All the Snooze Too Fat to Print

About the poll: All I can think of is the scene in "An Officer and a Gentleman" where Richard Gere cries, "I got nowhere else to go!"

In your first paragraph, do you mean "Joe Cole either quit or was fired?"

If Steepleton is Richard Gere in that film, then is Nick Welsh playing his Louis Gossett Jr.?

We LUUUV the bonus, website-only editions of the Poodle!!
But, please, proper spelling still needed:

Zate, not "Zarte"
Orsua, not "Orsuna"
tutti, not "tuitti" as in "capo di tutti capi di tuitti" although such a reference to a mafioso jefe still is a bit obscure.

While an Indy article may have published as "Bloom" for Blum, at least it was not the still-uncorrected "Bum" as a name for the Mayor in a recent Steepleton article.

By the way, news writers in India could do a better job than in the News-Less has been doing lately. At least these outsourced "reporters" would watch the whole videos of the meetings, read the entire staff reports, and maybe even conduct interviews via phone calls. But 20+ years of institutional memory on City government affairs and politics as the Indy has, not so much...

Since you have appointed yourselves the watchdogs of the Santa Barbara News-Press, you might want to be extra careful to be as accurate, and transparent, as possible.

Therefore, I would make a couple of suggestions regarding the above article.

1) By the time I read this, there were no misspellings, so I imagine someone made the corrections alluded to in David Pritchett's comment. You should follow the New York Times model and note all corrections that were made to online articles so that readers will know what was posted when.

2) Your statement about Orsua is grossly misleading, and -- I imagine you will pale reading this -- akin to the News-Press's original front-page story about Roberts and the porn-filled computer hard drive. Let me explain.

You wrote: "Former reporter Leana Orsua quit two weeks ago after Scott issued a gratuitously humiliating front page correction for a hefty exaggeration that appeared in an article she wrote describing this year’s immigration rights rally in contrast to last year’s."

But Orsua has already denied that the correction had anything to do with her leaving, as indicated in a Craig Smith's blog column dated May 4. Here's excerpts from that column:

..."when the Santa Barbara News-Press ran a front page story on April 22nd that attempted to link its former executive editor to kiddie porn, News-Press staff writer Leana Orsua had enough. By the very next day, she made up her mind that she was resigning....I asked her if a particularly harsh front page correction which appeared in Wednesday's paper and appeared to single her out played any role in her decision to quit. "Absolutely nothing to do with it" she said. The fact that she, according to others at the paper, had taken a number of sick days off in the past week (knowing she was a short-timer) would appear to corroborate that."

Note that you didn't actually STATE AS FACT that the correction is why Orsua left; but you made that strong implication, just as the original N-P article about Roberts made the implication that he was connected to the porn, without making a factual assertion.

Your statement -- while obviously not at all mean-spirited towards its purported subject as was the N-P's assualt on Roberts -- is equally misleading.

(I'm assuming Mr. Welsh reads Smith's blog on a regular basis, as any good reporter would. If not, there's a big enough problem anyway.)

You should correct this statement, issue an apology, and endeavor to be more accurate in the future.

Make no mistake about it -- I am no supporter of the News-Press. But it's just this sort of misleading reporting/writing that lends ammunition to the N-P's charges of bias. And we sure as hell don't need that!

"But it's just this sort of misleading reporting/writing that lends ammunition to the N-P's charges of bias. "

The N-P's charges of "bias" are mostly against their own former employees, and it's hard to see how Nick's post hoc ergo propter hoc assumption can be seen by any rational person as "bias", rather than simply error -- as opposed to the explicit bias he has against the thugs at the N-P, as all good people do. Methinks you should look after that hyperbolic beam in your eye before going after the mote in others.

The self-declared "sbmediawatch" just assumes that the Angry Poodle has the facts wrong. All the Craig Smith blog noted was what Orsua told to Craig Smith. Perhaps Nick Welsh has better or more recent sources? Maybe Welsh knows something different from what Smith knows?

Unlike in some now-fake newspapers, this town indeed has room for two alpha-dogs.

And, oh Dear and oh Heavens, the Poodle writes something as a strong implication but not necessarily stated as fact! Shocking that would happen in this OPINION COLUMN and in the Angry Poodle no less! Such columns are supposed to have a "bias" if that is what it is, as that is why we read them!

The difference is about news versus opinion and clear label as to which is what. Seems like the "sbmediawatch" needs some corrective lenses to understand the difference.

I also read the earlier posting of this Poodle blog and indeed those spelling errors of names were in the earlier draft. What should be done here in blog format is for an Indy staffer to enter a comment that the corrections were made, thus no need to add corrections and such about the corrections, although Updates have appeared in other Indy blog postings.

s-watch... gosh, this column is entitled `Angry Poodle Barbecue'.

How can you take this so seriously? There is a big difference between a satirical and effervescent opinion column and front-page straight ahead news.

Holding the poodle to news page standards is silly and wrong.

I do think sbmediawatch was maybe a little hypersensitive to the Poodle's snark. However, even though the statement is correct in the strict temporal sense (Orsua resigned AFTER Steepleton's correction appeared: mere fact), it does imply that her resignation was closely related to that printed correction. Since Nick's connotation directly refutes an actual "interview" with Orsua on another blog, any substantiating information should at least be alluded to to make the statement more credible.

I love the Poodle as much as anyone else, but let's not flame sbmediawatch for bringing up some points that have some merit.

I notice that McCaw's "fiance" is referred to in the Indy as her "paramour". When I see his name, the tune of "Just a Gigolo" prances through my mind with a toothy smirk.

You've all missed the tail of the dog. The point, as it were, is the NP only has one full time reporter covering the world. As a daily paper, this is surely troubling. As a reliable source of news, c'est impossible.