year, will obviously very little to curb the deficit.

As usual the Herald does not explain WHY there is a deficit (such a large one at that) nor if there are any other options being explored by the County.

Personally I'm confused as to why the County is running this airport in the first place. If my understanding from this article is correct, the County is maintaining this airport as a subsidy to the Airline companies. The libertarian in my is turning in its grave.

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This puff piece in the Herald explains a new program in Opa-locka where the city will be spending at least $50,000 to hire city residents to perform maintenance on foreclosed/blighted houses.
Residents can ear as much as $1000 per property, and are limited to working on three properties. There are currently 50 houses chosen for the program, but as unnamed Officials point the numbers are expected to "increase dramatically over the next 12 month."
There is no indication as to the average amount of work expected to be done per house, and as such there can be no estimate of what kind of impact this program can have on the community.

What also comes to mind is that as this is a "first come, first served" program, what efforts is the city of Opa-locka making to inform residents of the program? Of course the Herald doesn't bother addressing this issue. But if it's business as usual, I imagine no one will know about it other than friends of City officials.

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They needed a study for this?
The South Florida Biz Journal writes loosely about a study showing something I don't think we needed a study to show: high school drop outs makes less money than high school graduates.
Seriously? someone got paid to write about this.

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I'm still figuring this blog out, and it's obvious that a roundup type presentation will be necessary because doing individual write-ups for every article will encourage me to write too much about nothing special. But as such it's not a very sophisticated or impressive method, so we'll see how it goes.

Why we need the internet

As I've believed for a while, everyone knows, and the Miami Herald reports, Newspapers are failing, and with them comes large amounts of accountability to politicians.

They can get away with much more today than they could before the advent of the internet. What's up with that?
I'll tell you what's up: citizen journalism has yet to truly flourish--yet it is the only viable alternative to Big Media because unlike BM, citizen journalism doesn't depend on sponsorship and special interests. What it does depend on, and the biggest barrier to its proper advent, is effort. We have to make the news ourselves.

I haven't got to that point yet on this blog because it's still so young, and my posting is rather inconsistent, but hopefully this year I can make it a point to push my own limits, and demonstrate in some manner what an individual can do to bring relevant, honest news to others, which in and of itself would be a glimpse of what's possible with a whole citizen journalist network. This is certainly something I should look in to because there are already many example of citizen journalism at work on the internet, but I don't know if anything has been developed to allow communities to better watch themselves.

In this Herald article about the Omni CRA (what does that stand for?") the current Mayor of Miami is not referenced until the end of the article.
And I noticed that these pieces rarely explain when the quotes were taken.

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Short puff piece on Consumer Services Department of Miami-Dade County resolving $102,000 in financial disputes this month, and over one million dollars so far this year.

I can imagine some times I'd like to report businesses for the crap they do to me and others.

Why'd she quit?

The Herald has another very weak piece online that fails given the content of the article fails to provide very important information.

Opa-Lacka's attorney resigned before a recent commission meeting because later at that meeting the commission was expected to fire her. That's all well and good, but if I want to understand anything about the situation in my sister city of Opa-Lacka, wouldn't it be nice to know why they were going to fire her?

As usual, the "similar stories" are Opa-Lacka related, but don't cover this issue which they even mention was brought up at a commission meeting previously. I'd go in to it myself, but I'm done with that and have dozens or articles more to read.

Roundup

Fallen behind on my duties, so I'll link spam today with commentary.

This isn't the first time FPL has been in the news of late. Their in wait for an approval of a rate increases amounting to over one billion dollars. Or else they'll have layoffs and cancel programs. Not that I support FPL, but why don't they try to set it up so that rates would increase incrementally over time, rather than in noticeable jumps every once in a while?

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A woman in Boynton Beach (from the AP) hit two girls, kills one. I wonder if she was charged more or less harsh than a girl who recently received sentencing on a similar hit and run.

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Spanish language production company Univision is opening a studio in Miami. I generally don't like spanish language television content, so I won't hold my breath on how this venture turns out, but it would be nice if they produced some documentary material about the lives of latin americans in Miami.

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Another AP story, this one about a bill in the State Congress attempting to fund Tri-Rail to vie for Federal stimulus money. Is there a trend with the AP having the best local news?

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Massive Medicaire fraud.

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Superficial AP piece about cuts in school funding in the State. Interesting fact claiming families are leaving florida at a faster rate than they're coming. No link or cite. And estimates that private school kids will flock to public schools, who now have less money.

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First local piece of the night, Rothstein's relationship with Broward police.

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Profile of a struggling single mother. I didn't read the whole thing.

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Very weak and hollow piece about a petition to recall County Mayor Alvarez. No real explanation as to why Mr. Gonzalez is intent on recalling the Mayor. What are his Grievances? They even bother to have the Mayor's spokeswoman defend him, despite a lack of charges.

But how many was it?

The Miami Herald again forgets to answer the question it poses to the audience.
In this particular article the author discusses laptop theft on metrorail. He claims readers e-mailed him about this very issue.

Unfortunate then that he doesn't tell us how many laptops have been reported as stolen on the metrorail.
I'd be interested in knowing.

details, what are they good for?

This Miami Herald article, while covering a something quite interesting, is devoid of important details. The owner of a construction company is arrested because he allegedly bribed Opa-Locka commissioners to receive government contracts.
Oh! Great Herald, which commissioners were those? Were they arrested? When did that all happen?

Aside from that, a lot of these questions would be answered if there were simply links in the online article to previous, related stories featured in the Herald, or other reputable sources.

The only article available on the internet (when searching for either Faustin Denis or Dante Starks [the two men arrested in relation to this case]) is from local CBS 4. But as you can see it's not really any better, and doesn't seem to have any writer credit.

After doing a tiny bit more digging I did find this article from a local blog post a few years back. It mentions Commissioner Terrence Pinder as one person receiving the bribdes from Dante Starks. No mention of Denis. This post does not have any corroborative links, though, so I don't think if they're the same Dante Starks, etc.

However, a little more digging in Google News and I found this article from 2007 mentioning the two again, and an archived Miami Herald article whose headline alludes to Pinder in fact being the/a Commissioner involved in the scandal.

I'm too tired to try digging deeper, but I want to point out how much I found with such little effort as an example of why traditional newspaper journalism can and should die.

Anyway, as the CBS article mentions, there is currently no information from "officials" as to whether Commissioners will be investigated or not. Neither the CBS nor Miami Herald article mention Pinder, although Dante Starks and Pinder are linked together in the 2007 blog post.

Me thinks Pinder was not the only person receiving kickbacks, mostly because in a bureaucracy it's not common for just one person to make decisions, and if these bribes were to avoid a legitimate bidding process, someone else must have been involved lest they would have noticed how strangely things were working in these many construction projects.

the wrong message?

A young girl who was driving during deadly hit-and-run has been given probation and community service hours, according to the AP, via the Miami Herald.

It's really disappointing. As sure as I may be that she didn't do it on purpose, what message does this send?

This comes close to a month after the fatal hit-and-run of a local student, Rodolfo Rojos, who was killed while riding his biycyle on Biscayne Bouldevard on October 30th.
That story was never reported by a news source as a simply search through google news will corroborate. Quite sad. The Transit Miami post about this tragedy has letters written by Rodolfo's family lamenting the loss, and demonstrating their deep love for him.

What's wrong with us, and what's wrong the Miami Herald? Miami New Times?

The Miami Herald: not picking sides in a battle between truth and lies

T-Mobile, the cell phone service provider I haven't paid in three months wants to build a cell phone service tower in the city of Miami Gardens, according to this Miami Herald article. But the people of that city are terrified that such a tower would give them all cancer, causing eventual and painful death.

The Herald notes though, from a pamphlet handed out to citizens by T-Mobile citing the American Cancer Association that "microwaves, FM radio transmitters, baby monitors and police radios emit more radio frequencies than a cell site."

Read this short article and note how the writer avoids offending anyone.

In most cases I think journalists should avoid picking sides because in many situations the facts are tenuous at best, and much is yet to be resolved. However, once truth is established I think it's a journalist's responsibility (if they want to go by that title at least) to not only recognize the facts, but to also point out which side of a debate is wrong.

The citizens of Miami Gardens who threatened legal action in response to this situation are wrong. These ignoramuses do no deserve equal coverage in this article because their opinion, while popular amongst the uneducated, is not supported by facts.

And this of course goes to the heart of why I dislike government. Politicians are responsible to these idiots, who care not for truth and reality, but instead are concerned with their warped views of how the world works, and maintaining some schizophrenic sense of justice and peace which coincides with their delusions.

It makes me wonder how [not] far the species has come overall when the majority still cling to folklore and urban legends in the face of cold hard evidence from impartial parties.

Perhaps they think Satan has misled the American Cancer Association to surreptitiously increase cancer rates around the planet.

ps sorry for comparing ignorant people with evangelical christians.

Too little, the day of

This Herald article highlights Homeless Awareness Day, which has been organized by the Miami Dade Homeless Trust for today.

Yes, that's right, today. The article which was published on their web page earlier today does nothing for anyone who may have wanted to participate in some of the events.

I would have taken the opportunity to get some cards for the Homeless Helpline. I wrote about this on TransitMiami recently.

Banana Republican't

Francisco Alvarado has a piece in the Miami New Times which makes a few claims he doesn't bother sourcing or substantiating:

• City of Miami Mayor Tom Regalado and Commissioner Marc Sarnoff supposedly pressuring now resigned and indicted ex-Commissioner Angel Gonzalez "to come into City Hall for an emergency city commission meeting to appoint Spence-Jones's replacement"
• Then the duo trying to get the City Attorney to write an official opinion allowing Florida Governor Christ to choose the replacement for Spence-Jones
• Then they try to get the City Clerk to "expedite the certification results of today's runoff."
• And back to the Attorney.

There's no way to say whether these claims are true or not, I haven't bothered doing the research, but as the Miami New Times is a News source, I shouldn't have to do research to verify their articles, right?

Poll: Miami Herald doesn't care about the integrity of polls

I'm putting off the Spence-Jones controversy until I've gathered some more resources. And it'll just take more time to write than I've had to give today.

Instead I just wanted to mention I poll I recently conducted here in North Miami Beach. I only polled myself and my mother, which estimating the population of NMB at 50k (it was less than 40 in 2000) means I polled about .004% of the population.*

Does that poll seem unsubstantial to you?

Enter the Miami Herald's coverage of a poll done in Cuba. This is breaking news.

Some group was able to conduct an opinion poll in Cuba with a sample size of 432. That's .0039% of the Cuban population. What did this fantastically obscure poll find? Apparently Cubans don't like the direction their country is going in.

Aside from pointing out the obvious, you shouldn't take this poll, or almost any poll you see in the mainstream media seriously because the opinions of less than one percent of the population do not represent the views of the whole.

One need not take a course in statistics to recognize the usefulness of this advice. While these 432 Cubans have a right to their opinions--I'm sure they're very good opinions--an individual trying to learn of the daily struggles and mindsets of Cubans should not take this information into account for said purpose.

The Herald includes the opinion of a Miami pollster, suggesting "general caution in interpreting results from the country." While this is perhaps a relevant point to make, I am more concerned with the lack of information about the procedures used by the polling group to gather the information and most importantly, about the insignificant pool of persons polled.

Moral of the story? Polls usually don't really tell us anything. They force a small group of people to be grouped together by vague opinions which they may not even hold.

I'm a big stickler for the misuse of polls, so look forward to more rants.

*This is a lie. I did not poll anyone.