Sheepdog
heads
home
Aberystwyth 240 miles
to
Published on Apr 25, 2016
A sheepdog originally from a farm in Ceredigion appears to
have made the 240-mile solo journey back to its birthplace
from its new home in Cumbria.
Pero,
a
four-year-old
working
sheepdog,
escaped
from
Cockermouth on 8 April only to reappear on the doorstep of
Alan and Shan James’ Farm near Aberystwyth a fortnight later.
His previous owners have no idea how he found his way back.
They now plan to keep Pero.
Mrs James said: “The farmer in Cockermouth was looking for a
dog that could round sheep and follow a quad bike, and we
thought Pero would be ideal for the job.
“We told the farmer to take him away and see if he’d be
willing to work for him on his farm up north. And so Pero left
us at the beginning of March.”
But it seems Pero would not settle in his new home, and while
out working on the farm, he bolted across the fields.
City Official Arrested and
Charged with Stealing More
than $21,000 from Police
Pension Fund
IllINOIS
Police today arrested James Griegel, 71, of Sauk Village,
for embezzlement in connection with the alleged looting of
the Sauk Village police pension of more than $21.000,
according to officials.
He made an initial appearance
today before U.S. Magistrate
Judge Maria Valdez and was
ordered released on a personal
recognizance bond.
The complaint alleges that Griegel fraudulently issued
pension fund checks to himself and forged the names of Sauk
Village officials as signatories.
Griegel listed the names of conferences and seminars on the
memorandum lines of the checks to falsely make the payments
appear to have been business related, according to the
complaint.
Griegel then cashed the checks and used the money for his
own benefit, including making purchases at gas stations,
rental car locations, restaurants and storage facilities,
the complaint states.
Griegel worked as the village’s treasurer from May 2013
until January 2016, when he was suspended from the post. He
issued the checks over a ten-month period from April 2015 to
January 2016, according to the complaint.
If convicted, Griegel is facing up to ten years in prison
and a $250,000 fine, officials said.
Griegel is presumed innocent unless proven guilty, officials
said.
Feds Want Sheriff Held in
Contempt of Court for Jail
Conditions and Want Monitor
to Take Over New Orleans Jail
Operations
NEW ORLEANS
The Orleans Parish Jail is not in compliance with a federal
court order and Orleans Parish Sheriff Marlin Gusman should
be held in contempt of court, federal officials allege.
The jail is allegedly still fraught with
problems including prisoner supervision,
use of force, incident reporting and
tracking, prisoner grievances,
investigations, classification, young
inmates, supervision and jail sanitary
conditions, according to federal
prosecutors.
Federal prosecutors noted in legal papers that the court
heard testimony this month about the March 2016 jail suicide
of Cleveland Tumblin, who died by hanging himself from a
known suicide hazard – behind a locked door – after a mental
health evaluation flagged him for mental health follow-up
that he did not receive.
The mental health monitor further testified that, despite
the fact that the Sheriff’s Office was notified of systemic
problems from a mortality review of the suicide, those
problems had not been fixed.
It was pointed out that “suicide cut-down tools” were too
dull to rescue Tumblin remain “too dull to cut a sheet of
notebook paper,” officials claim.
Federal prosecutors want a courtappointed receiver to manage the jail
until substantial compliance is
achieved, federal officials said. The
monitor would be able to run the jail,
including the ability to discipline,
reassign, terminate and promote jail
employees; develop and implement
policies and procedures; allocate jail
budget funds and enter into contract
with jail services, according to court
papers.
Although the court ordered the consent judgment more than
two years ago, Gusman remains dangerously non-compliant.
Federal officials want the court to intervene, citing
the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act. It
authorizes the department to seek a remedy for a pattern or
practice of conduct that violates the constitutional rights
of persons confined in a jail, prison or other correctional
facility.
The department’s motion was filed jointly with the plaintiff
class, represented by the MacArthur Justice Center.
The read the memo filed in support of the federal
prosecutors allegations click here: Justice Department
Just
Saying:
Racehorses
Heads,
Red
Lobster
and
Catering to Millennials
What is wrong with this picture?
The photographs of racehorses’ heads still haunt me even to
this day. Then I remember what they did when the Internet
arrived, and it all made sense.
Long before the Internet, newspapers sometimes published in
the sports pages a row of black and white photographs of the
heads of racehorses with the horse’s names underneath the
photo.
My family subscribed to the now-closed El Paso Herald-Post
for decades, and when I went to work at the Herald Post as a
columnist in 1982, the newspaper was still running the heads
of racehorses but now they were adding color to the photos.
There were a lot of horse races every day at the Sunland
Park Racetrack in New Mexico, which is near El Paso. So the
sports department ran rows of racehorses heads. I swear I
couldn’t tell the difference between Secretariat and Break a
Leg or whatever.
I often wondered whether anyone ever complained if we
screwed up the names. Perhaps, some disheveled racetrack
character in a cheap suit with a marked up racing form and a
two-day stubble who looked like he had leaped out of a Damon
Runyon novel detected errors.
“You degenerate morons misidentified the horses again. You
have the wrong photographs for the faces of Epics Warrior
and Reality Check,” he’d say. “Get it right!”
Call me crazy but I never understood the purpose for
publishing the head of horse running at Sunland Park or
anywhere else in the country.
Then it all became clear one day after the Internet came
down the tracks like a bullet while the newspaper editors
and corporate heads stood on the train station platform with
jaws nearly touching the floor as the train zoomed by and
passengers waved.
The global communication network monster ate their lunch —
newspaper circulation and ad revenue is down, according to
the Pew Research Institute.
The Internet brought down newspapers, some argued.
More than a decade later, the
billion-dollar price tags that
some newspapers once commanded
when they were bought and sold
were now been relegated to
bargain basement sales. Some
newspapers the Press-Enterprise
and the Orange County Register
in California were recently
bought from Freedom Communications at bankruptcy sales,
basically auctions.
Digital First Media, which owns the Los Angeles Daily News
and eight other Southern California papers, bid $52.3
million for the two newspapers.
I worked at the Press-Enterprise in Riverside County in 1998
when the A.H. Belo, which owns the Dallas Morning News,
purchased the newspaper for an undisclosed price. Rumor was
that it paid close to a billion dollars. Belo sold the Press
Enterprise for $27.2 million to Freedom Communications.
Many blame the decline of newspaper circulation to the
Internet. That was part of it but much of it had to do with
poor management and incompetence of corporation honchos.
When the Corporate Brain Trust that gave readers racehorse
heads finally woke up from its corporate slumber, newspapers
were starting to drown in red ink as ad revenue was on the
decline, newsrooms permanently closed and tens of thousands
of jobs were lost.
The damage seems permanent and irreversible. But I believe
it can be fixed.
Lunch at the Lobster
The subject of the decline of newspapers and racehorse heads
came up at the Red Lobster earlier this year.
I had lunch with my former
newsroom boss Tim Gallagher and a
former newspaper sports reporter
Derry Eads. Both are friends and I
worked with them at the HeraldPost, which closed in 1997, and then, at the Ventura County
Star in California.
We have been getting together for lunch every year for the
last decade or so. It’s not to talk about newspapers or
lament their demise . It’s
because Tim, Derry and I have an
ongoing sports bet that’s
stretched for nearly two decades:
The person whose football team
had the worst season buys lunch,
and so we meet once a year to
have lunch.
Tim roots for the N.Y. Jets, Derry is an Oakland Raiders fan
and I bleed Dallas Cowboy blue.
So through the years, most of the time, I have enjoyed a
free lunch courtesy of Tim and Derry.
Derry’s credit card is black and blue from the beating its
taken through the years. We are merciless, however. Tim and
I make sure to pour salt on the wounds by teasing him,
saying that Oakland is where football careers go to die.
Or, “Eads, when are you going to root for a professional
football team?”
When the waitress takes our order Tim and I ask to see the
wine list or ask whether the Maine lobster is at market rate
or ask if they have prime ribs. We watch Derry’s face turn
pale, then red and hear him grumble. (But we keep our menu
choices reasonable no matter who buys.)
This year, the Cowboys choked so I picked up the tab. I
chose the Red Lobster because I got a $25 Christmas gift
certificate for Red Lobster. I wanted to minimize the
damages. But I told Derry and Tim that I liked seafood and
believed Red Lobster had the best choice in seafood..
They didn’t believe a word.
We always have a good time at lunch. A lot of laughs,
teasing, catching up, more laughs, a lot of nostalgia and
this year, again, the sorry state of newspapers came up.
While we were talking about the Gannett Corporation buying
the Milwaukee Sentinel along with other 12 other newspapers
including the Ventura County Star, I said I was convinced
that at the Sports Department at the Herald Post ran the
same batch of black and white photographs of the horses’
head.
The Herald-Post Sports Department was always suspect in my
mind. With the exception of Derry, many were old school,
loved the downtown bars, were always broke and took a lot of
shortcuts.
“What would have
that we got the
laughed. “I mean
lived
happened if a reader had called and said
names of the horses wrong?” I asked and
some racehorse aficionado who rented and
in a stable at Sunland Park.”
Tim, who was the city editor at the Herald-Post, joked and
said the newspaper’s Sports Department would have probably
run a correction that we misidentified the horse and add the
following note.
“We regret the error and sincerely apologize to the family
of Epic’s Warrior for any problems it might have caused.”
Laughs.
Tim said he was curious one day when he found out that the
Sports Department was going to run the heads of racehorses
running in one Kentucky Derby race. He said he asked sports
reporter/editor Bruce Williams about it.
“I remember asking him what he was thinking when he ran the
mugshots of the horses. He seemed a little defensive but he
said he just thought it would be a good idea because people
liked to look at the horses. I didn’t make a big deal about
it but I don’t think he ever did it again. I actually did
not think it was horrible. I thought it was kinda funny,”
he said.
Newspaper Ad Revenues Are on the Decline
Tim, who owns the 20/20 Network, a PR company in Ventura,
was a newspaper heavyweight.
After the Herald-Post, he became editor of the Albuquerque
Journal in the 1980s. While he was there, the newspaper won
the Pulitzer Prize. He was the editor and publisher at the
Ventura County Star and occasionally, he writes columns for
Editor and Publisher.
He recently offered some excellent solutions about how to
fix newspapers.
“I realize this column talks about another decade gone by,
but it’s about the greatness that could be. No one wants to
hear how it used to be. They want to talk about how it can
be,” Tim wrote in part.
And, “Allow for the possibility that you might be wrong and
take a chance on someone else’s ideas, even when they run
counter to your own.”
To Read Tim’s Entire Editor and Publisher Column Click Here:
Business of News
But then Tim wrote another column last week titled: “How
Publishers Can Meet Millennials on Their Turf.”
After reading Tim’s column, he sounded like AMC Theaters
entertainment CEO Adam Aron who said he would consider
allowing theatergoers to send text messages so that it can
boost millennial attendance.
“In a bid to attract younger, smartphone savvy consumers,”
Aron said he was open to making some theaters texting and
mobile device-friendly.
Aron who had been on the job less than four months
immediately back-tracked this dumb and ridiculous idea to
accommodate millennials to text during a movie after the
Internet lit up with angry theatergoers.
Tim wrote in his column: “Imagine that the children you
raised in your home—fed, sheltered, educated—have grown up
and are now talking a different language than the one they
learned in your home. You don’t know where they learned this
language, but you don’t speak it.”
Adding, “You have two choices as editors and publishers:
forget about them and hasten the death of our industry, or
learn the language. And don’t despair. Millennials want
news.”
Click Here to Read Tim’s Entire Column:
Publisher
Editor and
Imagine Raising the Bar, My friend.
Seriously, Tim, imagine requiring young people to properly
write and correctly use the language of the economy –
English – so they can succeed in life. Imagine requiring
schools and parents to hold children accountable to high
academic standards so they can learn to read newspapers and
books. So they can be enriched in the process and be able
to have intelligent conversations with other adults.
Newspapers catering to millennials’ “Tweeter Mindset” to
sell papers by limiting stories to 140 words or packaging
each story with interactive and unnecessary bells and
whistles so millennials can be stimulated while reading a
newspaper is equivalent to allowing them to text messages
during a movie at the expense of other theatergoers to sell
more tickets.
I believe many millennials are very intelligent and it is
insulting to them to suggest that newspapers be dumbed-down
to cater to them. I watched comedian and Host of Real Time
Bill Maher make some very interesting observations about
today’s kids. Maher can sometimes be a pompous ass but he
made a lot of interesting points in this segment of the show
Click here to watch the Maher video:
Movement”
“The Self-Esteem
Should we change the language in the printed word or add
trinkets and mind bling to cater to a certain age group or
population?
What would happen if somebody suggested that newspaper use
Ebonics to write stories about entertainment to appeal to
the black community? Outrage and anger, and rightfully so.
I kept a copy an Editor and Publisher magazine dated Sept.
5, 1998 because of a column written by Jennifer R. Humphrey
titled “Stop Pandering to Reader Whims.” It was written at a
time when newspaper were having community “focus groups” and
went through one reader survey after another to gauge
readers’ “concerns” and “wants” and “feelings.”
Humphrey wrote in her column: “The industry fad of
constantly, anxiously, ingratiatingly asking readers what
they want to see in the news fosters readers’ self-righteous
cavalcade of complaints. It’s like timidly asking children
over every possible morsel what they will deign to consume
at dinner. Being too solicitous breeds willful
dissatisfaction.”
Adding, “But responsible parents give their children what is
good for them, whether the youngsters ask for it or not, and
journalists should do likewise with the news.”
I loved the column at that time, and now, it speaks volumes
about one of the things the newspaper industry failures and
that is to constantly wanting to be loved and embraced by
those they cover.
This Might Help Newspapers
I’m offering these ideas that might jump start newspaper
websites and increase circulation. They might work.
Linkup with high school journalism departments and
generously offer them space on a newspaper’s website to
publish edited stories from their high school journalism
departments. These stories would attract young readers to
newspaper websites. In turn, businesses like Nike, the Gap
or Forever 21 would buy ads to sell their merchandise to
these young people.
In exchange, newspapers can offer high school journalism
departments writing workshops, trophies for the best
journalism of the year, student discounts on subscriptions
and some scholarships.
The attraction: Young people want to know what is going on
in their school along with other high schools in the area.
This would be great for fostering social media and reviving
spirited rivalries which means more users and activity on
the website.
Badly needed and new ad revenue would be used to keep
experienced journalists, run well-oiled newsrooms and help
keep a newspaper financially healthy.
Also cleanup the reader comments sections of newspapers
websites.
Many comment sections are harbors for racists, losers and
spineless Key-Board Commandos to anonymously spew garbage,
hatred and stupidity.
Make everyone who comments on a story use their real names
when they post. Offer a $150 gift certificate every month
for the comment that gets the most thumbs up with the
stipulation that the same commentator can’t win two months
in a row. Offer those that repeatedly submit the best
comments a blog that would be posted on the newspaper
website.
Some of the best ideas and political, social and economic
insights and commentary come from readers.
The attraction: This would fuel some great comments driving
up readership and a gift certificate would attract quality
submissions.
Also lower subscription rates to allow more people to
subscribe.
Newspapers are a Public Trust
“A newspaper is a public trust, and we will suffer as a
society without them. It is not the Internet that has killed
them. It is their own greed, it is their own stupidity, and
it is capitalism that has taken our daily newspapers from
us.” —.Michael Moore
After more than 30 years as a journalist, that about sums it
up.
Newspapers have through the years lost credibility with the
public because they have lost sight of their responsibility
to give readers three things: accuracy, fairness and
balance.
Most reporters are no longer community bulldogs who milk
sources and ask the tough questions and hold public
officials and others accountable or ask how the taxpayers’
money is being spent.
Nobody in his right mind should rejoice when a newspaper
closes its doors or is taken over by some corporation during
a buyout or merger and afterwards, the newsroom staff is
gutted to maximize profits.
When this happens, the community loses.
I love nailing scoundrels who abuse their power, victimize
the elderly, steal from taxpayers, take advantage of the
less educated or con people out of their hard-earned money.
I relish using the pen to click on the light just to watch
these kitchen cockroaches run for their lives.
From Russia With Love
My new Google Analytics Counter states that there have been
40,183 users on American Justice Notebook Website in the
past year and nearly 100 percent were new users. But the
most interesting thing is this: There were 27,807 users from
the United States and what was surprising is the country
with the second most users was Russia with 1,857 users.
The Russian people rock!
Thank you.
Also England had 1,054 users followed by Canada with a close
1,035 and Germany with 937.
And, get this: There were 123,949 page views in the past
year with a 12.67 percent bounce rate and an average of
three pages per session.