More fun with WWAY news

I really haven't been that critical of technical performance in the writing of regular people on blogs and forums, but because I've been such a stickler on facts and so forth, I got the Comma Doctor name I so enjoy. And I figured I need to live up to it a little bit.

I linked to this bio of news director Jack Pagano at WWAY in an earlier post about the stellar new anchor team he's put in place. Normally, I try to give a little quarter to the occasional typo, etc., but not when the guilty party is a news director, especially one in the process of pumping himself up so large. So here are my edits and comments - comments in [brackets] and edits in boldface or strikethrough.

Two things, to be clear: I have no connection to WWAY or Mr. Pagano, have never had any contact with him whatsoever. And these are only CORRECTIONS of what is actually WRONG with this bio - not even gonna try to critique the content and presentation beyond one or two minor moves of text.

Jack Pagano, WWAY-TV3 News Director

Jack comes to Wilmington after spending the past two and a half years in Iraq and Washington D.C., Jack worked as a government contractor, Ssenior Sstrategist/Eexecutive Pproducer (Gov’t Contractor)--
developing and producing high level information operations products in the Middle East.
He also trained Iraqi’s Iraqis [plurals don't need an apostrophe] in the art of producing television in a challenging and agile [don't think environments do a lot of jumping around - and not really sure what would be the correct word choice as I can't even discern what concept he intends to convey] environment. One of his highlights in Iraq--directing and producing, [delete comma here] “Baghdad My Love” [add comma here] a compelling and behavioral [what the hell does that mean?] music video that’s motivating and inspiring Middle East audiences.[to do what? kill more Americans?]

Jack has more than 28 years of civilian and military and documentary broadcasting experience. He has produced high level video work for Fformer Secretary of State GENen. Colin Powell,[delete comma here] and Oliver North,[add comma here] and for President’s [plurals still don't need an apostrophe] Bush and Clinton. Jack is a retired Army Llieutenant Ccolonel with extensive hands-on overseas experience, called back to active duty experience in: [absolutely no need for a colon here] Operation Desert Storm, Bosnia, Kosovo and Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Jack’s commercial broadcasting experience includes stints as a Pentagon Ccorrespondent and Pproducer for FOX News, Eexecutive Pproducer at KDFW in Dallas, Texas, and Ppreproduction Pproducer/Ssupervisor at WSVN in Miami, Florida.

In 2005, Jack was a coordinating producer and videographer for Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson's 2-hour ABC TV special, "TOUR OF DUTY," that aired around the world in 2005. During that special[add comma here] Jack Pagano he shot and edited a music video that aired worldwide. The ABC primetime show aired May 23 and July 4, 2005 around the globe.

Pagano's began his broadcasting career began as an page at NBC Page in New York. He holds a B.A. degree in Communication from Seton Hall University.

He continues to seek out work that will inspire, educate, and empower audiences everywhere. Pagano is an award-winning producer,[delete comma here] who creates impassioned productions.

Jack’s vision and goal at WWAY-TV3:
Develop and produce stories and newscasts that educate, inform, motivate, empower, entertain and inspire. It’s all about "people" and the way they live and work in Wilmington. Make a difference every[add space here]day...

Scholarship contest teaches self-confidence

Star News

This is an exceptionally amateurish story. It builds expectation for some kind of revelation about our semi-Iranian neighbor, which never comes.

And why, pray tell, is the spotlight of a story about a scholarship contest on a non-winning competitor? I didn't call her a loser, because I am indeed impressed with her effort and do not wish to denigrate her accomplishment. But just because she's a cute blonde (actually, I'm not sure the photo accompanying the story online is her: the caption says "An aerial view looking North along Wrightsville Beach in 2005. " !!!) and apparently the writer thought her story was the most interesting doesn't mean she deserves the focus of the story. That should have been squarely on the WINNING competitors. Do a feature on her some other time, if you wish, but the story about the contest should be about the contest, I believe, and not give such short shrift to the actual winners.

Personally, I think the winning speech, while it may have been entertaining, sounds awfully fluffy to win a soberly named "Oratorical Contest." If they used an applause meter to pick the winners, that might make sense. It makes me wonder whether there is some back story to the judging process, like who is related to whom, and whether the "mission" orientation of the boy winner's speech contributed to his victory, that bears reporting on.

Finally, please get this reporter a dictionary and take away her thesaurus. The "patron" of an endeavor, when it means sponsor, remains the patron regardless of gender. Mrs. Williamson is NOT the "matron" of the event. If the writer, or editor, can't handle that conflict, then use sponsor or benefactor or supporter or namesake or donor. Matron is simply wrong. And while it was very big of you to actually mention who won, "discreetly ecstatic smile flitted" is about the stupidest description of a facial expression I've ever read outside of cheap romance fiction. It goes way beyond feature writing into the realm of treacle - use the dictionary on that one, too, while you're at it.

Personality features are nice, but fraught with the danger of showing inappropriate personal preferences on the part of the writer. This story succumbed to that danger.

A Reprieve for the Paddlewheel in Wilmington

Star News Forums

RE: A reprieve for the paddlewheel - editorial

See my post on the related news article here.

I'm disappointed that this editorial merely adds to the hot air about this issue. The museum "may want to use the paddlewheel in a fundraising campaign" is the best you can come up with?

Why don't you suggest that Mr. Merritt pull out his checkbook and keep the promise he made to throw in a big chunk of money to keep the boat here? You seem to be congratulating him for pulling personal political strings in pursuit of something personally important to him - isn't that the same as earmarks and pork and all the other political sins so often decried in these pages? Now that he got his way, there is no suggestion that he indeed bears responsibility for the expense.

To suggest as you do that the museum rethink all of its financial priorities and base a facility expansion on this boat is a real slap in the face to the people who run it. Are you laboring under the assumption that they have no strategic plans, that they have never considered what among their missions is important, and how much they could afford to achieve which of them?

I have no affiliation with the museum, in fact have barely set foot in it, but I've never heard anything to indicate that they are either clueless or profligate - rather that they do the best they can with very limited funding.

Americans often misuse the word "romantic" when what is being discussed is actually maudlin sentimentality. You have done precisely that here - if the romance with this boat were genuine, you and Mr. Merritt would have more to offer in terms of actual, financial support instead of this phony gushy love, like a baby-daddy who thinks he's doing his job when he brings a rose on Mother's Day but never sent a single support check.

Historic boat's future uncertain

Star News Forums

This May 8 article said:

The decision comes just hours before officials were to begin dismantling the engine and just days after downtown developer Gene Merritt has said he'd be willing to move and store the steam-powered paddle wheel at his own expense to keep it from leaving the Port City.

But today Mr. Merritt says:

"It's not leaving town, and as far as I'm concerned my mission is accomplished on that level," he said.

Now that the museum has pointed out that it would take a huge fundraising effort to get the boat restored and on display, Mr. Merritt is finished. It seems to me that if he were truly sincere, he would put a dollar figure on the table that he's willing to pay - based on the earlier grandstanding - so the fundraising can get started in a big way, right away. Otherwise, it appears to me to be a lot of self-serving hot air.

Gas station passing out credit card info on back of receipts

Star News Forums
RE:
I'm a big fan of the concept of the three R's - reduce, reuse, recycle, but this one takes the cake.

With all we hear all the time about identity theft, this bozo (I'm referring only to the owner here) thinks it's OK to pass out complete credit card numbers with expiration dates, etc., as a free prize on the back of people's receipts - and since no one complained but this one troublemaker, well what's the problem?

Thank goodness for Kay Gordon, a woman after my own heart who didn't mind causing a ruckus with a bunch of complacent nitwits. At least the BBB and the sheriff's department didn't brush her off, too, which could certainly happen in some places or perhaps a few years ago in many places.

And now for something completely different

There's no media criticism in Wilmington, so I was in the mood to do some.

Star News Forums

I'm a little tired of the news itself, and wondering who and when will ever make a comment about the newest news team in town.

Grinny Ginny and her partner Ron Burgundy have been on Channel 3 for a couple of months now and while I did my best to give them a fair chance, I am just flabbergasted that anyone thought this was an improvement over Ann McAdams and Jon Evans.

Where do you start? Kaci Christian is probably the worst excuse for a main news anchor I've ever seen anywhere. She appears to have both the personality and intellect of a houseplant, but a carnivorous one that has been trained to bare its teeth when the lights come on, and to enunciate clearly. I have never seen anyone worse at camera changes, happy talk between segments, or applying the appropriate facial and vocal emotion to what she is reading. She will grin manically, batting the lashes on her caricature-sized eyes, as she lists the dead from a mass murder. I would joke that an AM radio station somewhere must be missing its traffic girl - except that it's true. How anyone bought her as a serious journalist, or even a good news reader, is simply beyond belief. I think it's testimony to the power of self-promotion. It's certainly not humility.

Steve Rondinaro probably isn't as bad as he seems to be as a result of debuting with her as a team. At least he's been to North Carolina before. He certainly has a nice voice and a particularly strong ability to use it to sell his stories. I don't know whether he's writing the promotional copy he reads - both during the news, as teases before commercials, and freestanding promos during other shows - but some of them are hilarious in their resemblance to 80's news parodies. He truly seems to have stepped out of a time machine from about 1981 - and pairing him with her only reinforces the worst aspects of his presentation.

Other things seem to have changed around there too. What the heck was this Dancing with WWAY garbage? Wasn't there any news for a whole month or whatever? The thing they did on Good Morning America was pretty stupid but at least they have a bigger budget to waste than these guys down here in Podunkville-size market.

Most of the reporters on Channel 3 seem to try hard to do a good job, but it's almost impossible for me to watch a whole show with those two on it. I end up laughing at the incredible stupidity of the blonde one and then giggling at the apparent eyelid paralysis of the other one, and the next thing you know it's the weather. But not the sports - apparently those two were so expensive to get that they don't have a sports department anymore. Gene Motley wasn't the best sports guy who ever lived, but people around here were definitely used to him, he still cared about his job after about 80 years doing it, and you could say he was an institution. The only thing I can imagine worse than being fired and replaced with a younger version is to be fired and replaced with Grinny-Ginny-and-Ron-Burgundy-do-SPORTS-too!!

Finally, while I was poking around the web, I found something that may explain a lot of this stuff. Perhaps this has something to do with the level of news judgment being exercised over there. The auteur of the behavioral music video - yes, that's what he calls it in this item on their website - Baghdad My Love - yes indeedy, that's the guy to figure out what's news right here in River City. If you're not familiar with high level information operations products, which he brags about as his background, you might want to do a little research and then get a little afraid every time you turn on Channel 3.

Congratulations .... you have printed spam in the newspaper

This is an email exchange with the News & Observer.

May 18, 2007, at 8:29 AM
Congratulations ... you have printed spam in the newspaper.

See text, same as earlier post

2007/05/21 Mon PM 05:41:58
Thanks for your reaction to the item in the News & Observer. By printing it, we meant to neither endorse the idea nor imply that it would be effective. Pesonally, I share the skepticism of anyone who doubts that loosely organized consumer boycotts will drive oil companies to their knees, but these kinds of boycotts are being talked about by a lot of people these days -- and that's the only reason for printing it. In a different format, of course (e.g., a news story), we would have discussed the potential effectiveness of the strategy.

May 21, 2007, at 7:29 PM
Thanks for your reply. I didn't infer endorsement, and I still object to your having printed it at all - the fact that it was not the individual's own original thought should have knocked it out of contention.

It's the same as printing a letter to the editor that arrives as a bad photocopy with "Dear N&O" scribbled at the top and the "sender's" signature at the bottom. As I attempted to point out, that particular message has been around since 2001 or so, and to print it as anything other than an example of the stupidest kind of spam is simply bad judgment of the worst sort.

This PR guy shares the blame

Public relations spokespeople who work for taxpayer-supported institutions have a sometimes difficult task - they obviously have individuals they are responsible to, but both their and their superiors' true responsibility is to the public who pays the bills for all of them. When the choice is between the truth and saving somebody's butt in the agency, the truth should win, no matter how temporarily - or even permanently, in the form of losing the job - painful it may be.

The Health Services department spokesman in this story from today's Los Angeles Times fails miserably in his duty to the public, and to the truth. He attempted to scapegoat a dead woman and her surviving boyfriend in order to save the skin of the people in the hospital who killed her. He should be fired along with the other heads that will roll in this horrifying story.

Even if this kind of whitewash and demonization of the victim succeeds - which it often does in the short term - in the long term, it comes back to haunt. Either the true horror is exposed, and those responsible, including the PR guy, pay a harsher penalty than if it had been handled right at first, or the anxiety of wondering if and when it will be found out takes its own toll. I'd way rather lose my job now for refusing to help with a coverup than be part of this kind of stink.

Tale of last 90 minutes of woman's life

Hours after her death, county Department of Health Services spokesman Michael Wilson sent a note informing county supervisors' offices about the incident but saying that that police had been called because Rodriguez's boyfriend became disruptive.

Health services Director Dr. Bruce Chernof said Friday that subsequent information showed Prado was not, in fact, disruptive. Chernof otherwise refused to comment, citing the open investigation, patient privacy and "other issues."

Who Sets the Gas Prices?

News & Observer's Editors Blog
Sue's story was good, as her reporting usually is. So how does the N&O follow up the education it provided in that story? By printing spam in the newspaper today.

All week I have been yelling at people for passing along yet another stupid spam campaign about sticking it to the oil companies. Now the N&O in a total lapse of good judgment has decided to validate it by printing it, as below, in a "Love it/Hate it" feature. I am just flabbergasted.

Before passing along this kind of nonsense, whether from your own email to annoy your own friends or in the News & Observer's pages, I suggest you check out the validity at a site like Snopes. Here's their response to the SEVEN-YEAR-OLD bright new idea you have just shared.

Hate it
We are going to hit close to $4 a gallon by summer, and it might go higher! ... With the price of gasoline going up more each day, we consumers need to take action. The only way we are going to see the price of gas come down is if we hit someone in the pocketbook by not purchasing their gas! ... For the rest of this year, don't purchase any gasoline from Exxon and Mobil. If they are not selling any gas, they will be inclined to reduce their prices.

-- ARTHUR SHUMATE (PASSING ALONG IDEA FROM FRIEND), CARY

Amazon review policy allows unethical practice

I stumbled across a book review on Amazon.com which had been posted by the author's mother-in-law, using very amateurish half-anonymization. To begin with, she didn't identify their relationship in her review, which would have made it basically acceptable. I happened to have just seen the wedding announcement online, and recognized her town. Upon looking at the announcement again, I saw that the Amazon user name was a contraction of the mother-in-law's first and last names. The review, posted more than a year ago, is the only one she has ever posted there, so it was clearly an intentional effort to boost her relative's sales.

So I dropped a quick email to Amazon, thinking how happy they would be to remove such craven pap from their pages. Well boy, was I wrong. Following is some of the correspondence.
Sun May 13 21:56:24 UTC 2007

I just happened to run across this review after seeing the author's wedding announcement in the NY Times online and realized the reviewer is her mother-in-law. Not only that, she is a retired librarian and certainly knows it is unethical to write such a droolingly positive review of a relative's work. You should delete it immediately.

From: "Amazon.com Customer Service"
2007/05/14 Mon PM 03:05:03 EDT

We're sorry for any inconvenience you've experienced. I hope the following information is helpful:
We would be happy to look into this matter further. To help us find the comments in our archives, we will require more information. Please use the link below to send us the ASIN, subject line and date of the review as it appears on our web site. This will allow us to locate the review and take the appropriate action.

Tue May 15 11:47:56 UTC 2007

I provided everything you could possibly need to know to find the review - a link as generated by your system. I certainly can't help it if the URL is four lines long and certainly don't see why you can't copy and paste each of those four lines.

I was not inconvenienced by this, I was outraged that your site allows such egregious self-promotion.

From: "Amazon.com Customer Service"
2007/05/16 Wed PM 01:31:20 EDT

We understand your concern, but the review doesn't fall outside of our guidelines. In order to help customers make informed buying decisions, we are interested in cultivating a diversity of opinion in our reviews. Part and parcel of that is allowing our customers to air their honest thoughts about items.

You can read our review guidelines online at:
http://www.amazon.com/o/tg/browse/-/14279631/#reviewguidelines

I am sorry to hear that you consider one of these reviews to be harmful to the sales of this title. We do, by all means, encourage you to submit your own review for this title. You can do this on the detail page by clicking on the link to "Write an online review."

May 17 12:01:24 UTC 2007

I was reporting a review that needs to be removed because it was written by a family member of the author. The cut-and-paste reply I received had nothing to do with my message at all. (I certainly don't "consider one of these reviews to be harmful to the sales of this title.")

From: "Amazon.com Customer Service"
Date: 2007/05/17 Thu PM 01:40:34 EDT

Thank you for writing back to us at Amazon.com. I've reviewed our previous correspondence and your account. I sympathize with your frustration. However, please understand that the information provided in our last message correctly represents our policy at this time. As my colleague previously mentioned, the review doesn't fall outside of our guidelines and so we cannot remove it.

I'm sure many authors, and others who create work for sale to the public, will be relieved to learn that they no longer need to buy the false moustaches before shouting praise of their own work from the rooftops. You can just go right ahead and have all your friends and relatives put gloppy raves into all the online sites, and thus make them useless to those who might seek an honest assessment of the work.