More Register Fail
Here’s a link to a Register article by Tony Saavedra that starts out with the breathtaking news that the OC Cemetery Board voted to hold a meeting to talk about raising it’s stipend 5%. That’s 5% of $100 per meeting, or a whopping five bucks per member. If they meet once a month that would total a mammoth $300 per year. Thanks for that earth-shattering news, Tony.
In the meantime, not a squeak about this opaque public district paying Anaheim mayor and general fixer/influence peddler Curt Pringle $6000 per month to locate a new graveyard site for the boneyard boys that we reported about here; a task that could have been handled by a realtor for the price of a commission paid by the seller. Of course Pringle was also supposed to grease the skids – which seems to be his only marketable job skill. No word yet on whether he accomplished anything at all, although this seems not to be a requirement to get a lucrative contract with one of these little known but apparently well-heeled public agencies.
But Saavedra seems to think his readers are more interested in the $5 per month scandal that’s he’s trying to brew up into something potable. Sadness.
And by the way, here’s a choice nugget from The Register’s OC Watch Dog, Teri Sforza, inviting whistleblowing news tips that I recently stumbled across. Maybe the Register reporters should (re)read Ms. Sforza’s stirring words. Here’s the kicker: “…we’ll put together a blogroll of local muckrakers like ourselves.”
Yeah. Right. Anything you say, Teri.
So get your butts over there and comment.
Dear “Grover Cleveland”: I believe that Tony Saavedra is a female reporter. Or at least I knew a female reporter Tony Saavedra during the Register and Fullerton News Tribune coverage of the Recall and the Great Bankrupty of 2005. There is a photo of her that you can see at newsbios.com.
Tony Saavedra has a reputation as a solid investigative reporter for many years, but presently she also has been saddled with responsibilities as a regular reporter on local governmental matters. In the last few years, chiefly due to losses of classified advertising revenue due to Craig’s List, most print newspapers have radically scaled back the amount of news which they print. Many journalists have lost jobs forever, and those who remain are given more news to process and their investigative time is taken away. My college classmate John Block was bitter when his family, which owns the Toledo Blade and the Pittsburg Post-Gazette, was forced to close its famous Washington, D. C. bureau. And the journalistic cutbacks at the Los Angeles Times in the past few years are profoundly discouraging.
The upshot of all this is that I don’t think that Ms. Saavedra is even aware of the Pringle contract, because she is being forced to report articles based upon agendas and related backup materials that she receives in the mail and gets on-line. Why not send her the information you have about the Pringle contract (as well as the Cunningham contracts) and ask her to consider reporting about them?
I think that the future of journalism, to a large extent, is what you and the other writers for FFFF are doing. It is the emerging new journalistic paradigm, in which on-line social networks will also play a role.
Best wishes, W. Snow Hume
Five Bucks?? Where kin ah sign up?
Mr. Hume, I’m pretty sure that Tony Saavedra is a man. This image of him was on the OC Reg website, although it is missing now.
http://t1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:EWR9w39H3QnP6M:http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/sections/news/investigations/images/tony.saavedra.jpg