Good morning, Whitewater
No municipal public meetings are scheduled today.
It’s snowy, but there’s still school. There is a scheduled (but perhaps not to be held this evening) PATT meeting at Washington School.
Weather? Some have written asking why there’s no weather forecast comparison between the National Weather Service and the Farmers’ Almanac. Well, it was never about the weather, it was a way to jab at longer range planning or forecasting of complicated events. Weather’s complicated, so much so that there’s still a gap, often, between explanation and prediction. I’ll post more on what the dueling forecasts were meant to show, but it wasn’t much of a duel. The NWS was an easy winner, day after day, week after week.
Press Releases? A sharp reader writes, with a valid complaint:
I was disappointed at your posting of the Hixson DOT press release with no commentary. I was looking for your insight on it but couldn’t find it. What’s the point of putting up a press release without speaking to it?
It’s a point well-taken — when I started adding press releases, I did so because I wanted to (1) add them to the site, on occasion, but (2) emphasize that a press release should always be treated as a press release, not an ersatz news story.
(Local press – this means you! Whitewater is a world of sham news standards, more often than not. Just about every reasonable principle of journalism has been violated here, typically on the theory that there are no violations if one does not intend violations. Children across America think this way all the time; in Whitewater, it passes as an adult’s fundamental creed. For good standards, that would produce real journalism, see my post entitled Press Ethics, with standards from the Associated Press.)
More importantly, one can add post a press release — properly identified as one — and comment thereafter, in a separate, immediately-following post. That’s where I’ve not followed through on my intention.
I’ll make good tomorrow morning.
In Wisconsin history on this date, from the Wisconsin Historical Society, an historical first for Wisconsin — the oldest radio station in America:
On this date [in 1922] the call letters of experimental station 9XM in Madison were replaced by WHA. This station dates back to 1917, making it “The oldest station in the nation.” [Source: History Just Ahead: A Guide to Wisconsin’s Historical Markers, edited by Sarah Davis McBride]
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