We begin this morning with some inside baseball.

Barring unexpected obstacles, and perhaps delayed due to a brief hiatus on the part of the fellow in charge (see note at end), something new is likely to appear on these pages within a week or so: Advertising.

Present plans are for the ads to appear underneath the “Log in” selections but above “Archives” in the column over there on the right.

These ads will be text. Just words, no logos, picture or other graphics, at least not for now.

The purpose of these ads, like the purpose of all advertisements in all news operations, is to provide said operation with revenue.

In this case, the revenue to be provided is likely to end up somewhere between paltry and minimal. Indeed, the mere appearance of the ad provides not a penny. The pennies (and we are talking pennies) start to flow only if a reader clicks on an ad.

(No, don’t click just to create revenue for the News Guy. That’s not cricket. Click only if you are interested in the good or service being advertised).

For the foreseeable future, then, the financing of this web site will continue to depend largely on: (1) the personal resources of its proprietor-publsisher-writer-editor-researcher-floorsweeper; (2) donations from readers.

Of late, the News Guy has been gratified by the noticeable increase in the number of people who have registered so they can get ‘Twitter’ updates about the posts and so they can comment should they wish.

Alas, this increase has not been matched by a concomitant increase in the number of donors. All who have not donated, are hereby invited to do so. Just hit “Donate” (under “Pages,” top right) and follow directions.

The News Guy accurately quoted the fellow who said the $112,000 that would be saved by hiring union workers for the new Lake Champlain bridge amounted to less than one percent of the roughly $1.7 million that could be saved by instituting a Project Labor Agreement (See “Non-Union Blues,” April 28)

But as a couple of readers pointed out, $112,000 is more like 6.25 percent of $1.7 million.

That’s still a small percentage of the total projected savings, but the News Guy should have thought to check the numbers. (And did, briefly. That post was written the evening of the big snow, in constant fear of losing Internet connection if not electricity, so it was written and published hastily. But that’s not really much of an excuse).

In another recent post (Political Health, April 24) the News Guy promised to explain soon why a single-payer health care system, whatever it advantages as a nationwide system, might be disastrous if adopted in one state. Herewith, the explanation.

In a single-payer system, health care is paid for with tax money. That’s actual tax money, from the taxes we call taxes, not the ‘taxes’ we call health insurance premiums.

Here’s an undeniable fact about taxes: it’s hard to raise them. People don’t like tax increases. Neither do politicians, who try to find some alternative. Any alternative.

There is no reason to think that health care costs will not continue to rise. Single-payer advocates argue that universal service itself will restrain costs. They’re probably right. But no one has presented persuadable evidence that simply covering everyone in and of itself will be enough to keep health care from getting more expensive.

So every once in a while, the Legislature and the governor will have to raise taxes to pay for the higher cost of health care. Or try to find an alternative.

One alternative is all but sure to be reducing pay to providers. That’s jargon for paying the doctors less. We know that this is likely because it is  what Congress has done for years; as health care costs rise, Congress regularly reduces provider pay for Medicare and Medicaid services.

Doctors don’t like it, but what can they do? They can’t go anywhere. Where would they go? To Canada? But Canada has a single-payer system. To Mexico? Not likely. In fact, almost nowhere in the world do doctors earn nearly as much as they do in the United States. It’s one reason U.S. health care costs so much more per person than it does in the rest of the world.

A few doctors refuse to accept Medicare and Medicaid patients. But not many. That’s an awful lot of patients to give up.

But if Vermont starts cutting physician fees, it’s no trick for physicians to go elsewhere. Many of them wouldn’t even have to move, residentially speaking. They could stay right in their present house and just move their practice to New Hampshire, New York, or Massachusetts.

In other words, if Vermont all by itself adopts a single-payer system, Vermont all by itself could find itself short of doctors in a few years.

Because it is the big guy on the block, the Burlington Free Press has often been the butt of criticism at this web site. So it’s only fair to point out that the paper has committed some first class journalism in recent weeks. Much of it has been the work of Candace Page, who seems to have returned from her recent leave of absence with renewed energy.

But she’s not the only one.  The duo covering the Legislature, Nancy Remsen and Terri Hallenbeck, are doing a good job. Time constraints (two reporters are really not enough for legislative coverage, especially as the session nears its end) prevent them from probing as deeply beneath the surface as some (probably including the two of them) might like. But they get the important stories and they get them right.

Let’s not, however, be too kind to the Freep. One thing its editors should seriously consider is doing away with those “My Turn” columns that regularly run on or across from the editorial page. Sure, it’s a cheap way to fill space (the writers are not paid), but the columns are full of misinformation.

Why wouldn’t they be? There is no requirement that the writers know what they’re talking about. Most are identified only by their town of residence: “Joe Schmoe lives in Colchester.” Living in Colchester is not a credential.

Sunday’s paper provided a perfect example. There one C. Joseph Soper (whose “credential” is that he lives in Burlington) pronounces himself “bemused” over opposition to the possible arrival of the new (and apparently quite noisy) F-35 fighter planes for use by the Air National Guard.

Only  Soper knows what bemuses him, and he may be right that the pluses of welcoming the new plane to South Burlington outweigh the minuses. But when he proclaims that “jobs disappear almost daily” in Vermont, he appears not to know that during this Recession they have disappeared more slowly here than in most states. All he had to do was check the unemployment statistics.

Pointing out that other sites are being considered for the F-35, Soper said, “ I strongly suspect the other installations involved have not adopted anywhere near the response we seem to be reflecting. In fact, theirs is most probably one of great excitement over the prospect of being chosen.”

Well, he may strongly suspect it, but he’s wrong. Some ten minutes of surfing the Internet could have told him that comparable opposition to the F-35 has sprung up in, among other places, Tucson, Key West, and Mountain Home, Utah.

This is not Soper’s fault, at least not primarily. He’s not in the news business, so he doesn’t know that a writer’s strong suspicion is insufficient. The rule is: Check it out. If your mother says she loves you, check that out, too.

But the editors of the Free Press are in the news business. They ought to edit those columns for accuracy or get rid of them. They may be good public relations. They are bad journalism.

NOTE: There will be no News Guy posting Wednesday, and perhaps not on Friday either, due to a death in the “family.” That’s in quotes because the person who died was not a relative, but a dear friend of many years.

Like a person, a web site must take a day every now and then to establish its procedures, clarify some confusions, and take note of new information which might confirm (or refute) earlier statements.

This is one of those days.

Last week the News Guy gratefully received a generous donation from an out-of-state political advocacy organization.

And reluctantly returned it.

The alternative was to keep it, but then, when dealing with the subject of this particular group’s interest, insert a parenthetical, “full disclosure” statement.

Nah! That’s no good, and not only because it’s awkward. You either take the money or you don’t.

The News Guy does not. At least not from: elected officials; senior appointed officials (as in, direct appointees of the governor); anyone running for office now (donations from former candidates gladly accepted, even those pondering another run sometimes in the future); political parties; interest groups.

As for individuals who work for political parties and interest groups, let’s use common sense. On the one hand, the News Guy is not about to research every contributor to see where he or she is employed. But then, he doesn’t have to do that with the chairs of Vermont’s three political parties. They should not donate.

If you do not fall into one of those categories, however, and have not sent a donation, you are encouraged to do so. Simply look under “Pages” (in the top right quarter of the page), click “donate,” and contribute as little (or, better yet, as much) as you wish. More revenue does not enrich the News Guy as much as it makes it possible to cover more stories, better.

If and when the site seeks advertisements, ads from any legal entity will be accepted: candidates, causes, defense contractors, tobacco companies, subversive organizations, escaped convicts. Whatever.

Two big differences between donations and advertisements. First, the ads are out there in plain site for all the world to see. Second, the revenue from each one is infinitesimal. In fact, the revenue is zero unless someone clicks on the ad. In that case the revenue is pennies. The News Guy can be bought, because anyone can be bought. But not for pennies.

Similarly, though it doesn’t really do any harm, all Facebook “Friends” (the quotation marks are needed because most of these “friends” remain complete strangers) might save their energies by not inviting the News Guy to be a “fan” or otherwise support (or attend the event of) a political cause, or for that matter a commercial enterprise.

Reporters are not fans, at least not of anything but sports teams, musicians, and actors. Yes, technically, the Facebook page under discussion here is personal, but it is effectively the News Guy web site’s page. As such, there is no point in urging him to become a friend of any business, or a fan of “Let’s Close Vermont Yankee,” VPIRG, the Champlain Housing Trust, “Fight Animal Cruelty.” Or Radio Free Vermont.

Since the December 28 post, “Population Balm” two pieces of information have generally confirmed the point of that post that Vermont’s stable population is a result of who Vermonters are rather than what they, or their state government, does.

One was a new Census Bureau report showing that Vermont was one of several states in which there were fewer young people (under 18) last year than in 2000.

Then there was a report by the Southern Education Fund revealing that a majority of students in public schools in the Southern states were both low-income and minority.

Not, the report said, because of the “white flight” of earlier decades, or because so many whites go to private schools; the South has the smallest percentage of private school students in the country. Instead, black, Hispanic, American Indian and others now comprise more than 50 percent of the Southern public school students partly because of increased Hispanic immigration. But also, according to the report, “Higher rates of birth among the South’s Hispanic and African American populations in recent years explain a significant part of the increase in school enrollment.”

The report does not quite say that whites, and especially affluent, educated, whites, are simply not having as many children as other groups, or as many as they used to. But it suggests that conclusion, which is also found worldwide in other population statistics.

It is one reason Vermont’s under-18 population has declined by 14 percent, faster than any other state’s, though the decline in Maine, Michigan, and North Dakota was also ten percent or higher.

Michigan, which is losing total population, is a special case these days because of the decline of the auto industry. Maine is almost as white as Vermont, but North Dakota is not, and neither is as affluent nor as well-educated.

Whether the drop in the under-18 population is a problem or an opportunity, it is undoubtedly a factor. It’s happening, and therefore should be discussed in connection with whether state policy can, or should, try to: (a) reverse: or (b) encourage and exploit the trend.

And finally today, reluctant though the News Guy is to pick on the poor, pitiful, Burlington Free Press yet again, a blunder in Saturday’s paper can not go unremarked. In a straightforward story with no byline, the Freeps informed us all that the speaker at Burlington’s annual Martin Luther King, Jr. remembrance next Sunday would be law Professor Anita Hill, who “earned notoriety during the 1991 confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.”

Not exactly wrong. At the time, Hill earned notoriety – that is: infamy, dishonor, ill repute – because at the time most people didn’t believe her allegations of misconduct against Thomas. Later, thanks to new information that backed up her contentions, public opinion turned more in her favor.

But the point here is not to relive the squabbles of 1991. The problem is that like many people these days, the writers and editors at the Free Press seem to think that “notoriety” means “fame.”

Minimally defensible. “Known widely” is the start of the Dictionary definition of “notorious,” but the words immediately following are “and usually unfavorably.”

A great language, English, because it allows nuance and precision. One of the great examples is the distinction among “fame,” “celebrity,” and “notoriety.” Newspapers oughtn’t muck them up.

It’s a little early to pronounce State Auditor Tom Salmon politically cooked and ready to have the loser’s fork stuck into his carcass.

But just a little.

Salmon, of course, is the elected Democrat who took the political risk earlier this year of becoming a Republican in a state where that is generally not considered a shrewd career move.

Last week he made the personal and political mistake of driving his car after he’d had too much to drink.

Monday he went on the radio to talk about it and botched things up totally.

Asked the obvious question by Jane Lindholm on Vermont Public Radio’s Vermont Edition, Salmon refused to say how much he’d had to drink before a Montpelier cop pulled him over Friday evening. The question, he said, was not “germane.”

This dictionary (American Heritage Second College Edition) defines “germane” as “having a significant bearing upon a point at hand; pertinent.”

Under that definition, what could possibly be more germane than asking an elected official who has had too much to drink just what he had been drinking, and how much?

Especially considering that he had earlier said he’d been drinking red wine.

Asserting that his goal was maximum “candor,” Salmon practiced maximum evasiveness. He wouldn’t say forthrightly that he planned to plead guilty when his case comes to court next month, leaving the impression that he was hoping for some other outcome.

To top it all off, before the brief (maybe five minute) interview ended, Salmon got potty-mouthed. If he thought the vulgarity would mark him as a regular guy, he was wrong. It marked him as vulgar. It also raised the question of…well, to come right to the point…of whether he’s something of a dope.

Maybe he’s the brightest guy around. But the context here is politics, in which appearance often outstrips reality. A candidate who comes across as kind of dense risks getting the reputation as a candidate who’s kind of dense. Once acquired, this reputation is hard to shake.

To be fair to Salmon, he does not appear to have been falling-down drunk. His breathalyzer test measured a blood alcohol content of .086, not far above the .08 legal limit.

Still, above the limit is above the limit. It doesn’t look good.

For two reasons, Salmon could still get re-elected next year. First, it’s early. Assuming there is no repeat performance, voters could forgive even if they don’t forget. A candidate who gets the vote of everyone who has ever driven after a drink too many would probably win in a landslide.

Second, one can never underestimate the facility of Vermont Democrats to nominate a turkey to run against Salmon. The Democratic leadership is no doubt trying to recruit a good candidate. But that leadership has limited power to control events. Anybody can enter the primary, meaning anybody can win it, including a turkey.

Right now, though, the Auditor’s re-election prospects seem bleak.

Oh, the other guy who wasn’t exactly impressive in handling this kerfuffle was Lt. Gov. and Republican gubernatorial candidate-designate Brian Dubie, who had nothing but praise for Salmon at Saturday’s Republican convention. Not a hint that he disapproved of what Salmon had done.

The appropriate response in the family, the fraternity house, maybe the Elks Club. Not in politics.

Enough of that. Now let’s turn to that other kerfuffle, the one about that letter to the editor of the Burlington Free Press, the existence of which the Freep is trying to deny.

The letter, by Ethan A. Sims (apparently the highly respected, much-honored professor of medicine emeritus at the University of Vermont, though the News Guy was unable to reach him for confirmation) which appeared to suggest that, while hunters were out trying to shoot a moose, anti-hunters might want to shoot the moose-hunters.

At least that’s how a great many hunters understood it. Preferring to be predators rather than prey, these hunters and their organizations not unreasonably became upset, deluging the newspaper with so many angry letters to the editor that the editors surrendered.

Abjectly. Not because they apologized, which was defensible if perhaps not necessary. But because they removed the letter from the newspaper’s web site archives.

It became, then, an un-letter, rather the way some one-time associates of Stalin who fell out of favor (and soon thereafter of sight) had their names and photographs purged from the history books, becoming un-persons.

Because no one here was killed, tortured, or exiled, the editors hardly sink to Stalinism, or other aspects of Bolshevism except in their obvious toadiness. Theirs is the spirit not of the independent journalist but of the ever-obsequious courtier.

Besides, this not being Soviet Russia, suppression doesn’t work. Anyone with a desire to see the letter and an Internet connection can find it. Here it is:

On this beautiful day we learn that about 1,251 hunters are taking to the woods with legal permits to “pursue prized quarry.” Certainly the members of various humane organizations do not approve. I suggest that before the next annual killing season, other residents be awarded legal permits to kill hunters who will be out to kill these beautiful, non-destructive animals. Or the government could just rule out all this primitive killing.
ETHAN A.H. SIMS
Shelburne

As another letter-writer noted last Sunday (a letter the Free Press editors, to their credit, printed), Sims obviously didn’t really want anyone to shoot a moose hunter. His letter was Swiftian satire, modeled on Jonathan Swift’s famous Modest Proposal (1729) suggesting Ireland’s poor ease their penury by selling their children to be eaten.

Not that hunters should be blamed for insufficient attention to Dr. Sims’ literary playfulness, which would have alerted them to his motivation. Hunters feel put upon these days because everybody does. It’s the American way to think everybody’s out to get us, whoever “us” may be. In fact, a very small percentage of the American people actively oppose hunting, and they have not been taken seriously by most of the rest of us (the News Guy is a very pro-hunting non-hunter) at least since the anti-hunting group PETA called for New Yorkers to change the name of the Fishkill River, apparently unaware that “kill” is Dutch for “river,” and so the name is not evidence of anti-piscatorialism (though perhaps of redundancy).

The editors could have explained that Sims was not in fact urging the murder of anyone, simply expressing his own anti-hunting views in a sardonic manner and with some literary flourish. Such a rational response, however, does not come easily to courtiers. Instead, the paper apologized for running a letter “advocating for violence against hunters,” which the letter does not do.

(OK, since this site is beating up on the Free Press again, this is a good place to note that Sunday’s package on the Lake Champlain Bridge, with stories by Terri Hallenbeck and Matt Sutkoski, was first class journalism.)

white-tailed deer

STRIKE ONE: KVETCH KVETCH KVETCH

When the going gets tough, they say, the tough get going.

Not in Vermont, especially rural Vermont. There, when anything changes, the supposedly tough whimper.

The latest example of this phenomenon occurred last week when roughly 100 members of the Champion Land Leaseholders and Traditional Interests Association met in Ferdinand, in the core of the Northeast Kingdom, to talk to Mark Maghini, who is sort of their landlord.

Well, not really talk to him. At least as reported in Orleans County’s Chronicle, it was more like screech at him.

And why? Because…(steel yourself for the horror about to be expressed) everything is not the same.

Oh, and also because weeping and wailing have become the default position in the subculture of some segments of rural Vermont.

To elucidate, for those unfamiliar with the saga of what are still called the Former Champion Land, Maghini is the manager of the Nulhegan Basin Division of the Silvio Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge, the owner of some 26,000 acres that once belonged to the Champion International Paper Company.

A few hundred people lease small plots of this land on which they have built camps, as they did when Champion owned it. As it happens, the terms of their leases are much more advantageous to them now than in the Champion days (largely because they moaned and groaned, and were immediately placated by a cowardly Vermont State Legislature, but let’s let bygone wails be bygone wails).

What ails them now?

First, under the new rules, they won’t be able to use or possess alcoholic beverages while hunting. What would happen, one of them asked, if he was bringing beer to his camp and a deer cross the road. Would getting out of the vehicle to go after the deer by a violation?

Of course not, Maghini said in a telephone interview.

“Get out of the truck. Go after the deer,” he said, as if any explanation were needed. Clearly this was a crowd looking for something about which to complain ever though there was nothing about which to complain.

Refuge visitors won’t be allowed to hunt from the road any more, either. Nor is anybody else, at least not in this state (see Page 17 of the most recent hunting regulations).

But the problem, as one of the meeting-goers put it, was that “we can’t do what we have been doing for a lifetime.”

Oh, please. There are two things these folks should do up. Grow and shut. The world changes. The land they lease is now owned by the Federal Government, which has designated it a Fish and Wildlife Refuge. The primary mission of the Refuges is “to conserve the abundance and diversity of native plants and animals.” But as a matter of law and policy – oh, and by the way, in the interest of the economy of northeastern Vermont – they also try to attract visitors.

Who are less likely to show up if they worry about getting shot.

Okay, federal regulations can always be dumb, and one of these seems to qualify. If motor vehicles are allowed on the roads, why should bicycles be banned?

Maybe they won’t be for long, Maghiri said, under a “comprehensive conservation plan” now in the works.

The Leaseholders are a small sliver of the body politic, but a somewhat larger sliver of the local cultural mythology. These are (at least so they want us to think) the traditional Vermonters of yore—self-reliant, rugged, adaptable.

Perhaps we’ll have to adapt to the reality; they’re a bunch of crybabies.

STRIKE TWO: SMILE, YOU’RE (MABYE) ON TV

More than any generation before us, we command the resources for self-realization…But do we want to be artists, philosophers, pioneers of the natural sciences? No, we want to be celebrities—Hilary Mantel

But does the Burlington Free Press have to lead the way.

The Freep routinely goes bananas any time a Vermonter even approaches celebrity, like appearing on a TV reality show. But Sunday, it outdid itself, devoting 50 square inches – 40 percent of the “news” (that is, not advertising) space on the front page to tell us that a guy who used to go to Middlebury would be playing against the New England Patriots that day.

Not that Steven Hauschka is really a celebrity. Or really a Vermonter. He grew up in Massachusetts. But he did start kicking footballs at Middlebury and he is the place-kicker for the Baltimore Ravens who would play (and lose to) the Pats Sunday afternoon.

Meaning he might be (oh, contain the excitement) on TV.

Not that it wasn’t a story. (Sort of) local kid (sort of) makes good. And it was nicely done. But it belonged on the sports page, not all over Page One.

Oh, and is it turned out, Hauschka kicked no field goals Sunday, or even (so it seemed after a quick look at the game account) attempted one. No TV time after all.

STRIKE THREE: LAW? WE DON’T WORRY ABOUT NO STINKIN’ LAW. WE’RE THE NEW YORK TIMES.

The paper of record came to Vermont last week, right up to the Northeast Kingdom, to write about that moose. You know, the one that’s being fed doughnuts in an impoundment in Irasburg.

Cute story by Katie Zezima of the Boston office. Mentioned the doughnuts. Quoted the old farmer who’d brought the moose to the impoundment and the guy who owns it. Got into the chronic wasting disease danger.

Just one little omission. Never mentioned that the rescue, transportation and confinement of the moose are all, undeniably, against the bleepety-blank law.

Actually, a not-so-little omission. Not, at least, in a serious newspaper, which The New York Times is.

Was?

Thanks to the….let’s just call it the less than impressive performance of the Wild Blue internet provider company and the firms to which it contracts out its customer service – DSI Systems Inc. of Des Moines and Installation Management of Lincoln, Maine, the News Guy still has no Internet connection, and will not until Tuesday at the earliest.

(Memo to all three companies: If you’re not going to show up as scheduled, you could call a guy and tell him you’re not going to show up as scheduled. Delay is excusable. Being inconsiderate is not).

Tuesdays being the News Guys teaching days at the University of Vermont, Wednesday’s post, if there is one, will probably be a brief one. But expect a doozy for Friday.

Before leaving you all today, though, something must be said about that truly bizarre lead story in Saturday’s Burlington Free Press, the one about how more jobs might be created if Vermont, emulating Oregon and New Jersey, banned self-service gas stations. (No time to do the link from here at the Step Back café in downtown metropolitan Barton

).

Not necessarily a bad idea, not only because it would create (as the story reported) more than 5,000 jobs but also because (as the story ignored), gas station owners would have to pay those people, so they’d have to charge more for gas, so people would drive less. (Markets work).

(And maybe for the same reason other goods should be more expensive, such as processed, fatty, sugar, food, either by taxing it or at least by not subsidizing it quite so much).

But bizarre (back to the Freeps story here) because the idea comes from nowhere.

Well, nowhere except the Freeps. The story does not cite any organized (or, for that matter, disorganized) effort to do away with self-service filling stations. There is no anti-self-service-gas station movement in Vermont. No politician’s campaign pushes the issue. No petition drive urges it. No organization calls for it. Yet there it is as the lead story on the front page of the state’s biggest newspaper.

Newspapers, to be sure, should be fonts of new ideas. But these usually come on the editorial pages or in columns. The Page One lead story is news, also known as “what happened yesterday,” or at least what is going on in general these days. Devoting the lead story to this proposal suggests that the idea is something other than the brain-child of somebody at the Free Press. But that’s all it is.

So what happened? The following is just conjecture, and anybody who knows better is invited to submit actual information, but here’s one guess:

Some Freeps bigwig took a vacation in Oregon or went down to New Jersey, found out he/she couldn’t fill up the tank self-service, and began to think….hmmm! Maybe this wouldn’t be bad for Vermont; it would mean jobs.

So the bigwig comes back, sends an email to an editor and/or reporter, who realizes that the bigwig – being a bigwig – can’t be blown off, and gets to work, and as the nonsense flows downhill, a perfectly good reporter, Dan McLean, risks embarrassing himself by having to write this peculiar story to lead the paper.

Here is the news about the News Guy that was originally going to be made public last week, but got delayed because…well, you know how these things are.

As the perspicacious among you have no doubt already noticed (and the rest of you-you know who you are!-get sharp) a new icon has appeared on the Newsguy page.

Look up and over to the right, just to the right of the fedora with the press pass. It’s a link to the News Guy’s new partner, the Stowe Reporter, the weekly that covers Stowe and its Lamoille County environs.

If you live around there, give it a click.

Or if you just want to know what’s happening in and around Stowe. And maybe even if you’re not that interested in Stowe. A couple of weeks ago, for instance, the Reporter had a story that should have been (but, we will not be shocked to learn, was not) picked up by the state’s daily newspapers. It turns out that, at least in the Morrisville Office of the Department of Children and Families, the number of children in foster care has gone up 57 percent in  five years. That ought to be statewide news.

So the News Guy is pleased to be entering into a partnership with the Stowe Reporter. We’re linking to its online version, which in turn is linking to us.

Here’s what’s in it for us (Who knows what’s in it for them? The folks there will have to speak for themselves): The arrangement gives the News Guy more exposure in the Stowe area, and in fact several new subscribers from that part of the state have recently signed on. The Reporter has skills that the News Guy lacks. It knows how to promote itself, and therefore presumably its partners. It knows how to sell advertising, from which the News Guy might someday benefit.

(But not yet, and, in all likelihood, minimally. Meaning donations are still welcome, the News Guy having not attained the long-sought financial Nirvana known as breaking even. Look below the “Stowe Reporter” link, under “pages,” and find “donate.” Just click. It’s easy).

Whatever happens financially, journalistically this is an exciting and positive development for this web site, which will nonetheless strive to avoid whatever dangers might arise from becoming respectable.

Any doubts that the News Guy needs help should have been extinguished by careful readers of last Friday’s post (just below), which mentioned “the spruce and fur forests so important to northern New England,” and noted that they mightbe replaced by maple and “beach” trees.

Interesting concept, the “fur forest.” It would, presumably, be made up of trees from which one could harvest the kind of material now found only on  mink, otter, beaver, and similar beasts. Great! Then we wouldn’t have to kill these creatures for their pelts. The development of fur forests would please the animal rights crowd.

For the nonce, however, those who want these furs will have to get them from the skins of dead animals, while the rest of us continue to live among spruce and fir trees.

There are beach trees. They are trees that grow along the beach. The trees that threaten to replace the firs and spruce, though, are beech trees.

That same post began by talking about the kind of world we would all leave to our “descendents.” To the purists among us, you are descendent when you are walking down the stairs. You are your grandmother’s descendant, even when you are walking up the stairs.

The dictionary (American Heritage Second College edition) is less finicky, regarding either spelling as a correct variant of either word. So this was not, strictly speaking, an error.

But you know what? The dictionary is insufficiently finicky here. Distinctions should be maintained. From now on in this space, progeny will be known as descendants, not descendents.

Any discussion of journalistic errors in this state this day is compelled to deal with the really bad story that lead the Burlington Free Press Saturday.

This story was B-A-D Bad, with a capital B. And a capital A-D, too. It was not good. It was…well, you’d have to call it…the right word would be bad. It wasn’t good. It was a bad story.

Many of you no doubt read it. The story explained that many Vermonters were buying carbolic acid (phenol) because it was considered the most effective weapon to use against invaders from the planet Zelfugghhia, hordes of whom were expected any day now.

Oh, no, wait a minute. That wasn’t it. Sometimes we get confused.

Actually, the story was about how Vermonters, like Americans elsewhere, were buying more guns and ammunition because they think President Barack Obama plans to make it more difficult, if not impossible, for them to buy guns and ammunition.

True, and it wasn’t as though reporter Matt Ryan got anything wrong. He accurately quoted gun shop owners and he cited the statistics on background checks indicating that gun and purchases have been rising.

Fine. But here is what else belonged in the story: The plain fact that the likelihood that Obama (or anyone else) is about to outlaw guns is roughly comparable to an invasion by creatures from the planet Zelfugghhia.

In fact, the story presented a wonderful (but ignored) opportunity for the Free Press to convey a civics lesson, explaining to these gun-buyers how America works.

Obama, you see, is merely the president. He can propose laws. He can not promulgate them. Only Congress can pass laws, and it can not do so secretly. Nor can Obama propose them secretly. He can’t file legislation. Only members of Congress can do that. So Obama or someone on his staff would have to urge one of those members to introduce a bill. If he did, we would all know about it. He has not.

Right now, there  are 11 bills in Congress relating to guns. Only four (three sponsored by Democrats, one by a Republican)  tighten restrictions on gun ownership. None of those four has gotten out of committee.

That means they ain’t goin’ nowhere.

Nor has the Obama Administration endorsed any of them.

Absent this information, the story fails to be truthful. It is, then, dishonest.

Were it actually honest (as opposed to merely being not dishonest), it would also have dealt with the political efforts designed to make some people think that Obama is trying to take away their guns, and the serious (in some cases fatal) consequences of these efforts.

In what is obviously a step to keep their members riled up and contributing, organizations such as the National Rifle Association and Gun Owners of America have been – to put it mildly – exaggerating Obama’s hostility to gun ownership and owners.

The NRA screed is excessive but not totally irrational. A an Illinois State Senator, Obama was a stronger advocate of gun control than he is now. With no political considerations, he might revert to that viewpoint. But of course there are political considerations, and at any rate he never supported banning guns altogether.

The Gun Owners of America, on the other hand, are so irrational that they might be worrying about that invasion from the planet Zelfugghhia. At one point their web site charges that the Inter-American Convention Against the Illicit Manufacturing and Trafficking in Firearms, Ammunition, Explosives, and Other Related Materials, designed to prevent drug smugglers from transporting weapons across national boundaries in the hemisphere, would somehow outlaw gun clubs.

Of course the folks on the other side of this debate, the pro-gun control set,  also like to rile up its members to keep the contributions coming. So far, though, their efforts have not had any spillover effect. But the gun lobby’s excesses may  have contributed, if indirectly, to the murder in Pittsburgh in April of three police officers, allegedly by someone who feared a government plot to take away his guns,

All that should have been in the story.

For the record, because people get so intense about the gun issue and are so quick to pigeon-hole anyone who comments on it, the News Guy has always held that law-abiding citizens have a right to own guns, and that hunting is a socially and environmentally healthy pursuit, which ought to be encouraged.

He just doesn’t like bad journalism.

And speaking of Friday, because of some still-unexplained computer glitch, the post for that day didn’t actually get onto the web site until almost 10:30 AM. For those who usually check in earlier, and perhaps assumed that we were taking  a holiday then, apologies.

That post is below, the third one down.

Thanks to the readers who emailed wondering what was going on, and to the reader who realized that New Hampshire’s pending budget deficit was probably closer to $100 million than $100 billion.

Looking at those federal budget figures really can fry the brain.

Friday’s post included results of a New Hampshire poll ,and some musing about why Vermont does not have the equivalent of  the Granite State Report polling operation connected with the University of New Hampshire.

If that musing conveyed the impression that the University over there in Durham, N.H., finances the poll, the impression was incorrect. Andrew Smith, who runs the poll, is a political science professor at UNH, but the poll, he said, finances itself. In election years, news organizations put up most of the money. In off-years such as this one,  he gets funding from various sources, including by allowing companies and non-profit agencies to “buy” a few questions in a broader survey.

Just as one of the Vermont polling firms does as discussed in an earlier post (“The Perils of Polling,” on January 27) about how polling results can misinform if the questions are not precisely worded.

The difference is that in the Granite State Survey, Smith edits the questions and changes the wording if he thinks it might affect the way some respondents answer the question.

“In fact, I’m a pain in the butt when it comes to the final wording,” Smith said.

As he should be. Polling questions should be written by scholars trying to discover public opinion. Not by activists trying to manipulate it.

And speaking of polls, here’s a one-question version: Do you give a hoot about whether , when that guy Tribble killed that guy Borello eight years ago. it was murder as opposed to…well, something else?.

What? Does someone charge that the above question was poorly worded, revealing a bias on the part of the questioner?

Guilty.

But not as guilty (of another offense, to be sure) as the Burlington Free Press was by devoting 81 square inches of Page One on Sunday (more than a third of the page’s news hole), plus another 132 square inches inside. That was almost one sixth of the front section news content.

And for what? For the verdict in the second trial of one boring, grouchy guy who shot and killed another boring, grouchy guy some time back. It doesn’t seem likely that very many people care that much. The stories have been ably reported and written by Adam Silverman. But toward what end?

Do not misunderstand. Murder is the ultimate great story. Accounts of it can be fascinating and fun. But this one was just bizarre. It had neither a famous victim (the Lindbergh baby) nor a famous defendant (O.J. Simpson),  nor any social, economic, or political significance. It didn’t even have any sex.

But the Free Press devoted thousands of column inches to the story over the past several weeks, which makes sense neither as news judgment nor as a circulation booster.

Which the Free Press could use. Two years ago, it sold 48,042 papers on weekdays, 56,295 on Sunday. The latest figures are 41,901 and 47,566. Yes, many newspapers are losing circulation and the Free Press did raise its price by one third.

Still, those are big circulation losses, 12.7 percent daily and 15.5 percent on Sunday. Do you suppose if the bosses there employed reporter Silverman’s competence on matters that affected the actual lives of actual people a few more of said people might read the paper?

Just asking.

All right, to some web site business: I am accepting the invitations of all readers who want to be my Facebook friend or to follow me on Twitter except for those trying to connive me into supporting some political cause or candidate.

But I still would like someone to answer this question: What is the point of it all?

On Twitter, for instance, one is regularly asked: “What are you doing now?”

Sitting at the computer, obviously.

OK, maybe I’m being too literal. But suppose I decide to answer that question some evening later this week. I could sit down at the computer and type in, “I’m watching an NBA game.”

That would be accurate. It would not be interesting.

Not to mention that when I clicked on one Twitter-follower, the Twitter company informed me that “this person has protected their updates.”

This company does not speak English. The person involved is clearly a female. Such a with-it firm ought to be able to program its software so it tells us that she has protected her updates. Or if that’s too much trouble it could use “his/her” for everyone. It need not debase the language and the culture.

And speaking of the language and the culture, this one was too delicious not to use to close today’s exercise. A letter-writer to the editor of the Free Press, enraged about the Burlington teachers contract, proposed that they all take pay cuts and that ten percent of the city’s teachers should be laid off immediately, with “the remaining teachers…asked to work extra hours to make up for less teachers.”

Turns out this guy, who will not be identified to protect the guilty, doesn’t even live in Burlington. Hmmm. Maybe if he’d gone to school there one of those well-paid teachers would have taught him when to say “less” and when to say “fewer.”

Did you get the announcement that the Burlington Free-Press had become a wholly owned subsidiary of the Lake Champlain Regional Chamber of Commerce?

Hmmm, It seems we all missed it. But how else explain the 1,400-word platform the Freep provided for Chamber President Tom Torti in Monday’s business section?

Followed by a half page outlining the Chamber’s wish list for the 2009 Legislature and another half-page for two other businessmen to make their own suggestions.

All without a word of assessment or the slightest hint that some of these proposals might be controversial, not to mention inconsistent.

Well, it is the Business section. But in a newspaper, as opposed to a propaganda sheet, that means a section devoted to covering the news of business, not an opportunity to provide a megaphone for businesspeople to pronounce their preferences as though they were princes of one church or another.

Especially when their preferences are as sweeping as President Torti’s. He wants nothing less than the reorganization of  state government in which the Departments of Labor and Economic Development would be eliminated, but then somehow merged, along the way picking up the adult education responsibilities now in the Education Department.

He also wants the state government to do less because “government has grown larger than we can really afford.” Except, of course, where he wants it to do more, such as investing in electric transmission infrastructure. And he wants taxes lowered, especially on the richest one percent of the people.

And just what is wrong with any of that? Perhaps nothing. Torti’s opinions are as legit as anyone else’s. But like anyone else’s, they should be put into some perspective, and would be were they being reported in an actual newspaper, not what appears to be the Chamber’s newsletter.

It isn’t that business’s point of view shouldn’t be in the paper. But it should be there with context, in this case an indication that much of what Torti proposed is not likely to happen, and a reminder that his is, after all, a special interest, to be treated with the same skepticism as any other special interest.

Were this journalism rather than  promotion, the story would have quoted someone-perhaps one of the leaders of the Legislature,  saying, ‘Gee, maybe we’re not going to do all of that. Or any of it.”

Were it good journalism, it would have sought out someone on the other side of the political spectrum. A trade union official. A somewhat liberal economist. (Come to think of it, a centrist economist would do). A representative of consumers. A health care advocate. Anyone who might present a contrary case.

Failing to do this might be acceptable if the Free Press also had, say, a weekly labor Section, or a pull-out devoted to education, or the arts (which its Thursday entertainment guide is not), or police officers and firefighters. Then each interest group could be handed a similar megaphone to present its prejudices. But business is the only identifiable constituency that gets its own section every day.

Because he has committed actual journalism in the past, reporter Dan McLean may well know all this. He did find one semi-independent sources, David Mace, the spokesman for the Agency of Commerce and Community Development, who said…well, not much of anything, really. Aside from that, he simply let Torti run on, not even pointing out the glaring inconsistency (less state spending except where it’s good for the corporate world), raising the question of whether he was ordered not to challenge the interview subject.

Acceptable perhaps in a feature-style personal profile. But that’s not what this was. This was politics.

Likely to backfire anyway, thanks to Torti’s public relations gaffe about the onerous tax burden of the top one percent. The tax structure, Torti said, gives these folks “A reason to leave” the state.

It isn’t that people who earn $348,000 a year (the national figure in 2007) should be under-appreciated and over-taxed. It’s just that the assertion that they are abandoning Vermont because of its marginal income tax rate is too silly for words, a fact that should have been noted in the story (though of course not expressed quite that baldly).

Vermont has been right next to New Hampshire for roughly 250 years, and for the last 30 of them Vermont has had a relatively progressive income tax while New Hampshire has none at all. If rich Vermonters wanted to leave the state because of its taxes, they wouldn’t have very far to go.

No doubt a few have gone. But the number of rich people in Vermont keeps going up. Maybe that’s because they keep getting richer. A study a little more than a year ago found, in fact, that “Vermont’s wealthiest households have seen their incomes grow faster than anywhere else in New England,” as reported in the Free Press by…Dan McLean.

Very well reported, too. But that was back in October of 2007, when the Free Press was still trying to be a newspaper, arguably worth the 50 cents it then charged. Now it barely tries and charges 75 cents. Why pay it?

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