Upcoming 2010 Spring Cleaning Media & Blog Purge: Sleepwalking South Florida news media and lemming blogs to be tossed overboard!

There is just a tremendous amount of news and information that will be coming to this space over the next few weeks, much of it about political ideas and strategy and upcoming elections that will have the possibility of seriously shaking up the deplorable status quo hereabouts.

Things both long in the planning as well as items that I've, admittedly, sort of lucked-into by paying close attention while most of South Florida's news media continues their 2010 spring slumber, preparing for their 2010 summer-long siesta.

But that's how it goes when you try to keep your eyes and ears open, return emails and phone calls from others promptly, and try to remain on good terms with people in a position to either make news -or cover it- all over the county, state and country.

In fact, I suppose you might even call what I have in mind -and in many cases, already have written- a torrent, though given the Broward School Board's continuing sub-par performance, if there are any Broward high school grads reading this, that's your cue to right-click 'torrent' and see what Google says it means.

I've got some big changes in store for my humble little blog, as this weekend I'll begin my 2010 Spring Cleaning Media and Blog Purge, wherein I make some long overdue changes that I had originally planned on making after Christmas, but couldn't due to time constraints
and some family obligations.

It's my hope that these particular changes will improve the blog's functionality and topicality, though perhaps not to everyone's satisfaction.
C'est la vie.

Frankly, I don't spend any time worrying about what people I've NEVER met, actually spoken to or received an email from, think about the blog, whereas those who have taken the time to actually contact me with their thoughts know that I generally take their constructive criticism pretty well, and only wish that I could change it the way I want to.

In the case of the former, people who have never contacted me but who have heaping helpings of criticism, I refer to people who never seem to actually manage to attend South Florida govt. or public policy meetings in person, what most people in the country might call no-shows, and who seem to "cover" things almost entirely second-hand from their living room or dens.

As anyone paying attention knows, that's the exact OPPOSITE approach of Genius of Despair and Gimleteye at Eye on Miami, http://eyeonmiami.blogspot.com/;
Daniel A. Ricker at Watchdog Report, http://www.watchdogreport.net/;
Chaz Stevens at My Acts of Sedition, http://www.myactsofsedition.com/;
Michael Butler at Change Hallandale Beach, http://www.changehallandale.com/;
Sara Case at Balance Sheet Online, http://www.balancesheetonline.com/;
Bett Willett at Blog by Bett, http://blogbybett.blogspot.com/ and myself.

(In case you're unfamiliar with the situation involving my friend Michael being sued by Joy Cooper, the thin-skinned, anti-democratic mayor of our fair city -who calls her political opponents "Nazis" while at Hallandale Beach City Hall- for simply attempting to get some public records, YET ANOTHER story that the Miami Herald and all of the local Miami TV stations have completely ignored, please see the following:
1.) http://openrecords.wordpress.com/2009/04/29/michael-butler-sunshine-troublemaker-of-the-week/

2.) http://weblogs.sun-sentinel.com/news/politics/broward/blog/2009/10/mayo_why_are_taxpayers_footing.html )
3.) http://blogs.browardpalmbeach.com/pulp/2009/10/judge_patti_henning_and_mayor_joy_cooper.php )

While I obviously don't agree with them on everything they might say about a particular subject,
I ALWAYS know that they are actually spending their time and energy to be physically present and accounted for when news could be made that's of interest to the discerning and concerned citizens of South Florida.
And they don't lie or intentionally misrepresent the facts.

Both are more than can be said for the large majority of South Florida's sad sack excuse of a press corps, who would be greatly improved if 75% of them were fired toute-de-suite, and simply replaced by some of the plucky and curious kids on the journalism farm at Ernie Pyle, Medill and some other places I could name, where curiosity is a prerequisite.
See http://journalism.indiana.edu/ and http://www.medill.northwestern.edu/

Then we'd see some serious Who, What, Why, When Where and How action in our local media diet, and improved verb subject agreement and proper verb tense, to boot, and less fluff TV stories on liposuction, women's clothes, Rapping Grandmothers, and Grade D celebs and celebutantes making paid appearances at South Beach clubs.

It's exactly like the sad and feeble approach employed over at WTVJ-6 -the News Nobody Watches- "who don't know what's going on, and send a cameraman (without a reporter) to an event at the last minute just so they can maintain the illusion they're a real news operation."

That particular tart quote comes from one of their most industrious TV news competitors, who told me that exact thing two years ago while we were both sitting in the Broward County Chambers for a Broward County Charter Review Commission meeting.

This comment about Channel 6 only served to confirm what I'd long felt since returning to the area from D.C., and when I shared this comment with other industrious reporters and bloggers I know, who have often shared their take on what ails South Florida and its incurious news media, they all seconded that emotion.

It goes without saying that if I knew then what I know now, I'd have perhaps made some different choices when starting the blog, perhaps going with TypePad instead of Blogger, or perhaps some other blogging platform, as many newspaper and TV friends of mine in D.C. had originally suggested. http://www.typepad.com/

Since many of you readers probably don't know this, with Blogger's software structure, unless I remove all the 'anchors' on it at the beginning, the photos and thoughts about the area, I can't physically move my most recent comments up to the top of the blog.
If I could, I'd have done that years ago.
But I can't, hence the upcoming changes.

But even with the changes I hope to make over the next few weeks, I know that I won't be matching the prodigious blog posting and video output of South Florida's number one Watchdog, Chaz Stevens, who surely must get less sleep than anyone in the 954 area code.

FYI, last night and early this morning, I downloaded all the video I shot from Tuesday afternoon's historic Broward County Commission meeting, where the plucky underdog activists from Hallandale Beach brought the Broward County development/lobbying machine to heel, 6-3, and hope to have at least some of it on my YouTube page on Thursday.

My personal take on what transpired yesterday will soon be here, along with photos, now that I'm finally starting to get caught up on all the sleep I've been missing the past few weeks.