THEIRS:

The New York Times, Jan. 29, 2006
"Penniless Man Wins Allies and Acquittal"
By Peter Applebome
___Sometimes, amid its florid theatrics and Dickensian arcana, the legal system dispenses justice. Sometimes it dispenses something else. And sometimes it does both to the same person.
___Consider what happened to Alfredo Vargas.

Make what you want of it. I'll refrain from comment. --Ed

This should be of no small concern to telemarketing executives as they lounge by their Palm Beach pools and scheme about how to get old people to part with their hard-earned pensions.

But it ought to be a relief to car salesmen, who knocked politicians out of last place in 1976 and have dominated the spot almost unbroken through this year.

For the record I’m also glad I’m not an advertising practitioner or a congressman, stockbroker, business exeutive, senator, labor union leader, lawyer, building contractor or a real-estate agent — in that order. Americans believe you can’t trust ’em.

At the other end of the list, nurses were the most trusted professionals, as they have been since 1998 (with the exception of 2001, when firefighters surged to the top for obvious reasons).

Pharmacists used to be more trusted than nurses, but no longer thanks to the decline of the mom-and-pop drugstore and the rise of big-money drugs like Viagara. This year pharmacists held down the No. 2 spot, followed by the family doctor at No. 3.

As a journalist, I’d settle for No. 4. Who can compete with those guys?

But as I scanned down the list, the next spots were occupied by high-school teachers, policemen and the clergy.

OK. I’ll concede high-school teachers. But I’ve spent some time in cop shops and boy, could I tell you a story or two!

And the clergy? You’d think that Pat “Let’s Bomb the State Department” Robertson and the Catholic sex scandal would knock them down a notch or two. I guess not, but I can live with it.

I read on and finally found myself and my colleages — after funeral directors, bankers and accountants.

Funeral directors? Yeesh, that hurts!

If you ever wanted evidence of how Jayson Blaire and other scandals have hurt this profession, there’s all the evidence you need. People would rather have a funeral director babysit their kid than Dan Rather (who, by the way, was set up).

It pains us to see this because most of us in the newsroom are scrupulously honest, hardworking and sometimes even downright noble.

I pride myself in the fact that I’ve never accepted anything more valuable than a cup of coffee from a source or a potential source. That means no gifts, no freebies and no free lunch. That’s right: If I meet a source for lunch, I pay my share. If he insists, I tell him the newspaper will reimburse me. Usually it’s not true, but I leave the table knowing I can’t be bought.

Every other reporter I know adheres to a similar standard. It’s the policy of our newspaper. It’s the policy of the Society of Professional Journalists. And it’s what they taught us in j-school.

Now, take your average banker (remember, they came out as more trustworthy than we did in the Gallup poll). Actually, take a specific banker, an investment banker I’ve known for years.

When he wants to bring in a corporate client, he lays out all the facts about why his firm is offering a better deal than the other guys. He uses charts, presentations, in-depth research, independent consultants, the whole nine yards.

Then the real wooing begins. Think Michelin four-star restaurants, $600 bottles of wine, Super Bowl tickets and trips on the company yacht. Think nights on the town drinking the finest Scotch whisky, smoking Cuban cigars and lap dances.

That’s how it’s done in the business world. That’s the established practice. It’s not illegal (except the Cuban cigars). They call it “building a relationship.” Everyone else calls it bribery.

Unfortunately, that’s usually how it works in the public sector, too — witness disgraced former U.S. Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham and ousted Connecticut Sen. Ernest E. Newton II. Even when they’re not taking outright bribes, which are illegal, the politicians who are supposed to be serving us instead take untold millions of dollars in legal bribes known as campaign donations.

They take money from defense companies that want contracts. They take money from oil corporations that don’t like the environmental rules they have to follow. They take money from special-interest groups that want less restrictive gun laws or no more abortions or more spending on the environment.

The lawmakers themselves, of course, swear up and down that none of that money has any effect on the decisions they make.

I pose the question: Would corporations waste their money if it weren't affecting policy?

At least the politicians ranked below us.

For me, the more relevant question is whether a journalist can be considered a blogger. (If you've read my crappy blog, you'll know what I mean.) Your question is tricker. I suspect when radio and, later, TV appeared on the scene, there were those among the wire and newspaper journalists of the world who raised similar questions. Ultimately, radio and TV expanded the notion of what we call journalism because they could do things the existing media could not. I think the blogosphere will prove similar in the long run.

The Internet is a new medium and people are still figuring out how best to put it to use. Blogs are an even newer phenomenon; I'm not sure I even heard the word until three or four years ago and I'm still trying to figure out exactly what it means. (Are news aggregators like Fark and online tabloids like The Drudge Report blogs, strictly speaking?) It'll be a lot easier to figure out how blogging fits into the concept of journalism once everybody agrees on exactly what it is -- and more importantly, what it isn't.

All of which is a cheap way of dodging your question. Here's how Merriam-Webster defines "journalism":

1. a : the collection and editing of news for presentation through the media
b: the public press
c : an academic study concerned with the collection and editing of news or the management of a news medium
2. a : writing designed for publication in a newspaper or magazine
b : writing characterized by a direct presentation of facts or description of events without an attempt at interpretation
c : writing designed to appeal to current popular taste or public interest

Blogging meets many of these criteria, and since there is no medium that satisfies all of them, it's fair to say blogging -- however you define it -- falls within the wider definition of journalism. The purist in me wants to point out that a "journalist" is literally, one who keeps journals. In that case, blogging is journalism in its most rarified form.

But here we're talking about Journalism, not journalism. Journalists (capital "J") write for the public good, sacrificing their personal shibboleths for some sort of objective ideal. Bloggers, in contrast, often do little more than repackage Journalists' work and add a subjective spin. Or they simply comment on Journalism itself, without contributing anything new. Either way, I think blogging contributes to the greater public understanding. I don't believe my blog is Journalism, strictly speaking. But I hope that it fills a gap in the public's understanding of what appears in the Connecticut Post. Or, at least, it would if anybody read it.

Do any of the blogs on the Post web site get edited by anybody else by the bloggers themlseves?

For the time being, the blogs on the Connecticut Post Web site are unedited, although I suspect the Webmaster reads 'em pretty faithfully. We bloggers also read each other's posts, and I suspect that any post that violated the organizational norms for decency or exposure to libel would quickly be deleted.

Any controversial blogging instances that you might share with me ?

I haven't run into controversy (but I'm working on it). I'm always aware of the potential for it. As a journalist and blogger, I have to adhere to certain boundaries to avoid jeopardizing my credibility as a journalist. I may feel strongly that Mayor A is a total nincompoop or that Governor B is a living saint, but I could easily wind up writing about either one. My work as a journalist has far less credibility if I'm wearing my allegiances on my sleeve. (This has been a problem in the national media lately: Two of the country's most powerful news organizations, Fox News and the New York Times, both lack credibility among a significant percentage of the population due to the belief that they are biased.)

Even if our internal calendars aren’t up to the task of keeping track of all these dates, legions of retailers spend the period roughly from Labor Day on jackhammering these dates into our heads. Bound by tradition, we newspaper folk can’t help but to add to this advertising blitz by devoting truckloads of newsprint to the same subject.

When I was a rookie reporter on one Connecticut newspaper’s business desk, I was asked to head down to a local mall the day after Thanksgiving. I was to write a story conveying a sense of the frenzied mobs scheduled to be storming the place right about then. The economists were predicting a banner retail season, and our advertisers, no doubt, would not have been displeased if we were to encourage people in the belief that this was a year for people to spend as if their reputations as dutiful consumers hung in the balance.

I won’t say it wasn’t busy at the mall when I visited. It was. But what I wrote — an honest appraisal — apparently didn't convey the sense of frenzy my higher-ups were after. They were thinking, Times Square on Millennium Eve. Valencia on Las Fallas. The Champs de Elysee, Aug. 19, 1944. Etc.

My version was more like the DMV at 10:30 on a Thursday morning.

After poring over the story for a second or two, my editor asked if I could make it "a little more dramatic, perhaps?"

I told him that's the way things had been when I visited the mall, and I wasn't about to change the story to say anything different.

But perhaps, my editor persisted, I could add a few details about how cars were prowling the parking lot, searching in vain for spaces. Or about the frantic crowds at the cash registers.

I replied that no mosh pits had formed at the checkout lines I'd observed, and there had, in fact, been parking spaces aplenty for any shoppers industrious enough to walk a few hundred feet to the entrance.

In the end, my editor ended up grabbing the story away from me and adding in details of a shopping frenzy like few others, cribbing details he'd seen reported with wide-eyed hystrionics on the TV news, accompanied by tightly-focused shots of flocks of shoppers. Judging by my editor's snarled commentary, my stock had dropped somewhat in the newsroom.

As I skulked, a more experienced reporter pulled me aside and offered the following advice, which I have carried with me ever since:

“Y’know,” he said, sotto voce, “sometimes when they ask for a blue dog, you just gotta find a dog and paint it blue.”

In this newsroom, as I mentioned earlier, the main challenge is simply keeping things fresh.

Last year around Thanksgiving I cranked out a story about what American Indians thought about the holiday, which they supposedly played such a key role in creating. (They view it about the same way your average Pole might view a holiday commemorating that country's "liberation" by Stalin.)

This year I’m hard pressed. Who knows, maybe a local PETA chapter will raid Gozzi’s Turkey Farm and bail me out.

So I put the question to you, dear reader: What can I write about the holidays that hasn’t been said already?

He was able to fend off the soap and toilet paper, but eggs would rain down mercilessly out of the dark.

Doorbell Night was an outgrowth of the "trick" component of Halloween: My mother tells me her generation simply made mischief on anybody dumb enough not to give out candy.

My generation needed a whole night just for the tricks, and we were indiscriminate.

I gave up Doorbell Night when I hit that point in my teens when looking all doe-eyed and innocent at the nice police officer was no longer a reliable strategy for getting him to overlook the half-carton of eggs in my hand.

I miss the tradition, and my brother and I have -- over beers -- on occasion discussed reviving it. But the stakes are too high these days. And, let’s face it: At 35 I’ve almost outgrown it.

Apparently, though, lots of otherwise grown-up people have not.

A variation of this has become a time-honored tradition in the region's communities in the weeks leading up to municipal elections.

I speak, of course, of the Lawn Sign Wars, and they’re in full swing this year — writ large.

In Seymour, Democratic Selectman Jeanne Loda is offering a $500 reward for anybody who provides information leading to the arrest of whoever vandalized her campaign billboard on Route 67.

The guilty party put an 'X' over Loda’s face and scrawled the word "liar" underneath.

Can’t really blame Loda for having her panties all up in a bunch after spending four figures on an advertisement that now makes a solid case for her opponent.

But one wonders if she's secretly salivating at the prospect that the reward might ferret out an agent of her archrival, First Selectman Robert Koskelowski, at whom she has sniped relentlessly in the political arena over the last few years?

For his part, Koskelowski denies involvement but has offered to pay half the cost to replace it (which has the added bonus of making him look like a model of magnanimity in the process).

Without actually uttering the words "poor sport," Koskelowsky points out that his lawn signs have been vandalized in the past, but hasn’t bothered to report them to police, much less offer a reward.

If all this rings a familiar note, it's because it essentially happens every year.

Last year, Milford's Gayle Slossberg worked up a lather during her successful run for state Senate, claiming some of her signs had been stolen from supporters' yards and dumped at a synagogue. Democrat Slossberg, who is Jewish, left it to her campaign manager to suggest a hate crime had occurred.

Republican incumbent state Sen. Win Smith Jr. staked his own lawn-sign claim, alleging some 200 of his campaign's lawn signs had been swiped.

Claims such as these have become so commonplace that newspapers rarely bother to report them unless there's some unusual twist.

Like this one: In 2001, former Bridgeport Schools Supt. Sonia Diaz Salcedo and her husband, Sylvester, squabbled publicly over a lawn sign he’d erected in their Black Rock frontyard.

And Milford politicians have been in an ongoing dispute over whether political lawn signs are included in the city's efforts to ban everything not specifically endorsed by Bishop Jay Ramirez's Kingdom Life Church.

This is the first time I can ever recall a reference to Franz Kafka in a press release.

"Rule number one will be to never tell the state what our rules are," Saunders said.

Chris Cagle

Let's give this some context. In recent weeks, we've had two catastrophic hurricanes, possibly a result of global warming. A U.S. city was destroyed. The body count in Iraq is approaching 2,000, with no end in sight, and Afghanistan appears on the verge of again descending into violence. The Senate is considering a new Supreme Court chief justice who could someday provide crucial votes on issues important to Americans. The GOP Speaker of the House was indicted in Texas. Closer to home, a state senator resigned and was indicted on federal corruption charges. In his parting shots he referred to himself as the "Moses" of his people and blamed his woes on the media and racism.

That's a lot of high-stakes news.

But for weeks on end, one issue has dominated the Connecticut Post's letters section: The Stratford mayoral race.

Granted, it's a big deal -- in Stratford, at least, where people actually care.

In today's newspaper, reader Joe Pedoto of Stratford writes that "some people in town" -- surely not himself, natch -- are calling Republican candidate Dominic Costello "the Stealth Candidate from Bridgeport," which in Stratford is apparently akin to saying something unpleasant about someone's mother.

There have also been vituperations and cross-vituperations over various candidates' habits as taxpayers and whether or not they own property in town. Local politics makes one long for the more civilized sort of discourse found in daytime TV and professional wrestling.

All of this public mudslinging, of course, is just a taste of the frenzied backstabbing that's doubtless going on behind the scenes. One wonders if the bloody mess that emerges from this political free-for-all on Nov. 8 to become Stratford's first mayor will be in any shape to govern.

But it had to hurt the geriatric rockers to be edged out of the limelight by a new band that’s sweeping the world’s young people off their feet.

I speak, of course, of the Wiggles.

The Wiggles, if you haven’t already had the pleasure, are four utterly wussified men who are supposed to be in a rock band, accompanied by the world’s least threatening pirate. They’re from Australia but their TV show is the hottest thing going with the milk-teeth set.

From what I gather their best-known song is an ode to fruit salad.

(ASIDE: I recently goaded federal court reporter Mike Mayko into singing this aloud in the newsroom.)

Leave it to Australia to come up with something dumber than Barney.

The first time I set eyes on the Wiggles, in a photo in this newspaper’s Preview section, I had an experience akin to my very first taste of Vegemite.

Not having kids, I’d never heard of these guys before. So I asked a friend of mine, a guy who’s currently weathering an infestation of toddlers, what he thought of the Wiggles.

He responded with the hollow stare of a man recalling his years in the gulag during Stalin’s reign. “God,” he said, shaking his head. “I think they’ve finally gotten over that whole thing.”

I still didn’t have an idea of how much of a phenomenon this was until the Wiggles took their world tour to Bridgeport a few weeks ago.

I confess: I wasn’t there.

Somehow, after a lot of pleading and a few well-placed bribes, my superiors instead chose me at random to cover the Rolling Stones, who were playing that night at Rentschler Field in East Hartford.

Alas, I could not also cover the Wiggles. Some other lucky reporter had to do that.

The Stones, by the way, rocked. From the seven-story stage setup to the giant inflatable lips to Keith’s burning vamps on “Miss You,” they put on the biggest, wildest, most spectacular, most explosive concert I’ve ever seen. For the first time, I completely understood why they’re called “The World’s Greatest Rock ’n Roll Band.”

So guess who made the front page the next day?

Granted, we take pride in a certain precision in the presentation of facts. Indeed, we like to think ourselves the intellectual progeny of Newton in terms of the discipline of our inquiries. But there remains some small percentage of what we do – I’ll hazard 90 percent – that falls into the slightly less rigorous category of wild speculation.

One of these areas in which we occasionally find ourselves on factually shaky ground is finding the proper mix of “positive” news versus “negative” news. This came up recently when an East End community activist took issue with me over the Connecticut Post’s coverage of recent events in that Bridgeport neighborhood. Without going into details, the gist of the conversation is that we seem to delight in reporting negative news from that neighborhood while failing to focus on the positive news.

I listened, and indeed he may have a point. But my mind keeps turning back to an observation a wiser colleague once made: “Negative news is when your kid ends up in the police log. Positive news is when it’s your neighbor’s kid.”

Which brings to mind an experience I had literally in the first few weeks as a professional journalist, working as the editor of a glorified shopper in the greater New Haven area.

The paper had just come out, and I was feeling pretty good about it because of the expose (so I thought of it at the time) on teenage pregnancy in the community. I walked into the office and the phone was already ringing. I made the mistake of answering.

“Why isn’t there any good news in the paper anymore?” asked the caller, a woman.

“Well, I—”

“It’s all bad news. All gloom and doom. It makes it sound like our city is falling apart. It’s sensationalism, that’s what it is!”

That, at least, is the much-abridged version. She pointed out from memory every story upon which the “negative” label might remotely be slapped.

At long last I found my voice.

“Ma’am,” I said, “how about the story on the front page? The one about the school kids raising money for the Special Olympics. Surely, you can’t find anything negative about that?”

“That?” she said. “Oh, well I didn’t read that.”

“[T]he fight broke out on Oak Avenue between Bridgeport Avenue and Wall Street...”
-- from the cop log (... and to heck with you and your stinkin' potholes)

ANSSTORY: 8-10 inches. Story from Ansonia. Details to come.
-- news budget item

"We’ve got all Portuguese people around here. We’re going to need a Spanish-speaking officer."
-- heard on the police scanner

Today, Sunday, Feb. 6, the Connecticut Post made me happy. What wonderful stories and writing from Michael Mayko and Michael Daly. The Connecticut Post made me laugh and cry a lot this day. Also, Frank Keegan’s look at the death penalty was insightful, and I learned something from Ken Dixon’s Capitol View. Even the sports section was full of human interest. It makes me happy to receive my Connecticut Post, delivered so early every day. OK, what really makes me happy is my good health, good family, good friends and good sex.
-- voice mail left by a very, very enthusiastic reader

Clutter has many causes. In newsrooms, the prime culprit is press releases.

Press releases arrive in newsrooms in great numbers by mail and fax; no matter how diligently you ignore your mailbox and fax machine, they always wind up on your desk. How, no one knows. There, they procreate and multiply. I've never actually seen this happen, but every time I turn my head for a second, it's clear they've been knocking boots behind my back.

Sitting in front of me is a press release that I can't bring myself to throw away. In fact, I want to frame it. It describes, quite clinically, a product aimed at people who have had gastric bypass surgery and have developed an unfortunate side-effect: "highly malodorous flatus" -- or, slightly less euphemistically, the tendency to pass gas offensively. The patented product, "The Flatulence Deoderizer," we're informed, consists of an "activated charcoal pad" which is placed where the sun shineth not. We're informed it's "military technology."

I would have though the Pentagon has bigger fish to fry these days. Then again, I've never been stranded in a Humvee for days at a time with a bunch of Marines who've been eating frank-and-bean MRE's. Maybe there's an explosion risk.

I suppose they sent this press release figuring I'd write a story about this wonderful product. I'm actually tempted, if only because I'd' like to see the copy desk trying to wrestle the word "flatulance" into a headline, knowing perfectly well there's a much shorter -- but alas, forbidden -- word available.

By the way, this product is available online, Dieter, at www.flat-d.com.

Here's another one: It's on letterhead from a pension and actuarial consultant in Southington, Conn.

"Dear sir or madam," it reads. "My name is S." -- I've withheld the name to protect the chuckleheaded -- "and I am the Press Secretary for P---- Inc. I am a graduate from Central Connecticut State University, graduating in the top of my class with a marketing management degree. in brief, I have held managerial positions and have excellent communication skills."

That's becoming more doubtful with each word I read. Let's skip ahead: She modestly goes on to boast that she works "side-by-side" with the company's president, which I suspect is true, depending on which side is "working" with which side.

She then sort of gets to the point, or as she puts it, "the purpose of this correspondence," which is to "provide us with a press release" -- my eyes are glazing over -- about the aforementioned company. She says this, however, using a great many more words, although she still somehow manages to say nohing useful or informative about the company.

But lest we fail to comprehend the urgency of this communication, we are told: "This particular press release is an important aspect in all our lives."

And to think I was this close to filing it in the circular bin.

Kevin Morris' plan was a boiler-plate bank robbery. He'd walk into the Bank of America branch on Main Street in Bridgeport, hand the teller a note claiming he had a gun, demand some money, and high-tail it out of Dodge.

But plans went sour for the 26-year-old Bridgeport resident when he approached the teller and handed her the note -- which read: "Give me all the hundreds out of your drawer, no funny money. I have a gun but don't want to use it, so let's make this easy."

He'd signed the note, "Kevin."

The teller asked Kevin to have a seat, which he patiently did, hands folded over his chest, as the teller called police.

As he waited, another bank employee asked what he was up to. He grumbled: "I'm trying to rob the bank, but nobody's paying me any attention.

He got two years in prison.

Luckiest dude ...

OK. Normally you don't win any accolades for your good luck when you get shot. But if you're shot 13 times with a .45 -- essentially a portable cannon -- and there's enough of you left to survive, you've got to count your blessings.

Under most circumstances, the Connecticut Post doesn't identify crime victims. But we do identify suspects when they're arrested. Matthew "Keil" Langston, 23, of Bridgeport, was charged in a warrant this week with attempted murder and other charges in the incident outside a Bridgeport housing project.

Most precocious kid ...

If you believe her lawyer (and given his profession, that's not necessarily a good idea), Tammy Imre's prepubescent paramour was an underage Don Juan.

So suave was this kid that he had poor little Imre, 30, of Stratford, half-convinced he was a 30-year-old midget rather than an 8-year-old boy. According to police, Imre maintained that the boy was the aggressor in their sexual relationship, which actually started when the boy was 7.

He allegedly coaxed her to ditch her boyfriend and stop taking birth-control pills.

"This is a savvy young kid and it's clear that he knew what was going on," said the lawyer, Donald Papcsy.

Under a plea agreement reached Wednesday, Imre is expected to be sentenced to six years in prison.