Give Goc. Crist credit: He did the right thing for Fla. state workers

Give the man a break; he did the right thing and that’s what the governor is supposed to do.

Gov. Charlie Crist vetoed a 2 percent pay cut for state employees making more than $45,000 per year. Almost immediately, our message boards and others in the digital space started accusing him of “only” doing it for political reasons.

No. 1: Who cares?

No. 2: Why are we constantly surprised when our politicians do things for political reasons?

No. 3: Who cares?

Let me tell you something about Charlie Crist and almost every other person I know who holds public office. Most really want to do the right thing. They view it as public service and many, if not most, could be making a lot more money doing other things.

And many, if not most, do want to win their next election.

For some it seems almost addictive, needing to grab the next shiny penny rolling across their path.

Politicians do things for political reasons.

Doctors do things for medical reason.

Teachers do things for educational reasons.

These things should not surprise us, should not be viewed as a negative or a positive characteristic. They just are.

My own reaction to the news that the governor acted to keep at least $900 in state workers’ families budget was the same as one of my Facebook friends, who wrote:

“On behalf of locally owned businesses and families of state workers everywhere: Yippeeeeeeeee! Let's find smart ways to heal this economy.”

The other argument was expressed by this poster on Tallahassee.com:

“So what I get from the gist of this story is that Crist was all about cutting spending and keeping taxes low ... before he decided to run for Senate. Now he sees the benefit (to him) of buying votes with spending.”

I talked to the governor not too long ago at an editorial-board meeting at the Tallahassee Democrat, well before he announced his decision to run for the U.S. Senate seat that becomes vacant in 2010. My gut feeling at the time was that he had already decided to run for the Senate but had not yet decided what to do with the Legislature’s cut of state workers’ pay.

I asked him the same question many others had been asking: Why would it be fair to take money from state workers by cutting their pay instead of taking money from others in the form of taxes or fees?

He said then that didn’t necessarily seem fair. But he was going to have to look at the whole picture.

The argument that he vetoed the state workers’ pay cut for political reasons is phony on its face anyway.

You really think the Senate election is going to come down to this? That state workers will vote in unison – as a single block – and that there are enough state workers to turn the tide? This is an election for the U.S. Senate, not Tallahassee city commission, where state workers are concentrated in large enough numbers to make a difference.

My view of this is that the governor didn’t need the money to make the budget work and did the right thing. Leave it at that and be happy the money is available to the Tallahassee area’s economy.

But even if I’m wrong about motivation, as I said: who cares?

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New micro site features violent-crime database

A new partnership between the Tallahassee Democrat and the U.S. Marshals Service can help keep you better informed about crime in our communities and maybe help take a criminal off the street.

The U.S. Marshals Service is providing photographs and information to feed into a newly created database that helps viewers to become better informed about the most-wanted suspected violent criminals in our region.

The information is gathered as part of the Florida Regional Fugitive Task Force, spearheaded by the service, which also is comprised of local law-enforcement officers and the State Attorney's Office, which is tasked with capturing violent felons wanted in our communities.

“We welcome the public's help in tracking down these violent felons and bringing them to justice to make our streets safer, and this Web site will accomplish this goal,” said Frank Chiumento, assistant chief of the U.S. Marshals Northern District of Florida in a story in the Democrat today.

With the new database, we are launching a micro site: Tallahassee.com/crime. This site, which will also be accessible from the front of Tallahassee.com, will include our galleries of people booked into the Leon County Jail on felony charges, gathered in partnership with the Leon County Sheriff’s Office; news articles on crimes; reports on others wanted by local law-enforcement agencies from Big Bend Crime Stoppers; videos and other information on crime; and information on how to report crime and criminal suspects to authorities.

We continue to work with other local and regional law-enforcement agencies to get their information as part of this comprehensive site.

Over time, we plan to add additional databases on criminal activities, crime statistics and analysis of what is happening across our region. We’ll also add links to forums on Tallahassee.com to allow the public to network and talk about crime in their own neighborhoods and communities.

Meanwhile, reporters and editors from the Democrat and Tallahassee.com have been meeting for months with experts and others in law enforcement, education, social services, the clergy and community centers to discuss how we can better help the community address violence in our region.

Our goal is to serve as a better conduit of information and to engage the community in conversation about violence and violent crime. We’re calling the project “Let’s Talk About It.”

More on this later, but if you are interested in getting involved, we are planning a teen and adult summit on crime along with several partner organizations, including the Lawrence-Gregory Community Center for June 13. So save the date now if you are interested in joining in the conversation or just listening to what young folks and experts have to say about crime in our community.

For more information about the summit, contact Local Desk Editor Rebeccah Cantley at (850) 599-2391 or rcantley@tallahassee.com.

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We cry, we hug and sometimes bring teddy bears

I do not know – and won’t guess at – the exact cause of the fire that killed Lisa McCarty, 24, and two of her children last week in Monticello. Authorities say the fire in the older home started in the electrical service.

Their graveside services are at 11 a.m. today at Concord Family Cemetery in Havana. Following the service, there will be a celebration of their lives at Old Bainbridge Park on Old Bainbridge Road in Tallahassee.

Lisa’s father, Kent Phillips, called the newspaper last week, saying he wanted to talk about the fire and his son-in-law, Mark McCarty, who dived through a window into the blazing fire to try to rescue his family. Mark survived and saved a son, Ashton, 4.

I asked Local Desk Editor Rebeccah Cantley to call Mr. Phillips and set up an interview for a reporter. Facing a tough schedule for the weekend, with seven graduation ceremonies and the Legislature somewhere in the still-wrapping-up stages, Cantley assigned the story to herself.

I knew there were other reasons, too. Just a couple days after the tragic fire, this would be a tough interview and hard story to write. After an initial telephone conversation with Mr. Phillips, she set up an interview for Saturday.

By the time our readers see our stories, they are ink on paper or different shades of digital lights. They read between the lines, seek hidden meanings or infer motive from every word. Although such assignment of ulterior motivations is nearly always way off base, I can live with that. What’s worse, especially on stories such as this one, is the belief we are indifferent.

Cantley was not indifferent. I don’t know how anyone could have been.

Before heading to Monticello for the interview, she picked up a card for the family and a teddy bear for Ashton.

We do our best to be fair in how we gather and report the news.

We do our best to be true to the story, not to force the facts to tell our vision of the reality.

We do our best to be balanced in presenting all sides.

But we can’t promise indifference, and when it comes to trying to portray a story like this one, we can’t promise objectivity.

I cried when editing Rebeccah’s story on this family. I had to do it in stages. Focus my attention in the first read through on the storytelling. Focus next on spelling and grammar. I had to keep going back and checking my work, even up until the story was physically on the page.

I want reporters and editors who care. I don’t want indifference. I want them to feel our sources' passion and emotions, and I want their writing to reflect that.

I had my ethics challenged by a reader because I accepted a hug from Margie Weiss and spent time talking with her. Weiss is the mother of Rachel Hoffman, the confidential informant who was brutally murdered a year ago.

Would I extend the same to the two men accused in her shooting? He asked.

An interview, yes. A hug, no. If it makes me unethical to accept a hug from a woman whose daughter was murdered, whatever you think of the woman or her daughter, so be it. Reporters and editors were people before they became journalists, and journalists who forget that aren’t worth a dime.

I remember being young and living in my hometown, having gotten my first full-time reporting job working at a newspaper that had published my high-school graduation picture on an inside page. My wife and I bought an old house across from the saw mill that had once produced the boards that built our place. We had two little ones then, more on the way, and we had bought the house as a fixer-upper when my weekly salary finally topped $250.

We worried constantly about the combination of the aging wood and out-of-date wiring, and we upgraded as we could – both the wood and the wiring – before moving to another house in a city far away.

I cried reading Cantley’s story as a father and husband, wondering if I would have had the strength and courage to dive through a window into that burning house.

There but for the grace of God, I thought.

No, I want journalists who can accept a hug from a still-grieving mother, who can cry and who bring teddy bears to 4-year-ol

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d little boys who survive such a hell.

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60 very good reasons our future is bright

New advertisements appeared in the Tallahassee Democrat this week touting our numbers for April on Tallahassee.com:

12,057,606 million page views, up from 7,843,192 million a year earlier.

617,672 unique visitors, up from 523,925 a year earlier.

23,159,390 total usage minutes, up from 16,705,808.

More people viewing more pages and staying online longer.

Those numbers not only make Tallahassee.com by far the largest local news Web site in the region, it ranks among the best for a market our size in the nation.

On Monday, 48,552 unique computer addresses accessed Tallahassee.com, viewing 525,998 pages. And more than 80 percent of those readers came from Florida, Georgia and Alabama, in that order, most overwhelmingly from the greater Big Bend.

Sure, we draw some from outside the market, but that’s the nature of being in the capital city with two major universities. Even those who don’t live here have strong local connections.

Those numbers are real close to the circulation of the print edition of the Tallahassee Democrat, which, yes, has seen some relatively minor slippage in circulation sales with the bad economy this year. But for the year ending in September 2008, our circulation, as reported by the Audit Bureau of Circulation, was actually up for the weekday newspaper.

How many daily newspapers can say that?

This is to say we’re here and we’re still working hard to be your best source of local journalism and information. More newspapers need to start telling their success stories and quit dwelling on the negative.

Our readers are tough to please and that’s exactly how we like it. They get on us when an out-of-town newspaper eight times our size “beats” us with a story or one of the drive-by, drop-in broadcast stations posts something a couple minutes before we do.

But overall, day-in and day-out, we are your best source for local news.

I’ll tell you why: The journalists and other professionals who work hard every day to bring you the best in local coverage in the Big Bend.

Let’s start with state government: Bill Cotterell, Jim Ash, Paul Flemming and Stephen Price comprise one of the largest and most experienced news teams covering the Capitol and state government.

Cotterell, Flemming, Mary Ann Lindley, Mark Hohmeister, Meredith Clark and Gerald Ensley provide a strong and diverse group of opinion writers with deep insights into the issues that matter to our region.

Our local news team with Rebeccah Cantley, Byron Dobson, Jeff Burlew, Jennifer Portman, Dave Hodges, Angie Taylor, Doug Blackburn, TaMaryn Waters, Will Brown, Amanda Nalley, Iricka Berlinger and Matt Gilmour has experience and broad knowledge of the community.

Our features and entertainment staff give the newspaper personality that is uniquely Tallahassee, people like Mark Hinson, Katie Schardl, Kathleen Laufenberg and Sharon Rauch.

Along with our sports staff and photographers, these are the names you know: Jim Lamar, Steve Ellis, St. Clair Murraine, Corey Clark, Jeremy DeLuca, David Saez, Aimee Sachs, Glenn Beil, Mike Ewen and Phil Sears.

Our copy editors, obituary clerks, news assistants, systems, digital and data desk teams are the names you don’t know as well, except maybe our Calendar Girl, Lyssa Oberkreser, who is something of a celebrity in the community.

Just so that you do know, here’s some of their names, too: Africa Price, Soni McKenzie, Julia Thompson, Bjorn Morton, Michael Baggett, Susan Beason, Joni Branch, Stephanie Calkins, Joe Chaves, Patrick Ennis, Debra Galloway, Martha Gruender, Chris Harris, Forrest Hyden, Susan Ledford, Megan Lewis, Casey Moore, Serena Moyle, Jane Parrish, Lori Roberts, Mike Stella, Helen Schwarz and Holly Taylor.

Even that does not include everyone, such as part-timers, interns and other support staff, plus freelancers and other contributors.

I would put our team in every department up against any news team in the capital or similar-sized community in the state. They are talented and care deeply about the communities we cover.

I’ll tell you this much: Those folks represent more than 60 good reasons that our numbers are strong and growing and our future is still bright.

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Hoffman's parents have special strength

The first time I met Margie Weiss was just a few weeks ago. We flipped through her family’s photographs and talked about her daughter’s life.

Eventually, and then only ever so briefly, we spoke of her daughter’s death.

This week marks the first anniversary of Rachel Hoffman’s brutal killing and the possible signing by Gov. Crist into state law a bill intended to provide some protections to future confidential informants.

Hoffman, of course, was killed while working with the Tallahassee Police Department during a drug sting. Two men, Deneilo Bradshaw and Andrea Green, have been charged in her death and await trial.

Weiss was in Tallahassee that day we met to fight for the legislation that now carries her daughter’s name: Rachel’s Law.

The first thing she said to me was: “Would you accept a hug?”

I had seen lots of photographs of Hoffman before. Although we had never met and never spoken to each other before, I felt as though Weiss and I had. I’ve never met or spoken to Rachel’s father, Irv, but have watched both fight tirelessly for the new law to protect other confidential informants, other people’s children.

I simply don’t know where that strength comes from.

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