The News Guy did not exactly take a President’s Day holiday. But because so many potential information-providers did, and because last Friday’s post was actual news, this seemed like the right time to deal with the housekeeping-clarifying-mopping up function to which Fridays are often devoted.

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.”

Short postings today and tomorrow to make time for serious research prior to the opening of the Legislative session Wednesday and Gov. Jim Douglas’s Inauguration Thursday. But…..

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?