Pittsburgh

Immaculate Heart of Mary Church
Polish Hill
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

http://steeltownanthem.com/2013/07/19/weekly-recollections/

--

A Tale About Newspapers

 Hot Off The Press

From The Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/23/california-newspaper-industry-wisdom

Conventional media wisdom posits several ways for a newspaper to commit suicide. It can drive up costs by multiplying staff and pagination. It can prioritise print over digital. It can erect a hard paywall to seal itself from the internet.

Or, if you are the Orange County Register, you can do all three. The California daily did so almost exactly a year ago, prompting astonishment and morbid curiosity. How long would it last? In a crisis-stricken industry more accustomed to death by a thousand cuts, the Register, which dates back a century, at least promised a dramatic and original demise.

But this week, as the paper prepares to celebrate the experiment's first anniversary, it appears to be thriving. "It's working," marvelled the editor, Ken Brusic. "We believe that this will work."
The paper's ambitious expansion and defiance of conventional wisdom has cheered and baffled the industry. Is it for real? Is there a magic formula to avert cutbacks and slumping circulation?...

Register staff – the newsroom has doubled to 360 in the past year – exude giddy, wary optimism that their paper has a bright future. Instead of rewriting stories they are filling multiple new sections with original reporting. "Feel the weight. This has 10 sections – and on a Tuesday. If it hit your cat, you'd kill it," said Rob Curley, deputy editor of local news.

Survival by concentrating by doing what you do the best you possibly may. That is innovative, especially in a time when most content and quality is compromised to increase profits. Look at any industry and you can see a conscious choice to reduce quality or reduce content; from Orange Juice - the 64 oz. containers now have 59 oz. - to newspapers, such as in Detroit, where the Detroit newspapers led the way into journalistic irrelevance.

And speaking of Detroit, again we see a hint of some further dynamics behind today's urban crises. Detroit stopped doing what it was best at. The question is why? There are answers at all levels, from city government all the way up to a Society which creates great inequities, thereby stirring the flows of people and capital. (I am only speaking of inequity such as establish by law and customary usage and norms, not purely economic differences in levels of economic entities.)

If we cannot succeed by doing the absolute best at what we do, we can only stave off disaster for a short time.

How long now has it been that we have not really been trying?
It's been a while.

--

A New Narrative On The Rust Belt

 Congressman Dan Kildee

Yesterday I listened to WDET as I was returning from the city where my mother and brother live. My mother I took shopping. Then I installed a DVD/VCR player for my brother; he has many VCR tapes and has not been able to view them in a long time.

I was feeling good. I think it is important for people to be able to view movies. Film is possibly the densest and most complex art form - or at least it is potentially so. My brother has numerous problems, nerve damage being one, and it is very hard for him to do many tasks.
He is also dying, but he does not seem in a hurry. We talked about his latest episode last week - I think I had a post about it when a young girl thought I was a drug dealer on my brother's street. I don't like being around death and sickness... so I've discovered this year of 2013, but it is extremely cool to help and bring joy.

So, Congressman Dan Kildee of Flint, Saginaw, and environs was being interviewed. He provided me with a more robust perspective of the changes in the old cities of the US over the half century. A main focus of WDET was on Detroit's problems, which was one of many in Mr. Kildee's.

Succinctly, things such as Globalization were partly governmental policies, supported by taxes, that actively undermined the ability of the older cities to be competitive in manufactures. Similarly, even within one country, policies rewarded flows of people and jobs to new areas, while they punished the older urban areas.

So, the standard take on Detroit that it was a result of 20 years of City misgovernment and corruption is seriously lacking in detail, for we must add in the policies and plans which undermined the ability of cities to maintain businesses, and understand that local governments were sorely handicapped in their ability to plan long-term when they were up against Big Government and Big Business seeking their own profits and benefits.

We have tended to see the Rust Belt as a natural phenomenon as well as the just rewards of liberalism.

We close our eyes to those who actively planned to destroy a way of life, either directly or indirectly.

--
--

A Tale of Two Cities: Detroit and Los Angeles

7640 Lasalle, Detroit

My alma mater, Detroit, has filed for bankruptcy.
It is where I was born in Henry Ford Hospital, and Henry Ford was once such a powerful name that Aldous Huxley used it as an equivalent for "God" in his novel Brave New World...

... and therein lies our problem: the equivalence of Money and God.

Meanwhile, on the West Coast, we look closely at Los Angeles, a city which is not filing for bankruptcy.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/07/18/197013/steve-lopez-its-a-crime-to-house.html#storylink=cpy

It's a crime to house the mentally ill this way
By STEVE LOPEZ | Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — If you routinely hear voices, hallucinate, sink into suicidal depression or suffer inescapable torment, Los Angeles has a place for you.

The county jail.

On Monday, the jail held 3,200 inmates diagnosed with a mental illness and accused of a crime. Most have not been to trial, many have waited months for their day in court, and the majority have cycled through at least once before. There's no longer enough room to house them all in segregated areas, so 1,000 mentally ill men and 300 women are housed with the general population.

Sheriff Lee Baca has said for decades that he runs the nation's largest mental hospital, but we've heard it so often that the shock has worn off. We know there's something inexcusably wrong with the system - something backward and inhumane. But we shrug and move on, and the failure of public policy persists, at great public expense, while Los Angeles County officials order up another round of studies..

Detroit cannot pay its bills, and suffers the condemnation of the world for improvidence, but Los Angeles maintains a system of caring for the mentally ill, the nature of which pre-dates the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and is truly Hogarthian in depiction, and the only people to suffer are the Sheriff and his deputies... and the inmates of the bedlam.

One is News, one is apparently just business as usual in this, our Brave New World.

The difference is attitudes founded on the Unity of the Two: God and Money.

Amen.
--