We're No. 128!

Hooray!

But now I feel a longing to move to the paradise that is Kirksville.

Seriously, these surveys are so bogus it's ridiculous. Why should Kirksville be No. 41 and Mexico No. 342? They're both just little one-dog towns as far as I can tell.

Privacy and restraint

On Tuesday, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch published an excellent editorial entitled "A Time to Heal" in which it pleaded with the media to give some privacy to the families of the two kidnapped boys who have recently been found in Kirkwood.

Every day since then, it has published front-page stories with huge glowering photos of the accused kidnapper and more details about the lives of the boys in captivity.

Just goes to show that being the voice of restraint isn't easy when faced with overwhelming public curiosity and intense competition from other media, both local and national.

Inquiring Minds Want to Know...

More about those water quality violations mentioned in teeny-tiny print in the classifieds section Sunday. They sound like news. Were they simple, minor violations, such as recordkeeping? Or were they serious and chronic violations? Gotta love the legal notices.

Don O'Brien's column about ten years of sports coverage was enjoyable. But "have went"? Tsk tsk, copy editors.

Did I Miss Something?

Or was there no story in the local media about the closing of the Blue Onion Blues Bar?

On another business-opening note, the Whig reported yesterday that Starbucks is hunting for a location. Too bad it's down Broadway. Obviously Quincy's comment that a downtown Starbucks would be a big benefit is very true. Unfortunately for that idea, Starbucks tends to go where the traffic is--in a college town or a downtown where there's lots of pedestrian traffic, they go downtown, but in a town where there's a busy main drag (Bloomington, for example) they just drop in on some high-traffic corner and add to the vehicular congestion.

If I were a local coffee shop owner, I'd have some tough choices ahead.....and this weekend's auction of the Jitter Bean's equipment and furnishings would sound like Marley's chains coming up the stairs.

Print and Electrons

Interesting article here about the growing irrelevance of newspapers in today's media world. I don't think it applies to the local media scene nearly as much as in larger metro areas, at least not yet....none of us local bloggers really do "citizen journalism" in the same sense as the blogs you see on the national scene. We feed off the local media, offering comment and criticism, but still depend on them, and we read the Whig like a Chinese wall.

But who knows what the future will bring? Definitely the local media are not offering much value added on their websites yet.

"The Game"

The intensity of feeling doesn't make any sense to me, but then I've never been much of a sports fan.

But it obviously means a whole lot to ninety percent of Quincyans, and the Herald-Whig covered the hell out of it.

Nice job.

The Hype-O-Meter Begins to Smoke

This month's Arts/Quincy tells us that the bank building at Seventh and Hampshire is "perhaps one of the finest examples of Modernism found anywhere in the world."

Perhaps it's a Colobus monkey, too, but both statements are equally ridiculous.

OK, I know it's not Arts/Quincy saying that, it's the press release from the Gardner Museum. But good lord, it's a shameless bunch of hype.

Think I'll drive out to the "bold futuristic masterpiece" that is the Quincy Regional Airport and have some kraut & sausage on Thursday nights.