The Future Of Media

A WONDERFUL OPPORTUNITY
I was fortunate to be included in a panel discussion Thursday afternoon with the current class of Leadership Tomorrow during which the current condition and future of media was discussed.  I was part of a panel, moderated by former Daily Pilot Publisher Tom Johnson, which included Daily Pilot Editor John Canalis and dynamic restaurant Public Relations representative Mona Shah-Anderson.  Unfortunately, a representative from the Orange County Register was unable to attend.

SOME FAMILIAR FACES
For an hour we responded to questions posed to us by Johnson and members of the class, which included some familiar faces.  Dane Bora and Leigh Chalkley of the City of Costa Mesa were in the group, as was Andrew Smith - a member of the Costa Mesa Charter Committee.  Click on that link above and you can see the full roster of this year's class.

 BUSINESS USING MEDIA
Shah-Anderson, the highly-acclaimed restaurant strategist, discussed her approach to getting media coverage for her clients - high-end restaurants throughout Orange County.  She, for example, had just returned from a video shoot at Fox News in Los Angeles that morning and was scampering out to another client commitment following our meeting.  The tries to "personalize" the restaurants by focusing on the chefs and their skills.  Plus, she uses all the current social media sources to the maximum to entice people to the restaurants.  I, personally, have been the victim of her skill.  She posts photos of yummy dishes prepared by her client chefs and I immediately feel like Pavlov's dog - salivating to get a taste of the food.  She is married to former Daily Pilot City Editor, Paul Anderson, who now is the presence of the City News Service in Orange County and a REAL newsman.

CONDITION OF LOCAL MEDIA
We discussed the current condition of print media locally - it's on unsteady ground.  The drama around the Register has been widely chronicled, as has the ownership of the Los Angeles Times - parent company of the Daily Pilot.  There are still some great unknowns about those organizations.  The Register, for example, made a huge commitment to growing it's print presence - acquiring the Riverside Press Enterprise and creating brand new newspapers in both Long Beach and Los Angeles.  Those last two efforts were spectacular failures and the financial condition of the entire organization is precarious, at best.  We learned from Canalis that the Pilot is on solid financial footing right now, but that he'd always welcome the chance to hire more reporters and staff to support them.

IT'S NOT JUST A LOCAL PROBLEM
In doing some research for this opportunity I found that, since 2004, 187 newspaper printing facilities have been closed nationwide - a bellwether of the condition of the print product.  Between 2003 and 2013 the advertising revenues for the print media has dropped 49%!  More journalism jobs are available in digital media sources than print sources by far.  And, it's not only newspapers that are suffering.  If you subscribe to, or regularly read ANY magazine these days, you realize that they are rapidly becoming mere shadows of themselves.  Folks just don't subscribe as much - because so much of that information is available online at NO COST.  And thereby lies the problem.

COVERING ALL THE BASES IS A TOUGH JOB
The difficulty of covering every story with a reduced staff was part of the discussion by Canalis.  I opined that, being a huge fan of the Daily Pilot myself, I thought they did a good job of balancing their news coverage.  I suggested one measurement of that success was the fact that they've managed to anger folks on both sides of an issue - each presuming that the editors and writers favored the other's point of view.  It's actually amusing in a sad sort of way.

THE BURDEN OF FACTS WITHOUT OPINION
Johnson prodded me about my aggressive opinion-writing on Costa Mesa issues, which I readily acknowledged.  As a blogger I have much more latitude than any of the "real" news outlets.  They are burdened by the responsibility of providing the facts of issues, clearly and accurately and as quickly as possible.  They also must cover a breadth of issues where I can focus on one specific story at a time.  In my opinion - there's that word again - both the Daily Pilot and the Orange County Register do a good job of presenting the news fairly and accurately.  Yeah, I know some of you disagree with me, but I challenge you to point out one issue where they have NOT done so...

CAULDRON READERSHIP CONTINUES TO GROW
Johnson also asked me to quantify the blog - how many people read it, for example.  Well, I told him there are many ways to quantify it, but purely from a "pageviews" standpoint, we have had well over 2 million page views with the current host platform - more than 500,000 each for the past two years.  The readership, based on all the measurements I have available to me, continues to grow.  Thanks to all of you for that.  That being said, those numbers pale when compared to the pageviews tallied by the Daily Pilot or the Register - which is how it should be.  We simply need a viable, thriving, free press in this country.  Otherwise, how do we know what the heck's going on?

LOCAL COMPARISONS
I will, unashamedly, tell you that the numbers for this blog far outstrip those of two "competing" blogs in this city.  That "kinder, gentler" blog seems to have lost all traction - not unexpected when his unreadable,  pseudo-intellectual bilge has devolved into comparing activists in this city to Muslim terrorists. The much more established blog operated by our racist laureate has lost readership so significantly that it doesn't even show up on many measurement tools.  I guess that's a good sign.  It tells me that folks just got tired of wading through all the manure posted there looking for a pearl of wisdom.   Typically, you'd come away from a session reading that thing and feel like you need a good shower.

DIGITAL IS THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE
The more than two dozen people in the class covered the spectrum age-wise, as you can see from the photo above.  Most of them, in response to Johnson's first question, acknowledged that they do NOT read a newspaper each day.  Several did, but most did not.  Many of the class members get their news from smart phones and/or tablets - which, according to the research I did, is the wave of the future.  Unfortunately, nobody has yet successfully found a way to make money selling the news that way.  That's a problem that simply must be solved.  We cannot let the future of news in this country be blogs like mine or, God Forbid, those other two!  That's completely unacceptable.

FACTS...
Here are some snippets of information extracted from a recent Pew State Of The News Media report from last year.

• News is part of the explosion of social media and mobile devices, which could be a way to reach more people than ever before.
• Half of Facebook users get news there even though they did not go there looking for it.
• Facebook users who get news at the highest rates are the 18-to-29-year-olds.
• The same is true for the growth are of online video.  Half of those who watch some kind of online video watch news videos.  Again, young people constitute the greatest portion of these viewers.
• Despite evidence of news consumption by Facebook users - half of whom report getting news across at least six topic areas - research data finds these consumers to have rather low levels of engagement with news sites.
• Their study found that roughly 5,000 full-time professional jobs at nearly 500 digital news outlets, most of which did not exist a half-dozen years ago.
• Local television remains the primary place American adults turn to for news, and the audience increased for the first time in five years.
• A quarter of the 952 U.S. television stations that air newscasts do not produce their news programs. 

You can read that report in it's entirety HERE.

THANKS FOR THE OPPORTUNITY
Thanks to Tom Johnson, Chairman Joe Stapleton and Vice Chairman Jon Lewis - recently promoted to Deputy Police Chief in Newport Beach - and the Leadership Tomorrow class of 2015 for inviting me to participate.  I hope my input was helpful to them - and I hope they become regular readers here.

Charter Committee Wraps It Up!

UNEXPECTED CHANGES MARKS A LONG MEETING
Last night the Costa Mesa Charter Committee used an extended meeting - four hours! - to wrap up their final version of the document they've spent the best part of a year cobbling together.  And this meeting, which should have been a walk in the park, still ended up with some high drama before it was all over.

MOST MEMBERS PRESENT

Most of the committee members attended this meeting, which began at 5:00 p.m., and finally wrapped up shortly after 9:00 p.m.  Only MaryAnn O'Connell and William Fancher were absent.  Both facilitators - Dr. Kirk Bauermeister and Dr. Mike Decker - both lawyers - Kimberly Hall Barlow and Yolanda Summerhill - and both staff members - City Clerk Brenda Green and Intern Sawyer Pendleton all were present.  A handful of residents also attended - a smaller group than normal, which dwindled as the meeting dragged on.  There were two of us and one lonely Daily Pilot reporter left at the end from the high of about 10 earlier.  (Ramos & Eckles shown)

FINE TUNING - WITH A CHAIN SAW!

Language for the Charter had been hammered out as the deliberations went along over the past many, many months, so the plan last night was to fine-tune it for presentation to the City Council on March 18th.  "Fine tuning" in this case included adding major segments from scratch in some cases and completely removing one section that had taken parts of three meetings to create last year. (Panian, Ramos & Bauermeister)

 

A WASTE OF TIME
The end result will be a short document - six or seven pages, depending on how it is formatted - that seems to not significantly change anything.  Almost every element included in the document is possible to accomplish under the current General Law rules that govern our city.  For that reason, this effort has been a colossal waste of time and resources.

COMMITTEE DID A GOOD JOB

Don't get me wrong... the Charter Committee did a good job.  They all worked hard, did their homework, remained mostly civil to one another and clearly found unanticipated respect and admiration for fellow members of the committee.  They flogged controversial issues into submission throughout this process, trying to find common ground and, when that was not possible, working on language that will pass muster with the voters. (Bauermeister shown here)

SALARY DISCUSSIONS
In that regard, the language included a segment regarding Council Member Salaries - the issue that was discussed at length over several meetings.  I reported at the time that they finally decided that each council member should receive a monthly stipend of $2,100 per month, and that any other optional benefits - health insurance, for example - would be deducted from that amount.  Currently each council member earns $904.40 per month and also receive health care benefits ranging from zero to a couple thousand dollars each month. (Shown here, Kevin Tobin with Ron Amburgey)

FEAR DRIVES LAST MINUTE CHANGE
However, as the discussion worked its way to this issue last night, committee member Andrew Smith (shown here with Amburgery and Ramos) balked.  After all that hard work and negotiation among the members previously, he feared that the voters would only see it as a move to double the council's salaries and that, alone, would drive a stake in the heart of the Charter.  Back and forth the discussion went and, eventually, the committee agreed with Smith and the language will be amended to indicate that the council will receive salaries consistent with state law.  As a sidebar - if they had NOT included specific language regarding salaries it would theoretically been possible for a future council to pay themselves big bucks - as in City of Bell big bucks - because the Charter language is such that if something is NOT specifically mentioned the council can pretty much do what they wish.  That's something to remember.

SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE
Member Gene Hutchins - a nice guy (shown here with Tobin and Bauermeister) - had another of his Unfunded Pension Liability meltdowns.  Even though committee members are supposed to present new ideas or expansion of old ones by the Friday before their Wednesday meetings, Hutchins has consistently - and frustratingly - brought what he thought was significant information to the committee the NIGHT of the meeting.  Last night - their last night - was no exception and things got just a little heated as he just would not take no for an answer.  As had been the case throughout this process, every time the subject of Unfunded Liabilities was mentioned he practically launched from his chair, eager to get into the discussion.  He's also a member of the Pension Oversight Committee and, apparently, has enlisted that entire group to help him craft language for the Charter on Pensions.  Keep in mind that the Pension segment had already been put to bed at a previous meeting.  This time, though, he brought several NEW segments he insisted were crucial for the Charter.  In the end his ideas failed to gain support from the committee.

ACTUAL FINAL LANGUAGE IS PENDING
Eventually the final document, which received so much manipulation last night that I just couldn't keep up with all the language alterations, will be completed by the legal staff and presented to the council next week. (Tom Pollitt and Tom Graham Shown)

HERE'S THE FRAMEWORK
The document includes a three-paragraph preamble and eight (8) articles.  This is what the Table of Contents will look like:
 Article 1.     Incorporation and Powers
             Section 100.  Name of City
             Section 102.  Boundaries
             Section 104.  Powers

Article 2.     Form of Government
             Section 200.  Form of Government and Powers
             Section 202.  Administrative Officers

Article 3.     Elective Officers
             Section 300.  Terms
             Section 302.  Presiding Officer
             Section 304.  Council Member Salary
             Section 306.  Incompatible Offices

Article 4.     Elections
             Section 400.  Elections
             Section 402.  Initiative, Referendum, Recall

Article 5.     Finance
            Section 500.  Budget Reserves

Article 6.    Personnel
            Section 600.  Retirement Benefits
            Section 602.  Civic Openness In Negotiations
 

Article 7.    Public Contracting
            Section 700.  Public Contracting
            Section 702.  Prevailing Wages
 
Article 8.   Miscellaneous
             Section 800.  Charter Review
             Section 802.  Outsourcing
             Section 804.  General Plan Consistency
             Section 806.  Construction and Interpretation
             Section 808.  Severability

SPECIFICS COMING SOON
I'm not going to begin to try to give you all the language because there are segments that need to be burnished by the legal staff based on last night's activities.  Nor can I give you the final version of the Preamble for the same reason.

NOT INCLUDED, BUT...
The committee also will present to the council a short list of things NOT included in their document, but that the council may wish to consider.  Those are:

• Community Outreach
• Establishment of a Citizen's Academy
• Consider a specific percentage of a budget surplus earmarked for reserves
• Current Council Members to cease "participation" in Pension Plan
• Adoption of a Private Pension Plan for new hires
• Use of Certificates of Participation to pay down liabilities

WHAT'S NEXT?
Here's the tentative schedule of events as this process moves downstream.

• March 18, 2014 - Charter document presented to the City Council at regular City Council Meeting
• April 15, 2014 - 1st Public Hearing (regular City Council Meeting)
• May 20, 2014 - 2nd Public Hearing (regular City Council Meeting)
• June 17, 2014 - City Council to vote whether to place on ballot in November (regular City Council meeting)

PLENTY OF TIME FOR OUTREACH - OR MISCHIEF
Keep in mind, the deadline for placement on the November ballot is August 8, 2014, so the council has plenty of time for manipulation of this document and to hold workshops, town halls and whatever other form of community outreach they feel is important to sell this document to the voters.  There's also plenty of time to tinker with the document to satisfy personal objectives.

SAYING GOODBYES...
Last night, as the committee met for what will likely be the final time as a group except for the reception that will be held for them immediately preceding the March 18th council meeting, they went around the table to share their thoughts on the experience.  Some of the comments were quite moving and obviously very sincere.  Member Hank Panian's (shown here with Harold Weitzberg) comments were particularly moving.  He was on the original charter commission back in the 1970s.  He spoke of having been part of the group that founded what is now Mesa Water District back in 1960 and he helped create the Newport-Mesa Unified School District also during that decade.  He said he was grateful because through this committee he, "Finally have a chance to help shape the future of the city."  The common thread through them all was that each one learned a lot during this process, gained new respect for individuals and the staff and were uniformly glad they participated.  Congratulations to them, the facilitators and staff for all the work they did.

NOW WE'LL SEE...
Now we see what happens with this work product.  We'll see if the council decides to add items to it or make changes at all.  The next couple months will be very interesting.