How the St. Petersburg Times can use beat-blogging for gay issues

If  the St. Petersburg Times wants to start a constructive conversation about St. Petersburg’s relationship with the gay community, they’ve been presented with as good an opportunity as any:

Thus far, Cristina Silva’s story about the clash between St. Pete Pride and the city has generated well over 100 comments.

That’s the kind of reader interest the Times needs to take advantage of — and strike while the iron’s hot.

The issue: Pride organizers want to hang rainbow banners from light posts in the city’s gay-friendly business district throughout the month of June, to coincide with Pride Month.

According to Silva’s story, the city has rebuffed their initial proposal, citing a policy that states “all banners must carry a written message.” Pride organizers see that rejection as a violation of their constitutional rights.

Considering that this story has clearly touched a nerve, the Times would do well by itself — and the community — by dedicating a blog to the issue, one where reporters give continuous updates while also providing a forum for interaction with readers.

Off the top of my head, I can think a few questions prompted by Silva’s article and the reader comments that beg to be answered:

Be accurate or be irrelevant

A friend of mine announced that Kentucky Oaks winner Rachel Alexandra might be shut out of this Saturday’s Preakness by owners looking to enter additional horses in order to prevent the filly from making the field, which is capped at 14 horses.  When I responded that I’d heard a radio report that Rachel Alexandra would be running, he was incredulous, and showed me a story in today’s St. Petersburg Times to verify his information.

“Right,” I responded with a tinge of smugness. “That was from this morning.”

To settle the disagreement, I quickly found an update on ESPN.com, which confirmed the radio report:

From PolitiFact to Pulitzer

Matt Waite, news technologist for the St. Petersburg Times, is also the man behind the Pulitzer Prize-winning PolitiFact. In a post on his personal website, Waite explains how his mantra of  “demos, not memos” has helped guide him as a designer.

In other words, “show, don’t tell.”

Waite offers three reasons why this philosophy has worked for him:

1. Ideas are cheap and plentiful, execution is hard (thus, a demo stands out from the “blizzard of ideas”)
2. Meetings suck (they should be about the demos, and less about the ideas)
3. Requirements documents suck (they ensure that the software will never be any better than the document)

This is why journalists and readers need to communicate

The St. Petersburg Times‘ Lennie Bennett is a passionate art critic and defender of the arts, and so I would love to have heard her response to some of these reader comments to her article about FSU’s consideration of closing the Ringling Art Museum:

• Bob from St. Pete

  Apr 23rd, 2009 10:31 am
  Close it! The voters have spoken. This is not the sort of thing that government should be funding. Or is it that the voters just want a free lunch and want someone else to pay for their quality of life?

• Jonathan from Jacksonville, Fl

  Apr 23rd, 2009 10:26 am
  The Ringling should be sold. There is no reason for the state of Florida to be subsidizing an art museum (according to the story, operations only fund half of the Ringling’s budget) in this climate.

• Andrew from Palm Harbor

  Apr 23rd, 2009 8:58 am
  If its so wildly popular and successful, WHY DO YOU NEED A STATE SUBSIDY? It should be autosufficient. There are enough blue blood art-lovers with guilty consciences who will endow millions for a plaque on the wall.

At my previous employer, Creative Loafing, staff writers readily engaged readers who commented on their blog posts, explaining why or why not they were wrong — which led to some spirited discussions.

But the comments on Bennett’s article, absent a response, have all the effect of yelling into a void.

One other nitpick — the Times really needs to provide permalinks to its reader comments.

Local news — property taxes, Starbucks and ridiculous legislation

The city of Gulfport says its budget will be $3 million short in October, but wants to avoid raising property taxes.

The city has frozen all hiring, except what is considered “mission critical” positions.

Unfilled positions include city manager, the police chief, a police sergeant, two police officers, a police department records technician, a fire lieutenant, the leisure services administrative assistant and a staff assistant in the administrative services department.

The city had already eliminated several library positions, as well as a fire captain, firefighter, maintenance worker, recreation coordinator and a clerical position in the city clerk’s office.

My question — can the St. Pete Times please provide city documentation with its story to give some context to that $3 mil figure?

Tommy at Sticks of Fire explains why delinquent property taxes means more money for newspapers.

Teen shot at Childs Park Rec Center.

Kenneth City’s mayor-elect could be sworn in, 44 days after winning in a landslide. The takeaway here is that Kenneth City, with a population of about 4,400, and a land area of 2 square miles, has a mayor.

Ybor City loves its Starbucks. Take that, Cuban coffee!

Alex Pickett has expanded his Bipartisan guide to ridiculous leglislation.

Bay area pitcher in media spotlight

Patrick Schuster is getting a lot of well-deserved media attention of late. The J.W. Mitchell High left-hander tossed his fourth straight no-hitter last night, striking out 17 in route to a 5-0 victory over Pasco High. The remarkable feat — a first in Florida high school history — earned Schuster a highlight segment on ESPN’s SportsCenter.

St. Petersburg Times picks up two Pulitzers

Congratulations to the St. Petersburg Times, which won two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism today.

The Times staff won in the category of “National Reporting” for “PolitiFact,” which the Pulitzer website describes as the Times‘

fact-checking initiative during the 2008 presidential campaign that used probing reporters and the power of the World Wide Web to examine more than 750 political claims, separating rhetoric from truth to enlighten voters.

Lane DeGregory won for “Feature Writing” with “The Girl in the Window.” DeGregory was lauded by the Pulitzer jury for

her moving, richly detailed story of a neglected little girl, found in a roach-infested room, unable to talk or feed herself, who was adopted by a new family committed to her nurturing.

Stephen A. Smith, Carlie Becker, Ray Sansom

Here’s what I’m reading right now on the Web:

State Rep. Ray Sansom indicted

Stephen A. Smith is out at ESPN

High school coach Carlie Becker fired for Playboy pics

Cessna plane crashes in Oakland Park (Broward County) And here’s what people are saying about the plane crash on Twitter.

Right-wingers, Ben Affleck and Southern girls

A few quotes to ponder as we head into the weekend:

“Oh, well. When the Feds surround my place for the big shootout, I hope my home gets described as a ‘compound’ just before it goes up in smoke. Cool.” –Mark Steyn, National Review Online, in response to a Department of Homeland Security report warning of dangerous right-wing extremist activity.

“Make no mistake, dear readers, we are living under tyranny. Especially to those who voted for Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress, you are living in denial if you believe otherwise. This is not hyperbole.” — The Sarasota Observer, in an article un-hyperbolically titled “Live Free or Die.”

“For now, though, one can’t help but note that these ‘conservatives’ seem so very angry about a federal government program designed to do nothing other than protect the glorious Homeland from Terrorists.  And we know that this is the purpose of the DHS program because that’s what the Government said its purpose is.  So what else is there to know?  That’s the lesson we all learned over the last eight years:  Bush said that all of his secret surveillance programs were only directed at Al Qaeda, so how can anyone say otherwise?” — Glenn Greenwald, Slate, in response to right-wing criticism of the Department of Homeland Security

Poynter Institute weighs in on St. Pete Times‘ Mug Shots

Nieman Journalism Lab interviewed Poynter Institute’s Al Tompkins for his take on the St. Petersburg Times‘ Mug Shots website. Poynter, in case you didn’t know, owns the Times. Tompkins was critical of the site and brought up some pertinent ethical issues:

I think there’s some serious concerns this kind of coverage raises … How do you make it right for those who are found to be not guilty? … Maybe we don’t have an obligation, but I think we do.

Tompkins explained that he isn’t opposed to posting an individual’s mug shot. However:

I just want to make sure there’s a reason to post it, and not just do it because we can. That’s never a good reason to put something on the Web, just because we can.

Poynter also has archived Thursday’s chat on the ethics of posting mug shots online. Matt Waite, one of the developers of the Mug Shots site, explained to Poynter’s ethics faculty Kelly McBride its function as journalism:

The main journalistic purpose of this feature is that we’ve given transparency to the grinding wheels of the justice system. The jail population is no longer an abstraction. You can look at them, as they come in. These people are your neighbors. The jail, the deputies that run it, the courts that have to deal with these folks, you pay for it. So there is a purpose to showing that to people. I would also add that people have said they found great value in being able to look at people who said they lived in a specific ZIP code because they only know their neighbors by sight.