I know that sometimes Coastsider can be earnest enough to gag a Smurf. Take the ownership of public records, for example.

I’ve been wrestling with MCTV over the right to publish newsworthy clips from their cablecasts for a couple of years. Through property taxes and cable fees, you and I pay for their palatial offices in Comcast’s El Granada equipment closet, executive director’s $45,000 [Correction: $60,970] annual salary for 25 hours of work a week [PDF of MCTV’s 2005 IRS filing], token payments for their dedicated camera crew, equipment, and even the actual, physical videotapes they use to record the public meetings of our elected bodies.

But MCTV will tell you that they own the contents of those tapes and will not allow anyone to redistribute them. This would be a shocking theft of public property if MCTV’s crime weren’t so penny ante—like stealing pencils from the library.

Last week, Supervisor Rich Gordon weighed in on the controversy [PDF] [Click here for a PDF of MCTV’s county charter] I’ve been bugging him about it for a while, so I only have myself to blame. Sensing that he was unprepared to declare all the recordings to be public property, I asked that the county at least assert its ownership of the tapes it paid for directly—those of Midcoast Community Council meetings.  However, I was extremely disappointed that Supervisor Gordon declined. He was willing to say that boards could negotiate ownership with MCTV—but they have every reason not to.

As I told Supervisor Gordon, MCTV’s policy panders to the worst instincts of our elected officials by promising to bury their newsworthy and controversial acts in hours of tedium.  Darin Boville looked into how the rest of the county handles this, and learned that no San Mateo city that streams their meetings allows a private party to own its copyrights. MCTV’s policy is so weirdly at odds with their mission and the whole point of taping public meetings that you have to wonder about their motives. Fortunately, the Montara Water and Sanitary District and the Coastside Fire Protection District are more committed to openness than MCTV gives them credit for.

What does all this mean? If you want a copy of last week’s Midcoast Community Council meeting, you can pay MCTV $50, roughly four times what you’d pay for a copy of ”Citizen Kane“.

MCTV’s executive director Constance Malach has made a lot of noise about MCTV’s nonprofit status, continually referring to Coastsider and Montara Fog “commercial” sites. This is a red herring, because (1) MCTV makes more money from its commercial activities than Coastsider and Montara Fog combined, and (2) MCTV has not answered questions about whether it would permit noncommercial sites to redistribute these public meetings.

MCTV is a private organization—in all senses of the word. Their board is self-selected [CORRECTION: elected by a small number of members], and their meetings take place behind closed doors. MCTV has not answered my questions about what material they will accept for cablecast, how they are organized, the names of their directors, or even their price for DVD’s. 

I also asked MCTV whether it would cablecast Coastside board meetings that were created by the boards themselves. I received the following reply from Ms. Malach.

MCTV will not accept public meeting videos from third parties for regularly scheduled meetings of local agencies.  There are a large number of reasons for this that we can review with you at an appropriate time in the future.  We are aware of the sentence in the Gordon letter that you have referred to.  Upon seeing the letter, we discussed the matter with the County and we believe they now better understand the rationale behind our policy.  Our understanding is that Supervisor Gordon’s letter was not intended to ask us to change our policy, and we are not changing it.

I asked Ms. Malach to set a time, as she promised, when she could explain her reasoning. She replied, “You have my answer.” MCTV is stonewalling, because they are not accountable to the public.

I’ve tried reasoning with MCTV. I’ve tried taking my concerns to the boards themselves. And I’ve tried to talking to the Board of Supervisors. I’m convinced that the only solution is the reform of MCTV itself, but it may not be worth the trouble. More on that later.

Comcast bused in thirty or forty paid seat warmers for an FCC hearing on network neutrality at Harvard University, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer. Network neutrality is the doctrine that network owners (such as Comcast and AT&T) cannot discriminate against any content in favor of other content—such as content they own or have been paid to carry.

An official at Free Press, a nonprofit advocacy group that has criticized Comcast for limiting the amount of data some of its customers send over its network, accused the cable company of “stacking the deck” at the hearing with the 30 to 40 “seat-warmers.” An official at Harvard said dozens of real participants were left standing outside the auditorium with placards.

“They were taking seats away from other citizens who had a right to be there,” said Catherine Bracy, administrative manager for the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School. “It was a PR thing. [Comcast] wanted more people in the room who were sympathetic.”

The FCC is considering holding another hearing at Stanford.

The company that publishes every daily newspaper in the Bay Area, except for the Chronicle, is offering buyouts to its employees in advance of more job cuts, reports the Chron.  The company owns the County Times, which has one reporter dedicated to Coastside coverage.

In a memo to employees on Tuesday, Bay Area News Group-East Bay President and Publisher John Armstrong said the company must eliminate a “significant” number of jobs as it seeks to save a specific, but unstated amount of money. The group provided the offer to 1,100 or so people it employs across more than a dozen daily and weekly newspapers in the East Bay, including the West County Times and Tri-Valley Herald.

The San Jose Mercury News extended a similar buyout offer to the nonunion employees of its 900-person staff, Publisher Mac Tully said. Its union employees, who already have severance agreements in their contracts with similar terms, are also free to accept the invitation to leave, he said.

BANG cites its anticipation of continued weakness in the economy for the cuts.

NOTE: The Coastside Fire Protection District board is considering whether it should hire MCTV or Montara Fog to tape its meetings. This is my prepared statement to the board at its meeting Tuesday night.

In the four years that I have been publishing Coastsider, my priority has always been to cover all boards on the Coastside as honestly and fairly as possible. As part of that commitment, I have devoted a great deal of time and energy to taping public meetings which are also taped by MCTV.

I have had to do this because MCTV will not allow any Coastside news organization to reuse video of meetings they have taped.

Ultimately MCTV will have to acknowledge that tapes of elected boards that are paid for with public money are owned by the public and not by MCTV. But in the meantime, I recommend that regardless of which vendor the board chooses to tape its meetings, that the district insist that the vendor not interfere with public’s right to the contents of the tapes.

There is more than one way to do this, but MCTV’s current misguided policy is not in the public’s interest or that of the board, and is based strictly on the self-interest of the station itself.

The public is denied easy access to newsworthy events that happen in board meetings when they are buried in gavel-to-gavel coverage.

Boards are vulnerable to having their actions distorted by news reports and by political opponents when the actual proceedings are not freely available to the public.

And the community as a whole is impoverished when public property is treated as private property, even by a nonprofit organization.

Whichever vendor you choose to tape your meetings or to distribute them on the web, I urge the board to insist that the final product is the property of the public and available for reuse by anyone who wants it.

As a nine-year Coastsider, I have suffered with Comcast long enough.

The final straw? Not the loss of video—as well as sporadic audio—during the fourth quarter of the NFL Packers/Giants championship game. That is merely typical of Comcast’s shoddy service.  The final straw was when an El Granada friend called Comcast to complain during the outage and was told, “There are no outages in your area”. That did it for me. Not only does Comcast offer poor service, they also lie about it!

I have installed a ‘dish’. The local channels are all crystal clear. So far, so good.

The instability continues at the company that publishes all the Bay Area daily newspapers that are not the San Francisco Chronicle.

George Riggs, chief executive of California Newspapers Partnership and former publisher of the Mercury News, has resigned, according to Editor & Publisher. His resignation follows that of the editor of the Mercury News, whom he hired.  Riggs, 61, says, “I may look at doing something different, outside the business.”

Asked about speculation that his departure had something to do with the surprise resignation earlier this month of Mercury News Editor Carole Leigh Hutton, whom he hired last year, Riggs said only, “she is an outstanding journalist and editor so I was sorry to see her leave.”

Reached by E&P today, Hutton declined comment.

The departure of Riggs came on the heels of Hutton’s exit. The San Jose Mercury News pointed out today, “Hutton had been appointed by Riggs and had proposed a sweeping transformation of the Silicon Valley newspaper into a three-section publication.”

CNP is based in San Ramon, and is owned by MediaNews Group, Gannett Co. Inc., and Stephens Media. Riggs has been replaced by a MediaNews VP. The Merc has a more detailed story that will disappear into the paid archives in a couple of weeks.

Dear Comcast

Please tell me how you justify such poor service [outages of one sort or another on an almost daily basis]; interminable wait times on your “help’ lines; and finally arrogant agents asking the same questions previously asked by your automaton—resulting in any sane person losing their mind. In the end, nothing is done to correct the problems and no compensation is offered ... the ultimate monopoly.

Bob Look

“The promiscuous use of anonymity breeds distrust. Readers react to anonymous online postings with the same skepticism that they have for newspaper articles that rely unnecessarily on unnamed sources. They wonder if the anonymous blogger is a paid shill, or has some other conflict of interest, just as they wonder if a newspaper’s anonymous source is objective or has an ax to grind. And if the use of anonymity is not explained or apparent from the context, readers will question a blogger’s good faith, just as they may wonder whether a newspaper’s anonymous source really exists.

“And anonymity corrodes the conventions of civil discourse, giving vent to impulses that, for society’s sake, are perhaps best held in check. Viciously personal attacks, racist screeds and paranoid rants are commonplace on the anonymous Internet. While such displays may provide an interesting laboratory for Freudian psychologists, they contribute nothing to debate on matters of public interest. If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of this invective, you know that it is impossible to reason with people who are screaming at you from behind a one-way mirror. The volume of their screaming only goes up.”

It sounds like a perfect description of what TalkAbout has become. Yet Peter Scheer, a lawyer and journalist writing an opinion piece in today’s San Francisco Chronicle Insight Section (Sunday, November 18, 2007, page E2) probably has never visited our own TalkAbout site.

He is Executive Director of the California First Amendment Coalition (http://www.cfac.org) and rationally discusses situations where anonymity is crucial - for example, “a Chinese blogger, defying a government censorship decree, publishes information about the crash of a military transport plane.” Anonymity in that situation protects the Chinese blogger’s life.

But “[f]or bloggers who publish in the relative security of the United States (compared with, say, China or Iran or Singapore), fear of reprisals, the most commonly cited justification for anonymity, is greatly exaggerated. When a blogger in California mentions the risk of reprisals, he is really talking about the discomfort of having to stand in a supermarket checkout line next to a city council member whom he has criticized.”

It is a very interesting opinion piece. Some of you will disagree. Others will find Mr. Scheer’s full article very informative. His conclusion:

“Most anonymous speech is just digital graffiti. Although it is protected from government regulation under the First Amendment, private publishers - whether bloggers or news media Web sites - have a duty to take responsibility for materials that they publish. In all but the most extreme cases, taking responsibility means identifying the author.”

If you didn’t purchase today’s Chronicle at the newsstand or get it by home delivery, you can read the entire piece online. It is headlined “Anonymity vs. Responsibility: Balancing political freedom with journalistic credibility in the Age of Blogging”.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/11/18/IN23TC0K5.DTL

I have no expectation that the Half Moon Bay Review will change its policies for TalkAbout. But there is very good reason for the Review to think through their position and consider good journalistic ethics.

Paul Perkovic
Montara

The owners of the San Mateo County Times, Contra Costa Times, Oakland Tribune, Tri-Valley Herald, Valley Times, San Ramon Valley Times, East County Times, West County Times, The (Hayward) Daily Review and The (Fremont) Argus are consolidating newsroom operations. All the papers (as well as the Pacifica Tribune) are owned by MediaNews of Denver.

The combined newsrooms have a total of about 360 employees. VP in charge John Armstrong is quoted in the MediaNews story/press release, saying the consolidation will ”eliminate wasteful redundancies, streamline management and redirect staff and resources to our interactive services and other priorities, such as watchdog journalism.” The MediaNews papers in the Bay Area have never been known for their wasteful newsroom redundancies, and Armstrong didn’t explain how the proposed staffing cuts would allow them to increase their level of watchdog journalism.

The MediaNews papers already generously share stories with one another and the same story often appears in several of these publications, as well as the Mercury News, Santa Cruz Sentinel, and Monterey County Herald. MediaNews bought the Mercury News, Monterey County Herald and Contra Costa Times last August from McClatchy (which acquired them when it bought Knight-Ridder). MediaNews also bought the Sentinel from Dow Jones last year.

Hearst’s Chronicle, which has been cozying up to MediaNews for some time, buried the story on page 2 of the daily digest page of the business section, according to San Francisco Bay Guardian publisher Bruce Brugmann.

Its lively head says, “Chain consolidates newsroom operations,” which means in effect “please don’t read this story, it is damn boring.”

Brugmann expects the East Bay papers to eventually be merged into a single paper with zoned editions.

It’s less clear what this will mean for local coverage by County Times, which has one full-time reporter covering the Coastside.

UPDATE: While no one knows how the importance of Coastside news will be perceived in Walnut Creek in the long run, County Times reporter Julia Scott says the answer to the question I sort-of posed in the paragraph above is “Not at all, as far as we can tell.”

In reading a Q&A with New York Times Digital News Editor Jim Roberts, I was struck by how close the Times’s guidelines for readers posting comments are to the ones we use here at Coastsider. There’s nothing new in our guidelines or those of the Times. These principles are well known in the online community. However, other sites do operate under very different rules.

Early on, we tried running anonymous comments without prior moderation. We did get a lot more postings in those days. But Coastsider today feel more like a conversation among neighbors than a hit-and-run argument. Without these rules, comments tend to be anonymous, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

If you follow these rules, regardless of the forum you’re posting in, you’ll get more respect and better responses.

Unlike some other news sites, we review every single comment that readers send in. We have considered trying software that filters profanity or doing what other sites do and allowing readers to flag objectionable comments. But so far we have not found anything that substitutes for having trained editors or news assistants read each one to make sure it is suitable for publication.

So, what is suitable? Well, we do want to know what people think, and we grant our readers a degree of leeway in criticizing newsmakers and in finding fault with how we present the news. But we draw the line in these ways:

1. No profanity. No obscenity. No asterisks that take the place of letters in objectionable words.

2. No name calling or insults. I don’t like it when I see the words “idiot” or “moron” or “fascist.” I can be somewhat tolerant of harsh criticism of public officials, but I am super-aggressive in deleting comments in which other commenters are being attacked. And while I don’t mind criticism of The New York Times, personal attacks on our reporters won’t be tolerated. And forget about ethnic, racial, religious or sexual slurs. Finally, try not to dominate the conversation so that other people have the opportunity to express their opinions even if they disagree with yours.

3. Stay on point. Comments that stray from the topic are pointless and will be bounced. And we tend to set the bar even higher when we have a huge flow on a certain subject and some of the sentiments seem repetitive.

4. Don’t bother sending press releases.

5. Don’t rage and don’t SHOUT. Lot’s of readers seem to think that UPPERCASE comments are more effective in getting their points across. We prefer a more tempered conversation.

6. Please use your real name. We don’t require this but we’d like to know who you are. If you sign your name Bill Clinton or Frank Zappa, we’ll in all likelihood delete it, unless we’re certain you’re the former president or the reincarnated Mother of Invention.