Holding PG&E's feet to their own fire

News writing and reporting is not simply about consolidating and then regurgitating personal accounts of important events. Good reporting often times involves research and investigation in order to “call out” or shine a light on injustice. You could write an investigative piece about inequality of pay, expose a congressperson for corruption, or even a company for its negligent business practices.

It’s been a little over a year since the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) explosion that killed eight people and set a San Bruno neighborhood ablaze occurred. Since that time, there has been serious investigation into what caused the explosion and if there was any negligence on the part of the PG&E, who have not exactly been forthcoming with information that might incriminate them.

What’s amazing is that over a year later the Public Utilities Commission is still uncovering new evidence proving how guilty PG&E really is. Just yesterday in the San Francisco Chronicle, there was a front-page piece citing evidence that PG&E installed a “salvaged or junked transmission pipe” back in the 1940s and ‘50s. According to the article, some of the pipes they used weren’t even any good 70 years ago and probably haven’t gotten any better from 70 years of being buried in the dirt.

I understand that public utilities companies are businesses and provide services that should be paid for. But it’s inexcusable to jeopardize public safety in order to increase profit margin. This PG&E disaster is a perfect example of why government oversight is so important in certain situations. Government may waste a lot of taxpayer money and get a lot of things wrong, but it can rarely be said that American government does not act with the best of intentions for its people. 

Moammar is no more

It’s all over the news right now and will no doubt make front-page headlines tomorrow morning. Former Libyan dictator, Moammar Gadhafi, was captured and killed today by Libyan rebels. That’s great for the Libyan people, and as a person of Middle Eastern descent, I’m happy to see one less dictator besmirching the reputations of good Arabs everywhere. But as an American, my feelings are a little mixed. Donald Trump is going to have to find someone else to rent out his front lawn at his Long Island home. And who’s going to entertain the TV audience with crazy rants at the UN Summit meetings?

Now that I got those two jokes out of the way, I’ll get on with my post. (Been saving that last one for a while now)

I read the Associated Press article detailing the death of Moammar Gadhafi. And when I say “detail”, man they really went into detail. I suppose if there were ever a case for a news story going into specifics about the grisly death of a human being, this would be it. Moammar Gadhafi probably just barely qualifies as a human, which in turn qualifies him for a story like the Associated Press wrote.

That said, I was pretty shocked when reading the story. I’m not sure if I was shocked at the amount of gory detail that AP decided to include, or the absolutely ruthless lack of mercy with which the rebels treated Gadhafi (not that he deserved any).

The story was not an obituary by any means, but instead a blow-by-blow account of how Gadhafi was killed after rebels discovered him hiding in a drainage pipe. According to the story, they didn’t keep him alive for long, but it was long enough to parade him about town on the hood of a truck before shooting him to death and dragging his bloody carcass through the streets. I’m paraphrasing here, but that’s the gist of the story.

Does the story go too far? It’s shocking for sure, but I think AP just about got it right. Gahdafi was a terrible person, probably as close to evil as any human can get and his actions in life were probably deserving of his horrible and undignified death as well as the “no holds barred” AP story his death received.   

Hey, next time the UN is in town, if Donald Trump wants to make a little extra income by leasing his lawn to a crazy foreign dictator, he can always get in touch with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

OK. Now I’m done.

The Handshake heard 'round the world

It's amazing how media and news outlets can turn a seemingly benign event into a national controversy; or at least a National Football League controversy. I think we all know to what I am referring. It is, of course, the handshake that took place after the San Francisco 49ers victory over the Detroit Lions this past Sunday.

For those who are not aware of the incident, there was a minor altercation between the two head coaches after the game. After the 49ers victory, Jim Harbaugh, in his exuberance, gave Lions coach Jim Schwartz what appeared to be a hard handshake and a firm slap on the back. This was enough to provoke Schwartz, who proceeded to chase Harbaugh toward the exit tunnel and give him a decent shove from behind. What ensued was a war of words between the two coaches as players and other staff tried to separate the two. The whole thing culminated in a face-off of sorts in which most of the players were involved. The stare-down cooled off after a minute and the Lions proceeded to exit the field.

Naturally reporters, news writers, and other members of the media had a field day during the post-game press conference, mining both coaches for reactions and possible significance behind the incident. Were Harbaugh’s actions rude? Did he in fact use some sort of profanity? Did Schwartz just overreact? Or was “the handshake” in retaliation to a previous action on the part of Schwartz?

Whatever the case, I find it kind of amusing how the press turns a minor incident into a national story. The incident is all over the ESPN highlight reels. Sports talk radio is using it to fill hours upon hours of air time, and it’s still on the front page of the Chronicle’s sporting green two days after the fact with headlines such as “Jim Harbaugh says he’ll work on his handshakes”.

I think the bottom line is that papers and broadcasters will pick up any topic if they think it’ll garner listeners and readers. Such is definitely the case here. This whole handshake business is silliness, but sometimes readers want to read a bit of silliness.

The Final Frontier

There aren’t an overabundance of moments when I feel proud to be an American, but I can’t help but feel patriotic when either attending a baseball game or watching a Space Shuttle launch.

Few government programs have captured the imagination of the American public like the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA has been responsible for some of the greatest American and human accomplishments. In 1962 NASA put the first American into space (Alan Shepard) and less a decade later, they put a man on the moon per a bull-headed mandate by John F. Kennedy.

News anchors and reporters such as Walter Cronkite played a significant role in making the space program and the moon landing a national event. Great reporting can make an historical event more significant and more real to the public.

I should think that I would have liked to report on the early days of the space program. The potential for the exploration of space seemed almost limitless back then. The early space program was almost like an epic saga of American adventure, ingenuity and sheer determination. And at pinnacle are the six moon landings before the Apollo program was finally scrapped in 1972.   

Now in 2011 the American space program has lost much of its public appeal and much of its public funding. The space shuttle has been retired and with next to no budget (thanks, Obama) NASA has no plans to develop a new spaceship. I know that space exploration is expensive, but I do not believe it can be argued that NASA is a waste of taxpayer money. It’s true that NASA is no Federation Star Fleet (it has yet to find new life or new civilizations) but its existence allows people to look up at the night sky and dream of a future where humans may one day settle in the far reaches of the galaxy (like Star Wars).

The NPR website has an awesome tribute to the Space Shuttle program as well as some speculation into the future of humans in space. 

Shea's afternoon with Silvera is gold

A few weeks ago I interviewed Justin Christian who just finished up the season with the San Francisco Giants. He’s not a very widely know player being that he has played minor league baseball most of his career. So it makes sense that he would be interviewed by a minor league reporter such as myself.

Anyway my article on Justin Christian finally went in the Skyline View this week and I’m pretty pleased with the profile. Justin gave me a lot of great stuff to work with as well as Skyline coaches John Quintell and Dino Nomicos.

I’m still relatively new at putting together newspaper articles, so I just did the best I could do and, as I said before, was pretty pleased with the result. That is, until I read another sports profile today in SF Chronicle’s sporting green.

John Shea is a sports writer for the SF Chronicle and he put out a doozy in today’s paper. Interestingly enough, his profile was on a minor celebrity as well.

There probably aren’t very many people who remember the Major League Baseball career of Charlie Silvera (I’d never even heard of the guy). He is not very well known for his personal achievements in baseball, but more for the fact that he played backup for Yogi Berra on the New York Yankees and alongside players like Joe Dimaggio and Mickey Mantle.

Old people are full of great stories, and their homes are littered with great old artifacts. Old people who played on a Yankee team with Dimaggio and Mantle should probably be donated to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Already, Charlie Silvera’s life is ripe with material for a great profile, and that’s where much of the interest is. But the reporter John Shea uses a great technique to gain deeper insight into Charlie Silvera’s life, and most importantly in this article, his personality. Shea spends an entire afternoon with Silvera, watching the ball game on TV. And the result is that the reader feels as if he were spending an afternoon with Charlie Silvera. As I was reading the profile I did almost feel like I met the man and that his stories were being told to only me.

This is the result of great writing and reporting by John Shea who really knows how to spin a yarn into whatever shape he wishes. The player I interviewed for The Skyline View (Justin Christian) didn't play alongside Dimaggio or Mantle, but if I had the article to write over again, I might have liked to write it in the fashion of John Shea's article in the Chronicle today.

Netflix has been sending more mixed messages than DVDs

For readers who are unfamiliar with the Netflix platform, I’ll cover it really quickly. Netflix started as a mail order DVD rental service, which people were able to sign up for via online monthly subscription. Sometime later Netflix began offering its subscribers high quality video streaming for movies and television shows at no extra cost.

But just a couple months ago Netflix announced that it would start charging separately for DVD by mail and online video streaming. This really did not sit well with consumers, causing thousands of members (including this one) to cancel their Netflix accounts.

A few weeks after that Netflix announced the new direction the company was taking. The new plan was to completely separate DVDs from streaming. The Netflix.com website was now dedicated to online streaming and the company started a completely new site (Quikster.com) requiring a separate membership for its DVD service. Many people found this either super confusing or super annoying (I sit in the latter camp).

On the front page of today’s SF Chronicle was the latest in this whole Netflix fubar.

Apparently the company and its CEO have done a complete 180 after public outcry over this new plan. The company is nixing the whole plan, cancelling the new Qwikster.com website and keeping both DVD and streaming under one account at Netflix.com. The company’s official position is apologetic and they’ve been on the defensive for months now, first apologizing for the fee increases and now again for proposing the separation of services.

And the result is a weak looking company that can’t make up its mind. Meanwhile investors are getting skittish and Netflix shares are taking a huge hit. According to the SF Chronicle Netflix went from an all time high of $304.69 per share in July, to $111.30 on Monday.

The thing that surprises me most is how Netflix did not see this coming. A company of that size must have done an extensive amount of market research before trying a change like this. It would be interesting to see the findings and find out what happened here. There had to have been fears of public dissatisfaction.

I actually kind of feel bad for Netflix CEO Reed Hastings who really looks like a fool because of all this. Netflix had a pretty successful formula, and this all could have been avoided by not messing with it. But in the end Netflix probably made the right decision for everybody by keeping DVDs and streaming under the same roof. You know what they say: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

  

Hockey's popularity in America ranges from luke warm to ice cold

Hockey season started back up just last week and my beloved San Jose Sharks had a pretty convincing win in their season opener beating the Phoenix Coyotes 6-3. I love ice hockey and I love the NHL. I think they’ve really done a great job promoting the brand in the last few years and they recently signed a huge deal with NBC which gives NBC stations exclusive rights to broadcast the Stanley Cup Playoffs through the year 2020. I could go on and on about how much I like hockey, but I’ll stop there and start complaining instead, about how little coverage the NHL gets in major news publications.

It’s not really a secret that America is not really a hockey nation. Canada, Russia, and Nordic nations are places where hockey is really engrained into the culture. But here in America, ice hockey plays second fiddle to football, baseball, and basketball (so fourth fiddle then, I guess). Because of this, hockey hardly gets any coverage in the major news outlets.

The San Jose Sharks are a great team and have done extremely well their last few seasons. But even when they go deep into the playoffs, they usually never garner front page of the sports section, which is usually relegated to the Giants whose season, by that time, is barely underway. And during the regular season you can forget about it. The sporting green is dominated by football, local or otherwise. Usually the Chronicle will include short game recaps on the Sharks and a tiny box with scores from around the league.

I understand the Chronicle’s position fully. It doesn’t make sense to give hockey the same amount of news real estate when it has half the popularity of baseball. Newspaper is a mass medium and the Chronicle is a big market. Newspapers are also more general interest publications and don’t have the luxury of catering to everyone’s interests.

I know inside that it’s nothing personal, but it’s hard not to feel discriminated against when you’re a minority (hockey fan).

Steve Jobs: Not the man that iThought

I’ve never really paid a great deal of attention to obituaries before taking the news writing class that I’m currently enrolled in, or maybe I just didn’t know it. I’ve always thought of obituaries as short pieces that are sort of confined to their own section of the paper, but the recent death of Steve Jobs has made me see that if the prominence of a person is great enough, their death can warrant an obit several pages long and can, in some cases, be considered front page material.

This was the case with Apple co-founder Steve Jobs of course. As a contemporary popular American icon Steve Jobs was, and still is, second to almost no one. Perhaps it’s fitting then, that news of his death should get top billing. He was front page in the SF Chronicle on Thursday morning and no doubt several other local and international publications did the same.

What got my attention the most though was not the fact that he made front page news, but rather the content in the Chronicle’s piece on Steve Jobs. When I think of the late co-founder of Apple Corp., I don’t necessarily think of someone whose career was mired in controversy or dishonesty, and as far as big-time CEO’s go, his record is practically blemish free. I think a lot of people (especially Apple enthusiasts) view Jobs as some sort of demigod. But the Chronicle obit definitely highlights many of Jobs’ personal shortcomings, making him look as human as any other man.