[Imc] meeting notes 10-8-00

[Zachary Miller]

> I am curious what it is the Octopus is doing wrong that particularly
> irks people. I wonder what folks think is going on behind the scenes
> that the paper appalls them more and more frequently.

Paul's comments were right on the money on this thing but I wanted to
point out some specifics that kind of bother me:

Every single article the Octopus ever writes about local business (and
thats most of them these days) is written strictly from the
perspective of the local business owners. They interview the owners
and write a summary. They never interview the _consumers_ to see how a
given news item will affect _them_. I don't mind hearing from the
owners, and I don't mind a pro-local-business slant, but I want to
hear from consumers, if they are going to talk up local business I
want consumers doing the talking not owners. At least _pretend_ that
the articles aren't _merely_ a ways to apease advertisers.

Two examples of their pro-business stance. 

1) When Mabels wanted to have strippers and the city (or county)
passed an ordinance that forbid it, the octopus cast it as the poor
club owner just struggling to find something to keep his bar open vs
the puritanical local government. They had a few quotes from
university officials and a quote from the owner of Lixx, another local
business. But they didn't go out and find out what local consumers in
campus town thought about it, did regular people think it was a just
ordinance? did local consumers look forward to or dread the coming of
the strippers? maybe they could have written some background material
on the social effects (negative and positive) of strip clubs, the
effects on the women who work there, the effects on the patrons, the
effects on the surrounding neighborhood.

2) There is this proposal to expand the protected land out by
allerton. This would involve taking some land from some farmers. The
octopus has cast this as some horrible grapes of wrath scenario and
they haven't said a single thing about the ecological gains that the
move would make. They haven't said a thing about how much land the
farmers have now and how little they would lose, they haven't said a
thing about how much the farmers would be compensated for their land,
they haven't said a thing about how many farmers are involved. They
haven't said a thing about the very likely possibility that if this
doesn't happen the farmers will simply sell (perhaps at similar
prices) the land to real estate developers who will certainly ruin the
nearby prairie. I want to know more about this issue and I have to
rely on word of mouth from Green friends to learn it. This is a lot
like how they covered Big Grove, completely one sided, they sided with
the Big Grovers and cast Urbana as a money hungry oppressor.

What is with inclusion of so much syndicated stuff. It started with
all the newswire stuff (from alternet, the alternative news
service). But now they have "News of the Weird", Astrology tables, and
a crossword puzzle. If they are going to add all that noise they need
to make teh paper thicker, not sacrifice locally produced content.

Their website is frequently broken in the most trivial ways for months
at a time.

Their "The Scene" is _so_ frequently incomplete or just plain
wrong. They make no effort to gather any information for that section
on their own, they rely on people to report it and then they _still_
get it wrong. www.shampoobanana.com seems to get it reasonably right,
why can't the octopus? I have been particularly dismayed with their
recent dropping of decent reviews for all the bands and their
experiments with _horrible_ grid layouts. Half the time they forget to
even put in the locations of the various clubs and events. They impose
a completely meaningless distinction between various event
types. There once was a day when the "critics picks" were really good
off teh beaten path stuff, now they are often fairly mundane or
non-existant. 

Their layout has been sloppy at times. White space in all the wrong
places. Important recurring sections (like the list of club addresses)
simply missing.

They are so money hungry that they actually drop stories they have
agreed to print when they sell extra ad space. The prairiegreens wrote
up a whole long article about the Nader ballot access struggle right
when things were in the thick of it, they were going to publish it,
and at the last minute they called and said tehy were replacing our
article with ads. We weren't even being paid for the article so it was
_free_content_ for them.

Despite their promise to do an in depth piece on the subject after
everything had played itself out, they never did a single piece on the
killing at The Gypsy. 

The egregious attack on the DI they did in one article "State of
Dependence" was the most ironic thing I've ever seen. They did a cover
expose story uncovering the fact that *tada* the DI is economically
linked to the University and couldn't possibly offer an alternative
unbiased view (with the implication that the octopus could)! I'd like
to see a cover story on the economic ties between the octopus and its
advertisers, the octopus and its parent company, or the ties between
"alternative" media and big corporate media all over this country.

I really want to see a follow up article on La Bambas. I know it will
never happen. 

Octo-Editor Chad wrote the _most_ inane content free pieces I have
ever seen. He wrote "comic" pieces that looked like stuff people wrote
in junior high for the school newspaper's parody section. When they
hired him is about when I stopped reading the octopus with any
regularity.

I could just go on forever. 

-- 
Zachary C. Miller - Go We Go - http://wolfgang.groogroo.com/ - @=
IMSA 1995 - UIUC 2000 - Just Another Leftist Muppet
  Social Justice, Community, Nonviolence, Decentralisation,
  Sustainability, Feminism, Responsibility, Diversity, Democracy,
  Ecology - http://www.greens.org - http://www.votenader.org