It’s been almost two weeks since 1) we learned that the Hasan Family Foundation paid gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis $300,000, rather than $150,000 as previously reported, mostly for his “series of in-depth articles on water, Colorado Water” and 2) that the series, titled “Musings on Water,” amounted to 150 pages, according to McInnis’ campiagn (though, mysteriously enough, the Hasan foundation is only in possession of 60 pages).

But I can’t find a single news reporter in Colorado who’s reported a water expert’s views about McInnis’ formerly stealth water articles.

Fortunately, while we wait for basic reporting on the matter, a few columnists and bloggers have weighed in. Here’s what they concluded:

Over the weekend, Denver Post columnist Ed Quillen, who’s definitely counts as an expert on Colorado water issues himself, spotlighted big-time errors in McInnis’ work, including McInnis’ failure to list the South Platte among Colorado’s major river basins. Quillen writes, “We’re not talking arcane knowledge, just the ability to read a map.”

Quillen concludes, “So you may not learn a lot about our water issues from these $12.50-a-word musings, but you could learn quite a bit about McInnis.”

On KBDI’s Colorado Inside Out June 18, Post columnist Susan Greene had a similar view:

“You know, I’ve actually covered the Colorado River for 20 years, and you could Wikipedia this stuff. I’m not saying he did… I’m just saying his name is on it. I don’t care. It’s not edifying at all. It tells me nothing about the Colorado River Compact. It has these sort of flourishes and great moments of insights like, water is very important to humanity. You know, $300,000? I’m thinking, he could have done that much less expensively.”

The blogosphere has also been pretty quiet about the substance of McInnis’s writings. John Orr of the Coyote Gulch blog  was by far the most kind to McInnis: “He’s consistent in his message, bashing government and the Bureau of Reclamation specifically. He embraces the development of water and other resources and laments all the possible mineral mother lodes locked up by wilderness designation. He demonstrates a good understanding of water issues and the history behind Colorado’s present situation.”

Over at Westword’s Latest Word blog, Alan Prendergast has made a complete mockery of McInnis’ own claim in a memo to the Hasan Foundation that his articles were “carefully-proofed.”  

In his third article on the topic, published the same day that the National Association of Hispanic Journalists was holding its national conference in Denver, Prendergast quoted a passage from McInnis’ water writings and then pointed out that McInnis got his Spanish translation messed up.

McInnis: “The Colorado River is the primary River of the Southwest part of Our Nation. It is called the ‘River of Rivers’ because of its importance in some of the most arid lands in the Americas… Do you know the name of ‘Rio Colorado’? That was the name, given by the Spanish, to a portion of what we now know as the ‘Colorado River.’ Colorado is ‘Red’ in Spanish. It was called the Rio because of the Reddish color that dominated the River…”

Westword’s Prendergast:  ”No, Señor Snore, I’m pretty sure it was called the Colorado because of the reddish color, but who am I to contradict a $2,000-a-page man?”

So, despite some great work by columnists and bloggers, we need more serious news analysis of the McInnis writings. You might argue that journalists don’t need to go fact checking old articles of a former Congressman who’s got a long trail of paper behind him, but with the Big Question still hanging out there (Why was McInnis paid so much for this?), I think reporters should ask more experts about the substance of these articles.

I’ve been on the hunt for any article about water, written by GOP gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis.

And guess what appeared in print when I was on vacation last week? A water article by Scott McInnis, titled, “Why I changed my position on the Southern Delivery System.” 

It was published May 31 in the Colorado Springs Gazette, in response to a column by Barry Noreen that raised questions about a McInnis vote on a water issue just prior to his leaving Congress.

Unfortunately, McInnis’ Gazette water piece was written too recently to be one of the articles in the series that McInnis wrote for the Hasan Family Foundation, which paid the former Congressman $150,000 from 2005 - 2007 to write a “series of in-depth articles on water.” (McInnis won’t talk about them to me, and reporters aren’t asking him about them. So I’m forced to keep searching for them myself. Hence this post.)

I thought there might be a remote chance I could find a clue or two in McInnis’ Gazette water article that might lead me to McInnis’ expanded writings on water issues, or at least to a reason for their disappearance.

In the Gazette piece, McInnis says that as a Congressman, he voted against the Preferred Storage Option Plan (PSOP), which would have provided funding for a study of, among other things, enlarging Pueblo Dam, a project possibly connected to the construction of the Southern Delivery System (SDS), which would move water from Pueblo Dam to Colorado Springs and areas around there.

In his column, McInnis writes that in Congress he didn’t support PSOP or the SDS.

Noreen’s column cites a Republican who said McInnis was originally in favor studying PSOP and SDS, as long as it didn’t take western slope water. But he allegedly changed his mind at the last minute, allegedly under pressure from McInnis future employer, Hogan and Hartson, and voted against the PSOP.

If that’s true, Congressman McInnis was for SDS before he voted against it. And now candidate McInnis has come out in favor of it again in his Gazette article. Why?

“Simply put, I believed then that the project needed significant improvements …- improvements that a ‘no’ vote could encourage,” McInnis writes in the Gazette.

Colorado Springs City Councilmember Sean Page, who tracked the issue when McInnis was in Congress and continues to follow it , told me he didn’t think the project has changed much between then and now.

“The plan is basically the same today as it was back then, which is to run a pipe from Pueblo reservoir into Colorado Springs and put it into a reservoir and so on and so forth,” Page told me. “The argument that somehow Scott McInnis improved the SDS by blocking the PSOP legislation is specious in my view and not supported by the facts.”

McInnis wrote in the Gazette that he changed his view on the project because there’s more collaboration around the project now.

“This collaboration, which was frankly lacking in 2004 and is alive today, is why the project has earned my support,” McInnis wrote in his column. “I’m also very pleased with the required safety and environmental projects on Fountain Creek. As with many folks in the region, while my support didn’t come easily, it’s enthusiastic for this reformed and vastly improved project.”

City Councilmember Page, who’s a Republican not backing McInnis or his primary opponent Dan Maes, thinks the collaboration (He calls it “extortion.”) would have happened as part of the normal regulatory process even if McInnis had not “torpedoed the PSOP.” 

Page believes McInnis changed his view on the water project because he’s looking for votes from El Paso County.

“Back then, he was representing his congressional district, and Bob Rawlings of the Pueblo Chieftain, had a lot of pull in his district,” said Page. ”When you run for statewide office you have to take the bigger perspective, because all of a sudden the people in El Paso County and Colorado Springs matter to your election. I’m sure he has changed his view based on the fact that he’s running for statewide office. You know, parochialism and being parochial is common for politicians, to look for what suits them in the short run for their district. Maybe this is just a lesson that sometimes you have to project down the road a little bit. I wish that five, six years ago he [McInnis] had taken a more statesmanlike position and looked out for not just his district but for the good of the rest of the state, or I should say the Arkansas Valley.”

Whatever you think of McInnis’ different positions on SDS, it’s clear that his recent Gazette piece reflects a detailed understanding of at least one Colorado water issue. So, I’m thinking maybe McInnis excerpted a portion of a previously written Hasan water article for his Gazette piece. That’s mostly a joke, but I think McInnis knows a lot about Colorado water issues, and I have no reason to doubt that McInnis wrote water articles as a Hasan ”senior fellow.” McInnis said so. Why in the world would he misconstrue this?

The simple reason for McInnis’ apparent refusal to produce his water opus might be the fact that these issues are so mind-bogglingly sensitive that he feels he has nothing to gain politically by exposing more of his thinking on the topic.

McInnis alleged temper tantrum (described in City Councilmember Page’s blog) in a private meeting in CO Springs, when a water issue was raised, is proof of the sensitivity of the issue. As is the Noreen’s recent column on the topic.

This is speculation, I know, but until McInnis explains what’s going on, or reporters dig into it, what more can we do?

You expect the news in The Denver Post to be fair and accurate, as opposed to the writinng in most blogs, which is usually gossipy, free-wheeling, and, with luck, accurate. As to fairness on most blogs, forget it.

If you’re a journalistic outfit like The Denver Post, and you’re operating a blog like The Spot, you face conflicting priorities. You want to post stuff that’s easy to read and talk about but you definitely don’t want to undermine the journalistic credibility that separates you from the blogging masses…-especially if your fair-and-accurate news reporters are the ones doing the blogging, as is mostly the case on The Spot.

 One really good way to undermine your journalistic credibility is to use political propaganda as descriptive terms for bills or laws.

 I did some bean counting and documented a small, but meaningful, way that this is happening on The Spot.

 The Post’s blog is sporadically using the term “Obamacare” as a synonym for the federal health-care law.

It’s one thing to report the term “Obamacare” as part of a quotation or within quotation marks but to use it as a descriptive term, no. You don’t want to do that.

If you’re thinking this is no big deal, I’m here to tell you that you’re wrong. “Obamacare” is an inaccurate and partisan salvo, and coming from a reporter, working for a publication that cares about accuracy and fairness, it looks sloppy…-not to mention the fact that this kind of term in news reporting, even on a blog, makes The Denver Post look like it has a hidden agenda in support of the right wing.

 On the Spot, during this calendar year, I found 15 articles using “Obamacare.” Of these, it was used nine times, inappropriately, as a synonym for the health-care bill or law. In the remaining six articles, the term was used, appropriately, in quotation marks or in a quotation from a partisan. Once it was used in a Spot headline, “Don’t Worry, we’ve got Obamacare,” on March 23.

In a May 22 post on the differences between Attorney General John Suthers and his opponent Stan Garnett, the Spot reported: “They differ on Obamacare and medical marijuana for starters.”

On May 1, the Spot reported, “The AG’s race normally is pretty ho hum but with Suthers and Garnett disagreeing on Obamacare and medical marijuana it’s shaping up to be a battle.”

 Asked about this via email, Denver Post Politics Editor Curtis Hubbard wrote, “Whether it’s ‘Obamacare’ or ‘the Party of No,’ it’s incumbent upon reporters and editors (I can’t speak for columnists and the editorial dept.) to attribute political marketing terms to a source or somehow put them in proper context for readers. 

“Without going back and re-reading each post, your analysis suggests that there have been instances on the blog where that hasn’t happened in regards to the term ‘Obamacare.’ While it’s possible that the entire tenor of a post made it unnecessary or that the author assumed the audience of a politics blog was astute enough to figure it out for themselves, our goal should always be to provide clarity.”

 I often see things in my favor, but I’ll take this to mean he at least partially if not mostly agrees with me.

 For fun, and because bean counting is so interesting if you’re counting the right beans, I checked out how “Obamacare” is being used in the print edition of The Post.

 In staff-written news articles, I found “Obamacare” in eight articles (from May 23 of this year through July of 2009). In each case, it was used appropriately–either with quotes around it, or in a quotation by a partisan. It was never used as a synonym for the health-care law.

 For example, in describing a speech by Sarah Palin March 23, The Post reported that she “called the freshly passed health care reform law an attempt to drive the country toward socialism. The article quoted Palin as saying, “Mr. President, do you understand now that Americans don’t want Obamacare? And do you understand that it won’t improve our health care system?”

In the Post’s opinion articles, where fairness is not expected, “Obamacare” is used as political marketing term, without quotation marks. In an opinion column, you’d expect this and it’s appropriate. In the print newspaper, in opinion columns and editorials, I found “Obamacare” in 10 articles from May 23 of this year through July of 2009. In nine of those cases, it was used as a synonym for the health-care bill or the health-care law passed by Congress. (Columnist David Harsanyi used it in six columns, columnist Mike Littwin in two, and columnist Susan Greene in one). I found it in one Post editorial, used within quotation marks. Once it was used in a headline (“Repeal Obamacare? Unlikely”) on a Harsanyi  column. (If I were an editor, even on the opinion page, I wouldn’t put “Obamacare” in a headline, because it’s not factually accurate and therefore not right for any headline.)

 In any case, with the exceptions I cited in the Spot blog, the Post is treating the term “Obamacare” as you’d expect, allowing its use in opinion articles but not using it as a descriptive term elsewhere.

If you read the Spot, especially more recently, you see writing that’s fairly similar, if more chatty and quirky, to what’s in the print newspaper. I think the Spot blog should follow the standard described in Sunday’s New York Times by Times Managing Editor Jill Abramson:

“Blogs are an important part of our news report. On big, running news stories, like the oil spill, the earthquakes in Haiti, the elections, and so forth, they offer readers the most important, up-to-the-minute developments-.While the opinion side of The Times also has blogs, the news blogs exist to report and analyze, not to offer slanted “takes.” Times blogs are never personal diaries. All of our blgos are carefully edited, and we apply the same standards for accuracy and fairness to them.”

Ari Armstrong’s media analysis has apparently led Jane Norton to completely and unequivocally endorse Amendment 62, the Personhood measure, which would grant zygotes the legal rights of U.S. citizens.

The Grand Junction Sentinel reported May 10 that “all of the top-named GOP candidates for governor and the U.S. Senate” support the ballot question. 

You’d certainly think from reading Norton’s website that she’d endorse Amendment 62, but her campaign had never officially confirmed this to GJ Sentinel reporter Charles Ashby, despite his request to do so over a week ago, Ashby told me. (The campaign lapse could be explained by staff changes, however, Ashby points out.)

During the last two days, Norton’s campaign would not provide confirmation of her support for Amendment 62 for Ari, either.

And, as Ari pointed out in his blog, there were small but serious differences (and political ramifications) between Norton’s website statement on abortion and the text of Amendment 62.

Today, Norton’s Campaign confirmed that Ashby’s article was correct. She supports Amendment 62.

In any case, as Ashby told me, the major point of Ashby’s article was never in question, namely that in 2008 none of the GOP candidates would touch the personhood amendment and today they’re running toward it.

The Denver Post’s Spot blog gave GOP state chair Dick Wadhams a bullhorn yesterday to bash Vice President, who’s visiting Denver April 30, for being accused of plagiarism in 1987. (I must note that when The Spot last week announced Sarah Palin’s May 22 visit to Denver, State Democratic Chair Pat Waak wasn’t asked to comment. In fact, no Democrat was asked, but that’s the way it goes.)

Anyway, the Spot reported yesterday:

Colorado GOP chairman Dick Wadhams couldn’t resist a jab at Biden, who on the presidential campaign trail in 1987 and in law school was accused of plagiarism.

“I understand Vice President Biden has personally written a special speech for this auspicious occasion and that the opening line is: …Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth. . . . ,’” Wadhams said.

The Spot should have used this opportunity to ask Wadhams what he thought of Republican Jane Norton’s own plagiarism of Gerald Ford. She plagiarized Ford during the announcement of her camaign.

The Spot impressively uncovered Norton’s plagiarism but hasn’t asked Norton about it.

I picked up Eric Boehlert’s new book, Bloggers on the Bus: How the Internet Changed Politics and the Press, because I wanted to find out how a journalist like Boehlert shows that bloggers have a real-life impact on politics.
 

I mean, we all know there are who-knows-how-many bloggers out there, posting political opinions, facts, corrections, and errors of their own on the Internet for all to see. But what do they actually achieve, beyond talking to each other? Or should I say, linking to each other? How does their work affect mainstream politics?
 

That’s the beauty of Bloggers on the Bus. It captures the tactics used by blogging activists, who have writing skills but often minimal political experience, to move a lefty notion out of fantasy land and into the mainstream consciousness.
 

One way bloggers do this is by using cyber fundraising tools to steer political donations to promising underdog candidates, like unknown Elwyn Tinklenberg, who came inches away from unseating Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachman, a GOP rising star, who stirred the ire of bloggers when she suggested that Obama was anti-American.
 

The book also explains how a “blogswarm” (many blogs focusing on the same topic) creates a wave of actions by blog readers. For example, bloggers mobilized their minions to inform the Democratic presidential candidates that planned debates on the Fox Network would have given undue legitimacy to Fox as a news source. The Democrats eventually agreed, and the debates were canceled.
 

Bloggers are probably best at swarming, and influencing the mainstream media in the process, but they also investigate. Liberal bloggers revealed that right wing pastor John Hagee, who had endorsed the Republican nominee, sermonized that God sent Hitler to “hunt” Jews and force them to go to Israel. After a video was uncovered and promoted by a little-known blogger, John Wilson, McCain denounced the pastor…-to the dismay of right wingers.
 

After reading Bloggers on the Bus, you’ll be able to list substantive political victories that can be attributed fully or mostly to bloggers.
 

As he explains how these political stories unfolded, Boehlert profiles the bloggers involved, illuminating their all-American brand of hard work and entrepreneurialism. The how-I-became-a-blogger stories (e.g., from art gallery manager to famous lefty blogger) are entertaining and inspiring.
 

The credibility of Bloggers on the Bus is enhanced by its willingness to air the nasty disagreements among liberal bloggers…-as well show the erroneous information that promulgated by top blogs (e.g., the false claim that Gov. Sarah Palin was not the real mother of her young son).
 

Boehlert acknowledges that left-leaning bloggers swarm around topics that most voters unfortunately could often care less about. Liberal blogs sink their teeth into wonky issues, like the Bush Administration’s wiretapping or President Obama’s refusal to pursue Bush officials who committed war crimes.
 

The tendency to fixate on fringe issues makes sense when the bloggers are in pure combat mode against the right wing.
 

But now their man, Obama, is in power…-even though, as Boehlert reports, Obama has unfortunately distanced himself from bloggers who helped him get elected.
 

Should these bloggers adjust their tactics to help Obama succeed in the compromised Washington milieu? Or should they continue to slash and burn and demand the President address their off-the-radar-screen screeds?
 

If you’ve read Bloggers on the Bus, you know moderate voices urging compromise will likely encounter a sea of venom online.
 

That’s too bad, because bloggers can clearly get things done when they have a focus, which should now be to dig into Obama’s core agenda (health care, the economy, and energy).
 

If they do this, they’ll be taking advantage of an opportunity for political change unlike any they’ll likely see again in their lifetimes.
 

If you had any doubt that liberal bloggers are a force to be reckoned with in American politics, Bloggers on the Bus will make you a believer.
 

It’s fair enough to cover the news from a conservative perspective, which is what Face the State claims to do, as long as your standards of “fair and balanced” don’t align with Bill O’Reilly’s. But it’s a problem when you develop such tunnel vision that you can’t even see a liberal politician’s name when he’s involved in something conservatives support. Maybe the name “Gov. Ritter” becomes invisible to Face the State’s unnamed reporters when he’s doing stuff conservatives like?

Maybe that explains what happened in the coverage below, which completely ignores Gov. Ritter’s involvement with Attorney General John Suthers. But whatever the explanation, it’s a ridiculously gross omission by Face the State, and it proves my point that the Colorado Independent, which covers news from a progressive perspective, does a better job of being fair and accurate than Face the State does. I’ve proven this before, but Face the State Editor Brad Jones stubbornly disputes my quantitative findings.

I don’t want Face the State to close down. I want it to do better.

FACE THE STATE

SUTHERS SIGNS ON TO HELP COMBAT POLLUTION IN SOUTHWEST COLORADO

Attorney General John Suthers has joined state Rep. Scott Tipton, R-Cortez, in a joint-effort to combat harmful pollution to southern Colorado caused by emissions from Four Corners Power Plant.

The two penned a letter sent to Interior secretary Ken Salazar (PDF) and the Environmental Protection Agency (PDF), asking both to stop the FCPP from further polluting the region.

The FCPP is located across state lines on the Navajo Nation in New Mexico, creating complex jurisdictional issues. As Interior secretary, Salazar has authority over these lands, while the state of New Mexico does not. Salazar’s office, however, declined to answer questions Tuesday about the FCPP and punted to the EPA, which did not return phone calls.

Talk about government bureaucracy run amok.

The only things missing from the ozone-busting tag team of Gov. Bill Ritter and Attorney General John Suthers are Mexican wrestling masks to completely shield their partisan identities.

The state’s chief executive and chief lawyer have teamed up to fight the belching coal-fired Four Corners Power Plant and the planned Desert Rock plant located just over the state’s southwestern border with New Mexico.

According to a press release from the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment, the dynamic duo is taking two tacks …- push the Environmental Protection Agency to require stronger emission controls on the Four Corners Power Plant on Navajo Nation lands near Farmington, N.M., and halt an operations permit for the nearby Desert Rock Power Plant.

Says CDPHE: “The Four Corners Power Plant is the largest single nitrogen oxide source in the nation, emitting more than 40,000 tons of the ozone-causing pollution annually.”

Our colleagues at the New Mexico Independent get to the real crux of the problem with the so-called “clean coal” Desert Rock project:

Mary Yuhl, Air Quality Bureau Chief at the NM Environment Department, though, told the Independent the primary problem in the Four Corners region isn’t sulfur dioxide, it’s ozone, which the company’s mitigation plans don’t address.

It’s the ozone levels in the region, she said, that are near the maximum when it comes to the National Ambient Air Quality Standard.

Colorado officials are concerned that the northwestern New Mexico power plants, those in operation and planned, will continue to violate EPA ozone and mercury emission limits that affect our own state’s clean air standards …- violations that can come with hefty fines.

In several stories on the Desert Rock EPA permit saga reported by the New Mexico Independent, the health-threatening bottom line for Colorado becomes apparent:

In …econ-o-speak,’ an externality is an external cost or benefit that is not reflected in the market price. Electricity generation from coal-powered power plants is a perfect example of a negative externality; the cost of generating electricity does not reflect the health and environmental impacts that arise from using coal. Thus, these costs are ignored by producers.

-

On the regional level, coal use contributes to acid rain. Where the acid rain occurs is highly dependent on wind and weather patterns. At the local level, coal use can impact communities and ecosytems through increased smog and mercury levels. Thus, when we consume energy from these sources, the external costs can impact very different communities.

If the Rocky closes, media coverage of the state legislature and Colorado politics will take yet another hit–on top of the reduction we’ve already seen. 

Like it or not, online publications and blogs by political junkies will become even more important for airing political debate in public. 

So politicians, even if they are uncomfortable talking to bloggers, should make the exta effort to do so. 

So it was disappointing to hear Cara DeGette, a senior writer at the Colorado Independent, on online news outlet, say at a forum Tuesday that someone in the Republican Party had issued an “edict” that Republicans should not talk to the Colorado Independent. 

I asked Colorado Republican Party Chair Dick Wadhams if this was true. “Well, actually, it is,” he told me. “When I am asked about these liberal blogs that are financed by scumbags like George Soros, I encourage Republicans not talk to them. I do not believe they are legitimate journalistic entities. And I think it would be the same thing as talking to the Democratic Party newsletter. I mean, why would we do that? So I do not speak to them. I don’t read them. I encourage Republicans who ask me about it to do the same thing. I don’t spend a lot of time initiating conversations like that. No, I think they are scumbags and I don’t think we need to talk to them.”  He said he had a “fairly clear position,” and I agreed.

He said he’ll talk to free-market-oriented sites, like FaceTheState.com, and other bloggers. To Wadhams, size doesn’t matter when it comes to blogs, but their source of funding does. Plus he thinks FaceTheState practices better journalism than the Colorado Independent–a view I’ve shown to be wrong previously. 

DeGette explained to those at the forum, sponsored by Colorado Media Matters, that she doesn’t understand why some Republicans wouldn’t talk to her. She defended her reputation as a journalist who aims to be fair and accurate, and she pointed out that Republicans like former Gov. Bill Owens will speak with her. (Even Wadhams did in the past.) She pointed out that public discourse is degraded if politicians try to pick and choose which journalists to grant interviews to. And besides not talking to her makes Republicans look bad, she said. 

I’m waiting for the day that a local TV station leads its late-night “newscast” with the weather segment. Yes, I know, this already happens whenever a small storm can possibly be hyped into a big-sounding one. But I think someday we’ll see the weather segment appear first on a regular basis. Think of the marketing: Weather Comes before News on Channel 20!

For those of you who like to know about the weather, but wish it were reduced to a 12-second summary on the local newscasts, you can get weather information all over the web, of course.

But there’s a local guy, who goes by “Weatherby,” who sends almost-daily emails about the upcoming weather. He lets his right-leaning politics slip out in his emails, he likes to dig at the local weather anchors, and his weather writing is blunt and fun.

I’ve been getting his emails for about a year. You also might like them.

His email earlier this week, with the subject line “yuck is on the way,” read:

Looks like there’s a decent chance for a crummy to partly crummy Thanksgiving weekend on the way with the yuk arriving about the same time the bird is done…..

To try him out, email him at SKGC77@aol.com and ask to be added to his weather list.  

In my Rocky column Saturday, I discussed recent changes at Westword, Denver’s alternative weekly owned by Village Voice Media. Staff writer Mike Roberts is now the lead blogger for Westword’s news blog, The Latest Word. For nine years, he’d been writing, among other things, a weekly media column called “The Message.” He’s now writing the print column about once a month, and posting lots of short media items on the blog–as well as items about lots of other topics. (The media posts are archived on the blog in the “More Messages” category on the right side of The Latest Word home page.) Here are excerpts from my discussion with Roberts on Tuesday, Nov. 18.

Jason: Was the change printed in the paper?

Roberts: No, there hasn’t been a change announced because, as I mentioned to you in my note yesterday, the column continues to exist. It’s just that it will be appearing less frequently as a result me overseeing our online news blog, The Latest Word-.

The model for this is one of the papers in our Village-Voice chain, the Dallas Observer. They have a blog called Unfair Park. It’s been really successful. And the powers-that-be here have been trying to figure out why it’s been successful, with an interest towards replicating it at the other Village Voice Media papers.

Jason: Successful by what measure?

Roberts: By simply the measure of page views and unique visits.

Jason: Is it profitable?

Roberts: When you talk about online and profit, you have to use air quotes. Someday it might be profitable. Fortunately all that dollars and cents stuff is way above my pay grade. The idea is to increase the number of folks visiting our website and other Village Voice Media websites. And they’ve done really well. And one of the theories about why is that they have assigned someone to oversee that blog. His name is Robert Wilonsky-. He is overseeing that on a daily basis, and he is making sure there is a lot of content on that site, over at least 10 items every day.

And the idea is simply by creating content they will come, to use a Field of Dreams paraphrase. The more content you put up there, the more people seem to be coming to the site.

So the idea was, and we were the first paper to try to replicate the success that the Observer has had, let’s assign somebody on very close to a full-time basis and make sure we have 10 posts a day on our news blog, and I was chosen for this mission.

So since we started it [June 23] every day that I have been here, we have had a minimum of 10 blogs, and our numbers are indeed way up.

So it seems like the theory has at least some credence to it…-that the more content we put out there, the more blogs, the more items, the more people are finding them and coming to our site. So that’s the idea-.

The corporate folks have been very happy with the numbers [at Westword]. I don’t know if this is a formal term used corporately or just a term we use jokingly around here, but the term we’ve been using is uber blogger. I’m the uber blogger. They have uber bloggers now assigned at other Village Voice Media papers-. I think the idea is that all the Village Voice papers will end up with someone in a role like mine-.

My column is about media, and I have a big interest in media and so a lot of the items I write are media-related.

Seven or eight years ago, my column was much longer in print than it became after the downturn started. I was getting 2,500 words per column, which is unbelievable. And because I has do much space I was able to write a really big hefty main item, and then I was able to write often three of four smaller items after that. As the page-count began to shrink, those other items often went away-.It went down to 1400 words, still very generous-.

Now online I essentially get to write those smaller items that I had to forgo a number of years ago. That’s one of the nice things, and I get to write a whole variety of different things, not only for the news blogs. I also used to be the music editor here and I continue to write a lot about music-.

The music stuff is probably easier to fit into my schedule than the full media column.

The way I did the media column it was very very time intensive with lots of interviews and lots of research. The music stuff is usually one interview or a review where I can write my opinion. That just fits in easier now-.

We also have a food blog called “Café Society.” One of my sad obsessions is cold cereal. I’m allergic to eggs, and as a result I grew up fetishizing Quisp and Quake and Count Chocula. I am getting to write a weekly cold cereal review…-a beautiful thing….

On The Latest Word blog, I have an interest in film as well. I actually have a Master’s Degree in screen writing from UCLA and love movies…-and this week being film festival week I’ve gotten to write film reviews and you-were-there kinds of things. I write about a wide variety of news beyond media, the stuff that’s in the headlines. So that’s the good stuff-.
 

There are cons as well as pros.  And one of the cons for me was I loved writing my column, and I loved doing long-form media writing.

I’ve gotten a chance to do several columns over the last few months. Certainly not every week. And I never missed a week unless I was on vacation, generally.

I do miss that weekly opportunity to flex my muscles in a long-form kind of way. There is the possibility that as this evolves that I will be able to get back to that.

Jason: When you say it’s not gone, what does that mean for now?

Roberts: If I have a story that comes up that I want to be able to do in a column form, I have been assured and it has been proven to be the case quite a few times that they will find space for me. That has been shown to be the case.

The problem is squeezing it all in.

I am supposed to do no more than six blogs a day, with the other four blogs being contributed by staff writers and editors, as well as the occasional freelancers. Sometimes those other four blogs have been easier to come by than others. Last week, for example, there were two days when I wrote 10 blogs and one day when I wrote nine.

And so, as a result of that output, there just aren’t enough hours in the day to do the column the way I would like to. If we end up having more contributions from other staff writers, and I’m able to cut back on the sheer number of the ones I’m writing myself and I’m more in the mode of processing other people’s…-I read over, post the art, edit, embed videos, all of that stuff, for everybody else’s blog. I’m sort of the producer of it, in a sense. I hope to be able to get the column into the paper more often than I have in recent months. With luck this is a transitional stage and I will be able get back to that kind of long-form writing in addition to the shorter-form blog writing-.

There could be some story that comes up, that’s so good that we can make arrangements to shift my workload long enough for me to be able to write the column. That option is always there.

At this point, I’m literally writing on average 2,000 words per day and 10,000 per week. So it’s a lot to squeeze in more.

Jason: That’s amazing. It really is-.

Roberts: What I was lucky enough to do on a weekly basis for nine years was valuable, and I hope to get back to it.

In the meantime, I’m able to write about media matters in shorter form and in a more timely way. And that’s one thing that we, throughout our history at Westword, always sort of rued, was that we got only one time a week to get our point of view out there, essentially one bullet in the chamber, whereas the dailies had one every day. Now we have as many as we want ever day. We can be as timely and beat them on stories-.

Everything is so fluid right now. Not just for this concept but for the industry in general. Every day, I walk into the office, and I’m happy when the lights got on-.

I have complete freedom on what I’m writing for The Latest Word, so if there is a day where there are 10 media items that I want to write, and it gets us to ten, great. So I will continue to be writing about it just as much as I can.

Frankly, when this first started, I had unrealistic ideas about how much I could do on a daily basis. It became clear after a while that if I were to try to write as many blogs per day as I need to and write the column that my head would look like David Cronenberg scanners. It would explode.