George Rebane

(This appeared on NC Media Watch on 7 April 2006)

If I had my druthers, I’d like western Nevada County to grow into what a lot of folks call a ‘balanced community’.  We all have differences in what we consider balanced, my own vision is something close to Simi Valley in Ventura County, a town Jo Ann and I helped to become a model city in the seventies with residential areas, parks, shopping, businesses, and populated by people of all colors living in marbled neighborhoods.  From recent visits there we are happy to report that growth has been kinder to it than many California towns with a favored youth.  But residing in the armpit of the San Fernando Valley ten minutes away, its future now looks uncertain.

Our Jeff Ackerman recently called for such growth in his 21mar06 editorial which, because of an unfortunate choice of a word or two, left many people seeing him as yet another social engineering import to these forests and hills.  My own consternation to his editorial was blogged in ‘Planned Color In My Back Yard?’ on NC Media Watch. Jeff responded to the piece with a kind email and followed up with his clarifying 28mar06 editorial that, to my mind, tilted The Union toward a more level political stance.

The rest of this piece can be read here.

George Rebane

(This first appeared on The Union’s website December 2005.)

Before we again go all over the map on affordable housing and rent control — or in more obtuse blather, “rent stabilization” — perhaps we should first do something simple and straightforward when renting in mobile home parks. These renters always seem to be surprised when they are told about rent increases. A letter at the get-go outlining the blunt truth about the tenant-landlord relationship they are getting into may help in avoiding such fuss. I offer a draft of such a letter at NC Media Watch; it might be worth a try.

Avoiding such surprised outrages by tenants of existing rental facilities is an issue different from the ongoing Nevada County affordable housing debate. To the extent we can keep these separated, we may be able to make progress on the advisability of rent control and the supply of affordable housing. And finally, wouldn’t it be a gas if the same people who propose “rent stabilization” would also include “cost stabilization” as part of their deep thinking?

George Rebane

Former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw recently told a Washington audience that by 2018 the Washington Post (and presumably other newspapers) would survive only in their online editions. Subscribers are dropping the pulp versions of the newspaper at record rates and many are abandoning professional journalists’ versions of the news altogether. Newspapers are seeking to divert their readers’ attention to this development by switching from publishing the traditional circulation figures to giving out something called “reach”. This new circulation metric is supposed to be the sum of the old print circulation plus the number of daily unique visitors to the newspaper’s website. It is not yet clear that the advertisers will accept this apples and oranges comparison because the online perusal experience is markedly different from that of the traditional page turning session.  In any event, if this prognostication holds for the nation’s flagship newspapers, what can we surmise will be the fate of the more marginally budgeted and staffed small town news outlets like our own Union?