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Sunday, September 24, 2006
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 Sunday, September 24, 2006
started 9/24/2006; 7:43:09 AM - last post 9/24/2006; 7:43:09 AM
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Doc Searls - Sunday, September 24, 2006 
9/24/2006; 11:43:09 AM (reads: 4560, responses: 0)
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Santa Barbara News-Depression 
| | Last I counted, twenty-three staffers have left, including photo editor Len Wood. I got to know Len when he gave a tour of the paper a couple years ago. He'd been there for a quarter century. Photography was one of the paper's main virtues. It was as good as any paper in the country. |
| | Now the paper has become an ivory tower with howitzers, soldiered by lawyers and PR agencies. |
| | A disturbing anonymous Internet posting related to the current labor dispute between the Santa Barbara News-Press and the Teamsters union was sent to the company calling for certain illegal actions to be taken against the paper. Several of the actions are serious crimes and the posting itself is a thinly veiled solicitation for criminal acts, which is also a crime. |
| | No pointage to the post. No attempt to publicly expose the villian. Instead, the linkless release (from Agnes Huff Communications, with a Los Angeles telephone number) implies that the posting must have been an anti-management tactic by union organizers: |
| | While the identity of the writer isn't yet known, activities of this nature are involved in union corporate campaigns and are used when attempting to improperly force a company to give in to union demands. Professor Jarol B. Manheim at The George Washington University, who is recognized by one publication as "one of the world's foremost experts on campaigns against businesses," describes a corporate campaign this way: |
| | "It is a highly sophisticated form of warfare in which a target company is subjected to diverse attacks...the function of which is to so thoroughly undermine confidence in the company that it is no longer able to do business as usual. The union waging the campaign then offers to withdraw the pressure in return for substantial concessions." |
| | This sort of campaign is most often used to circumvent the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) procedures and secret ballot elections. The News-Press has already agreed on a date for the NLRB sanctioned election. The paper is doing everything it can to work within the system and the law, and will vigorously defend itself against any attempts to do otherwise by anyone. |
| | But why would the union, the staffers, or anybody on the pro-union side of this thing, even bother with tactics like this? Who (besides the News-Press) says this kind of posting has to come from a "campaign"? Especially when it seems that the paper could hardly work harder to increase its alienation from the town it serves, and its remaining readers (many of them unhappy) run the dozens of thousands? |
| | But I still subscribe. I still hold out a small hope that Wendy and Travis may peek over the parapets and see a clue or two. Maybe even on the dreaded Internet. |
| | Here's one. For a newspaper to issue press releases, or to communicate with the public — or any constituency — through BusinessWire, is lame. |
| | What's needed here is public dialogue. And there is no place more public, or more supportive of real dialogue, than the Internet. |
| | [Later...] Craig Smith, the most persistent source of All Things News-(de)Press(ing) has a post on publisher Arthur "Nipper" (yes, that's his nickname) von Wiesenberger's behind-the-bunker response to a public letter to the paper from twenty local clergyfolk. It's complicated, but that's one of Craig's fortés, so I'll leave the rest up to him and your mouse button. |
| | The sad bottom line is that Nipper, Wendy, Travis and their shrinking support base (if there is one, you can't find it on the Web) continue to reduce every rumble outside their castle to one of their conspiracy theories. |
Sunset in smoke
| | My plane from Boston to San Francisco first encountered smoke layers at about 25,000 feet over western Nevada, as we passed Walker and Mono lakes. The haze over the Sierra was brownish, and stayed that way into San Francisco. |
| | Flying from San Francisco to Santa Barbara, we were downwind in the diffused river of smoke from the fire. I had hoped to get a few good shots of it, but I didn't. (I'll put that whole photo set up later.) |
| | When we cleared the Santa Ynez mountains, a 3-4 thousand foot transverse range that runs east-west just 4-5 miles inland from the pacific, the south coast had the only clear skies in California. The sky was high and blue, the air was clear, and you could see the Channel Islands across the Pacific to the south. That was about 12:45pm. |
| | After I woke from a nap, around 5pm, the river of smoke had moved westward, starting as a white edge, looking like normal clouds. Then it turned brown and we could see ash falling from it. |
| | As the sun sank toward the horizon, I took this set of photos, most of which became experiments in exposures and croppings. I really wish I had a good long fixed-length lens, but those run at costs higher than the camera itself, so I had to make do with my 18-200mm Tamron zoom. It's flexible and good in an all-purpose way. But for the single purpose of shooting close-ups of the setting sun, not great. Still, it was a beautiful scene, for all its ominous appearances. |
| | Here's a tabblo of the same series: |
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