April 29, 2012

SandBoxBlogs: Aspen Daily News "Hard news is good to find"

Long live the King.  Terrific and somewhat brutally succinctly stated column out of the 'Usual Suspect' aka Dave Danforth.

Up on the Aspen Daily News.

Dave Danforth:
"In 2009, Newsday, the daily paper on Long Island, played up a story its owners didn’t like.  The New York Knicks’ Eddy Curry had been named in a sex harassment claim by his male driver.

Newsday is a tabloid paper, but not in the same brawling tradition as its big-city neighbors, the New York Post or Daily News. Nonetheless, the story was bound to attract attention as a sports tale in the sports-crazed New York metro area.

That was just fine, except for a detail that eventually cost editor John Mancini his job. Newsday has been owned since 2008 by Cablevision, whose father-son ownership of Charles and James Dolan also own both the Knicks and Rangers.....

........Newsday did some digging into reports
that Long Island Railroad workers and unethical physicians had siphoned off $1 billion from the railroad’s disability fund since 2000. But when the paper shied away from running the story, the New York Times scooped it. Charges were handed down in the pension scandal last October.

This was the place at which Bob Greene, Jimmy Breslin, Murray Kempton, Gail Collins and Pete Hamill once worked. By 2010, it decided to institute a $5-per-week “pay wall” to drum up digital subscribers. It produced all of 35 takers in its first three weeks.

As the Press pointed out, the “pay wall” cut off its impact with anyone outside Long Island, including nearby New York City and state legislators in Albany.

Up popped an anonymous Facebook called “Debbie CowardlyLion.” Its fans undoubtedly recalled when Newsday won its last Pulitzer, in 1996.

The trendy “hyper local” fad also distracted Newsday, drawing its attention away from more worldly coverage. The paper, with a 2009 circulation of 377,000, was trapped. It wasn’t quite large enough to command national attention but still too big for what some residents called “super loco local” coverage. 

A Newsday PR exec called writers who gave worried accounts to the Press a “small number of disgruntled employees.” But the paper recently convened a rare pow-wow in a large auditorium to discuss it. Cablevision ownership stocked the meeting with cookies and coffee. A good dialogue resulted, all agreed.

In other words, they kicked the can on down the road..."  (Read more? You should.  Click title)

"Unapologetically pursuing and tracking patterns within the news others make since 2010."

SandBoxBlogs: Contentions "Crucifying the Oil and Gas Industry"

John Steele Gordon:
"It is often said that the definition of the word gaffe in Washington-speak is when someone accidentally tells the truth. Al Armendariz, the EPA administrator for Texas and surrounding states, certainly made a gaffe when he said in a speech in 2010, that the best way to enforce environmental laws was to crucify a few oil companies so that the rest will fall in line. He noted that the Romans used this technique when they conquered a new town, crucifying the first five people they could get their hands on so that the place would be very easy to manage for the next few years. (I expect that that is actually a slander against the Romans, although they had no scruples against selling whole populations into slavery.)...."
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"Unapologetically pursuing and tracking patterns within the news others make since 2010."

SandBoxBlogs: Grand Junction Daily Sentinel/Dennis Webb "Black Sunday still reverberates 30 years later"

Dennis Webb:
"Thirty years ago this Wednesday, on /Sunday, May 2, 1982, the party ended — for O’Leary’s, for Parachute, for much of western Colorado. On what became known as Black Sunday, Exxon announced it was shutting down its Colony Project, putting its workforce of more than 2,000 people out of work, and spelling job losses for thousands more support workers.

O’Leary’s eventually shut down. But the reverberations spread far beyond Parachute.

Gary and Monica Miller had gone into the clothing business in Rifle just a year before Black Sunday.
“We had one year of incredible, very good, healthy business, and a complete, severe drop the day after Exxon left. You could tell the next day,” said Gary Miller, 65. “... It was really an exodus. It was here one day and literally gone the next day.”

The couple was in the process of buying a Rifle home that would end up losing two-thirds of its value. It took more than a decade to recover that value.

“That was a very, very difficult time,” said Herb Bacon, now 82, but at the time a senior vice president of United States Bank of Grand Junction, now part of Wells Fargo.

“... Overnight everything just stopped. We had 15,000 people move out of Grand Junction. Because of that we had all kinds of foreclosures and empty houses and people took a lot of stuff they weren’t supposed to.

It was a tough deal. We survived, but it took several years to pull out of it.”

Thirty years later, the memories of Black Sunday are still sharp for those who went through it. Many still can describe where they were and what they were doing when they first got the news...."
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"Unapologetically pursuing and tracking patterns within the news others make since 2010."

SandBoxBlogs: Summit Daily News "Breckenridge, Summit County Sheriff's Office doll out Life Saving Awards"

Caddie Nath:
"BRECKENRIDGE — When Summit County Sheriff's deputies Jason Little, Jeff Wilson and sgt. Brian Smith arrived on scene of a possible suicide off Highway 9 Feb. 9, they found a man clinging to consciousness on a blood-stained snow bank.

The man told them he'd tried to kill himself by slitting his wrists with a knife they found nearby. His injuries, the deputies knew, would be fatal.

Realizing the man was going to die, the three deputies picked him up and carried him across the river in sub-zero temperatures to an ambulance waiting on the other side of the road.

“You saved this individual's life,” Sheriff John Minor told his deputies at a small ceremony April 18 before presenting each of the men with the Life Saving Award for their actions on the call. “He recognizes the fact that you saved his life because he has contacted us. … His father called me to thank you as well.”......

........Officer Kylor Dossett received the Life Saving Award for keeping a patient alive using CPR until paramedics arrived on scene.

On March 4, Dossett responded to a call and found the man unconscious, not breathing on the floor. He began chest compressions and kept the man's heart beating until help arrived....."
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"Unapologetically pursuing and tracking patterns within the news others make since 2010."

SandBoxBlogs: Aspen Daily News "Green living in the wilds of Aspen"

Chris Council:
"One of the first places Jim Kravitz lived on the ACES property was a former chicken coop. Then he graduated to a yurt and then a straw-bale house. Luckily for his wife and two children, the director of naturalist programs at the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies (ACES) now lives in the caretaker’s house with a state-of-the-art heating system. The structure is one of four employee housing buildings on the property, all of which are unique yet share the common theme of being incredibly energy efficient and “green” in their own right.

Elizabeth Paepcke established ACES in 1969 as a 22-acre environmental center and preserve behind her West-End home. One of the matriarchs of the Aspen Idea, Paepcke believed strongly in meeting the needs of the human spirit, followed closely by caring for the wild things just outside everyone’s back door. In 1975 Jody Cardamone was hired as the first director of ACES along with her husband and co-director, Tom. But even back then, employee housing was a challenge, so the couple lived on the property over an old horse barn that stood where today’s main building is located....."  (Read more? Click title)

"Unapologetically pursuing and tracking patterns within the news others make since 2010."

SandBoxBlogs: Vancouver Sun "Whistler Resort Eagerly Awaits Word on 2013 X Games "

G. Kingston:
"WHISTLER — The question hanging over the Telus Whistler Ski and Snowboard Festival this year is simple: What happens to the party to end all end-of-season parties when ESPN comes in next year with its hugely successful X Games brand?

The 10-day festival, a rollicking combination of cutting-edge extreme sport and often dazzling and innovative visual and performing arts, is already the largest spring event of its kind in the world.


The American sports broadcasting giant hasn’t officially given Whistler the nod yet, but all signs point to the resort municipality being on the X Games schedule starting in 2013..."  (Read more?  Click title)

"Unapologetically pursuing and tracking patterns within the news others make since 2010."

SandBoxBlogs; Durango Herald "Tribe’s dilemma: Splitting $43 million"

Emery Cowan and Heather Scofield:
"The Ute Mountain Ute tribe is abuzz with both hope and concern about how to spend a $43 million windfall stemming from a recent court settlement.

Since news broke that the Ute Mountain Utes would receive $42.6 million as a part of a $1 billion settlement with the federal government over the mismanagement of tribal money and trust lands, tribal leaders have held several meetings to discuss different options for the money. Meetings were held this week in Towaoc and Ignacio.

The Ute Mountain Utes are among 41 Native American tribes set to receive cash from the settlement, which was announced April 11.

Chatter about the money quickly fanned out across Twitter and Facebook after the announcement. And tribal members began circulating petitions and proposals outlining how the money should be distributed.

One proposal shared with The Durango Herald offers a three-pronged approach for distributing the money. It suggests splitting a portion of the money equally among tribal members, putting a portion back into the tribal organization and investing the rest.

The tribal council is expected to consider those proposals in the near future...."  (Read more?  Click title)

"Unapologetically pursuing and tracking patterns within the news others make since 2010."

SandBoxBlogs: Steamboat Today "Steamboat's Joe Pete LoRusso helps set skydiving world record"

Tom Ross:
" — Joe Pete LoRusso recently returned from Lake Elsinore, Calif., where he teamed up with 59 other people — none of them younger than 60 — to set a new world record.

LoRusso, 62, and all 59 of his mates jumped out of three airplanes at an altitude of 16,000 feet and skillfully flew their bodies in position to link up in a precise snowflake pattern, then carefully broke apart before releasing their parachutes. Less than 30 minutes after they returned to terra firma, the U.S. Parachute Association used photographic evidence to confirm they indeed had established a new world record for 60 skydivers 60 years old and older linking together.

“It’s very cool to set a world record, especially in your 60s,” LoRusso said.

He has been skydiving for 30 years and remains in the sport for the pure rush it provides.

“The adrenaline was revving a little higher than usual after they announced we’d broken the record,” he said...."  (Read more?  Click title)

"Unapologetically pursuing and tracking patterns within the news others make since 2010."

SandBoxBlogs: Summit County Citizens Voice "Photoblog: B & W – the roots of photography?"

All credit:  Bob Berwyn