In this post, I’ll review the September 11th issue of the Whitewater Register, the low-quality, poorly-written news weekly in my town of 14,296.
I read these stories so you don’t have to – doubt not my love for excellence as I wade though page after page of … something other than excellence.
Front page. Last week’s sad story on the need for traffic safety grew sadder still with the news that Michael Chaloupka, a twenty-three year old graduate of the University, died from injuries received after being stuck by a car in the city.
Everything else on the front page is mundane, and so far less sad and disturbing, by comparison. Taste of Whitewater was a fine event, marred not even by the rain (the story ran before the Friday & Saturday event).
There’s one other front page story that might have been much shorter – the renewal of the city manager’s contract. There’s nothing about the published terms of the contact that seems unusual or different from that of thousands of career city bureaucrats in cities across America.
The entire story might have been reduced to a single sentence: City manager receives salary ‘a’ for term ‘b’ with possible penalties for early voluntary departure of ‘c.’
Had the story been a single sentence, we might have been spared an inapt reference to financial penalties in the contract. Dampier speculates that “[p]erhaps it was because of Brunner’s wandering eye that the Council put in some financial penalties…”
It’s a poor choice of phrase, inapplicable in this contractual matter. Looking at other employment opportunities doesn’t mean someone has a wandering eye. Hundreds must have read that sentence and thought … Hmm, no, that’s the right expression. There’s a predictability about these poor word choices in the Register
Penalty clauses are common in many employment contracts.
What’s more interesting, to me, is what the city manager thinks about his role and responsibilities. Terms are less interesting than what someone believes about his role. In this respect, I am much more interested in what someone recently described, I think, as the “leadership and vision of Kevin.”
(That’s Kevin Brunner, not Kevin Bacon, Kevin Costner, or Kevin Kline.)
That interest in a public official’s leadership and vision will lead me to post tomorrow on the city manager’s outlook, from public statements and interviews. His views are probably not much different from the outlook of others, in similar jobs, all over the country.
Inside. There’s a section inside the paper called ‘School,’ but it only suggests how little school news there is in the paper. I am still working on a school series, and I will have it done, I am confident, before the next summer Olympics, in London, in 2012.
There are some prominent ads in the paper this week, including a full page ad for an event in Waterford, and two half-page ads for concerns in Lake Geneva.
How much value the Waterford ad will be in the Whitewater Register I cannot say, but then it’s telling that there are not more Whitewater ads in the Whitewater Register.