Business
Statesman Favors Wall Street Over Local News
September 21, 2008 
What a shocker to open the Daily Paper Sunday edition hoping to find something in the way of local news and getting two full pages of the Wall Street Journal instead.
No doubt it is cheaper–WSJ may even be paying to get into the Daily Paper. OR the Daily fills space at a lower price than paying the six newsroom staffers that got or will get the axe. Most of the page 2 local page was taken up with a rehash of the dude wishing to build a nuke plant in Elmore County.
Back in the “old days” it was fun to sit down at Sunday breakfast and get an expanded view of the week’s events.
Not a word on local stories like the jury verdict in the 3-week long wrongful death trial over the guy who died in the Ada jail. No mention about theft of $30,000 worth of steel tables from a Canyon jail site (the jail project itself faces a court challenge). No look at a less than forthright land exchange for inflated values by Boise City. Not a peep regarding quiet negotiations in Boise and Nampa to sell rights to an Arizona ambulance company to compete with existing county EMS services.
All those stories from a couple of fat old guys who run the BOISE GUARDIAN and CALDWELL GUARDIAN blogs in the spare time! Sources come to the GUARDIANS as the “mainstream media” these days instead of the “legacy press” which apparently lacks the ability or desire to inform citizens of what their local governments are doing–or NOT doing.
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Comments & Discussion
Comments are closed for this post.
Sep 21, 2008, 5:40 pm
Does the GUARDIAN ever sleep?
You have more REAL news here this week than any of the “legacy” outfits that sell ads. You deserve to make a buck or two for what you save us!
Sep 21, 2008, 6:49 pm
The local blat has been a useless “newspaper” ever since I got here and that was 15 years ago. In fact, it just keeps going downhill. Trivia is the name of its game. The Guardian and a little bit of BW are all that’s left.
Sep 21, 2008, 6:52 pm
Guardian,
You’re where I go for the real scoop. When I hit the Lotto and can quit my day job, I’m volunteering full time for you as an investigative reporter. Hell, I just may do it anyhow.
Clip
Sep 21, 2008, 7:09 pm
The Statesman article about the nuke dude and his plan for Elmore County elided the real interchange about Gillispie’s educational qualifications. What was really said (I was there) at the meeting in Elmore, when an Elmore woman stood up, was: She asked where did Gillispie attend college. He said ‘MIT’. She followed by asking ‘Did you graduate?’ He said ‘Yes’. This untrue claim has been nugated by research with MIT, which says he never graduated from MIT. What he did do was take a 6 week course at MIT’s Sloan Biz School, a separate entity from regular MIT, and got a certificate. A certificate for a short course is not graduating from anything.
The article also said:
‘His company’s stock has dropped from more than $120 a share to 22 cents.’
That’s wrong too. The stock never sold for $120 a share. See http://www.pinksheets.com/pink/quote/quote.jsp?symbol=AEHI#getNews for details and also how this company used to sell rice bran products before Gillispie took it over.
So IMO this was a potentially important story that got warped by what often happens at this paper: misleading reportage (and sloppy research, or both). Another reason why we need the ol’ Guardian.
Sep 21, 2008, 8:32 pm
As my posts show, I am a big supporter of local papers covering local events. That said, I was pleasantly surprised to find the WSJ coverage. The papers expertise in the field is shallow so they went to the experts. As this is the biggest threat to the country since 911 and perhaps to the economy since 1929, I was hoping for some expertise and not just opinion.
Sep 21, 2008, 9:32 pm
Now Guardian, with all your travels in your day job, surely you know how difficult it would be for the rag to have it’s finger on the local pulse of the community from Sacramento!