Dispatches from the road: Los Angeles

First of all, I can’t get ahead of Al Hogan and his anti-tax crusade. All the way down here in LA and the first story I see in the online T&T is “Tax season hits N.B. hard”. Now the question I have is this. How does it work in a newsroom? Does Al actually tell his journalists to pump out story after story day after day on the exact same topic? And these journalists, would they dare question the actual journalism associated with this? Do they teach this at Kings or STU? I can just imagine a professor at Kings saying “Okay, young journalists, today we are going to talk about the time honoured technique of ramming the editors personal opinions down the throats of the readers. “And you get the added bonus of not having to think.”

It’s one thing to take a position. It’s one thing to write a story or two or a new story as new content becomes available. But taking the same story and writing it over and over day after day is downright bizarre. Of course, Al has a spotty record of getting his way. He wrote stories on that ‘Cath lab’ for something like 18 straight days and didn’t get his way. However, back in 1999, he wrote 40 or 50 stories in a row slamming the toll highway and he got his way – and New Brunswickers got stuck with a $600 million bill (and climbing).

Back to LA.

I forgot how big this place was. I went to Venice Beach from the hotel by bus and it took almost an hour – by bus. LA’s a weird place. It’s low slung and spread out – for miles and miles on end. But it’s a great example of Americanism. Rich & poor, multilingual/cultural – with a little more narcissism than most cities for sure.

I’ll have more to say later in the week.

And I’ll lay of Al Hogan for a while. It could turn out that I am ‘being Al’ with a monotonous litany against his monotonous litanies.