from the Lincoln Journal Star

There are a good number of ways in which the San Diego Union-Tribune is following national newspaper trends, including their latest buyout program, which Don Bauder at The Reader reported on yesterday.

But just like last year’s buyouts, there is one significant way in which the U-T is defying national newspaper trends — in times of budget cutting, they are protecting the editorial cartoonist position rather than cutting it. Today’s Voice of San Diego story on the buyouts explained the plan “…excluded a number of newsroom positions from buyouts, including … the editorial cartoonist.”

“They have long appreciated the power of the editorial cartoon here,” Union-Tribune cartoonist Steve Breen told me. “I’ve always loved working for the UT and I’ll stay as long as they’ll have me.”

from the Lincoln Journal Star’s Thursday letters to the editor:

Toon attacks freedom

After seeing the Aug. 20 editorial cartoon by Neal Obermeyer on the primary seat-belt law proposal, I think he should have been sent to the Summer Olympic Games on a one-way ticket. They understand his type of non-freedom thinking style over there. Both sides would have benefited from this action.

Clarence Olberding, Lincoln

from the San Diego Reader

from the Omaha Reader

• As you may have guessed from the image at the right, nealo.com is now optimized for the iPhone and iPod touch.

Users will still have the option of switching back to the standard Safari view if they so choose, but otherwise iPhone and iPod touch users will automatically be greeted by a portable-browser friendly interface that still allows for all the reading, commenting and searching functions that regular full-size browsing visitors enjoy.

As an iPhone user, there were selfish motivations for installing this. It got kind of annoying zooming and panning to read everything, but this update definitely eases the experience.

• Speaking of comments, commenters here may notice the option to reply directly to existing comments, so that replies will appear nested beneath their parent comment (sort of message board style).

Previously, all the comments just piled on sequentially and it got kind of hard to follow who was talking to whom. No longer.

• Finally, just another reminder to visit the nealo.com page on facebook, and become a fan if you aren’t already. I’m looking at you, Mike Honcho.

from the Lincoln Journal Star

(for the record, I did submit ideas about the proposed lowered drinking age and the mayor’s efforts to get the city council to intervene in the Lancaster County Agricultural Society’s expansion plans, I swear.)

I want to draw visitors’ attention to two new additions to the links at right — the OB Rag blog and SanDiegoish.com.

The OB Rag is the third incarnation of what was originally an actual newspaper in the ’70s. It was “…initiated to ply the San Diego scene with news and commentary from a distinctively progressive and grassroots perspective, and to provide a forum for those views.” There’s a lot of focus on national / international politics, but local news and commentary makes its way in there too.

SanDiegoish.com is “…a San Diego blog about interesting things happening in and around town. That means San Diego: arts, Chargers, events, fashion, music, news, Padres, people, places and more.”

Several of the SD blogs I used to read have kind of died away, so I’m always looking for more. Send me an email or post a comment if you know of something worth reading that I’m leaving out.

Since I wasn’t contacted for the Journal Star’s recent story about the error in one of my cartoons, I’ll give my comment here.

Early last month, the Journal Star ran a story in which city councilmember Jon Camp was being very tough on WRK, a development team that has a lot of projects in Lincoln and wants to start more. Camp suggested WRK was failing to deliver what they promised to the city. According to the story, Camp said WRK promised 43 new jobs at their Sawmill Building project, “…but by his count, it only created three; he said most of the jobs just relocated from other Lincoln sites.”

A few weeks later, Deena Winter’s weekly City Hall column included a piece on how nobody knew where that claim came from.

Problem is, Urban Development officials don’t know where Camp got that promise, or his figures; the only figure relating to jobs in the city’s redevelopment agreement with WRK was a projection that the Sawmill Building could eventually house 85 employees.

The Journal Star asked Camp to provide documentation of his claim WRK promised 48 new jobs, but he was unable to do so.

The story later told how Camp criticized WRK’s plans to build a hotel in the Haymarket, which he had tried to do “a year or two ago.”

Using figures that he couldn’t back up in order to make a competing developer look bad was something that caught my eye, and I worked that into a cartoon.

Well later in July, Camp found the document from which he had taken WRK’s claim. Deena Winter reported on that again in her City Hall column.

In response, on July 22 Camp provided documentation to support his contention — a document WRK’s attorney, Kent Seacrest, handed to council members during a March council meeting.

The document was drafted by WRK after the council asked for tax revenue and job projections.

The document does indicate 48 jobs could be created by the Sawmill project, although Camp wrote on the document that Seacrest indicated “half or more” of those were existing jobs.

So I was completely wrong and off-base when I said Camp “…fabricated the numbers he used…” and for that, I most definitely apologize and retract the accusation that Camp fabricated those numbers.

As Winter’s column pointed out, WRK promised 48 jobs at the Sawmill project, approximately half of which would be new. Meanwhile, the Sawmill building now houses approximately 100 employees, 36 of which are new positions. Camp said there were three.

Like I said, I was absolutely in the wrong to claim Camp “fabricated” the numbers. What I should have said is that Camp “completely misrepresented the situation by exponentially understating the number of jobs created in order to make it appear as if WRK failed to live up to promises, when in fact WRK had greatly exceeded those promises.”

I am very embarrassed for the mistake and I hope this helps clarify the situation.

from the San Diego Reader