Author Archives: Bill Frederick

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Covering the news media

Writing about the news media was one of my beats when I worked for a business newspaper in Tampa. It was fun and an interesting coverage area, but even in the mid-1990s the print business was in decline. That made for some uncomfortable stories, and also for some uncomfortable news business executives. They didn’t like it when reporters would write negative stories about them. I could always count on a ringing telephone the day after writing a story about a newspaper that was less than glowing. This story was about the Tampa TRIBUNE, a newspaper that has been in second place to the St. Petersburg TIMES (now the Tampa Bay TIMES) over on the other side of Tampa Bay. The Tribune is still hanging on, but its future is cloudy.

Arthur Frederick
Staff Writer

A team of Pennsylvania-based consultants has been hired to study the nooks and crannies of the Tampa Tribune, and is searching out ways to cut costs and boost efficiency.

Publisher Jack Butcher said the move was simply a matter of the newspaper business trying to catch up with other industries.

“The word that comes to mind is `archaic.’ Every other industry did this eight or 10 years ago,” Butcher said. “We are trying to make our company more productive and more customer-friendly — what just about any company in America has to do to survive.”

But to some Tribune news staffers, the study is little more than a cover for the further elimination of jobs which has been rumored at the paper for some time.

Tribune managers won’t discount the possibility of layoffs. But they say the study is really aimed at finding more efficient processes which will improve news reporting, and make the paper stronger and more competitive.

“This is an ongoing process that probably will take at least six or seven more months,” said Michael Kilgore, the Tribune’s promotion director and chief spokesman. “We aren’t looking at money to be saved or people to be employed. We’re looking at processes. We’ve told our employees that in some departments we might need fewer people, and in others we might need more.”

Continue reading →

Trade shows: Writing for industry gatherings

On several occasions I’ve been hired to attend and write about trade show gatherings. In this example, I was hired by the annual Fuel Cell Seminar & Exposition, which met at Disney World near Orlando, Fla. in 2011. In this case, the group was looking for someone to do interviews and attend sessions, and then turn out  stories for an industry newsletter. These assignments can be fun, and sometimes they are good revenue generators. This example is one of the newsletter stories.

Industry leaders optimistic about fuel cell industry’s future

In spite of the sluggish economy and reductions in financial support by the federal government, a number of fuel cell industry leaders we spoke to were surprisingly upbeat about the future.

During the 2011 Fuel Cell Seminar & Exposition at Disney World in Orlando, Fla., we asked a number of attendees one simple question: Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of the industry? Here is what they had to say:

MORRY MARKOWITZ, Executive Director, Fuel Cell and Hydrogen Energy Association: “I am very optimistic about the future. My background, both in the electric utility industry and the automotive industry,  has given me the foundation to understand the past, present and future of this industry, and I think the future is very bright.

“On the mobile side, the fuel cell vehicle is the only zero-emission vehicle that is on the horizon that will be able to exactly replicate the current driver’s needs in driving an automobile by having the range that it needs of 300-400 miles per tankful, being able to refuel in two-to-five minutes, and to be able to do that hopefully in multiple places.

“On the stationary side, the simplicity and reliability of fuel cell technology will provide a bridge for our current system of centralized generation of transmission lines having to go through vast areas and distribution lines that are increasingly vulnerable to weather  and even some future activities, both by nature and manmade.

“The idea of the simplicity and availability of fuel cells is an appropriate bridge for those technologies.”

SAM LOGAN, chief executive officer, LOGAN Energy Corp., Roswell, Ga.: “In the shorter term, the industry is going to be bucking the headwinds of the really difficult economy.  And coupled with that is the diminished ability of the government to provide the kinds of appropriated funds for product improvements, manufacturing improvement and deployments. Continue reading →

News coverage: writing about the environment

Since I spent so much time working as a journalist in Maine, it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that writing about the environment was an almost-daily assignment. A lot of Maine people consider themselves to be environmentalists, and newspaper editors knew that and loved to get environmental stories from the wire services. Back in the 70s, power generating projects tended to be huge. In Maine, there were two big proposed power generating projects — the Passamaquoddy project, which was to generate power from ebbing and flowing tides; and the Dickey-Lincoln Hydroelectric project, two dams that would have flooded thousands of acres of forest land in northern Maine. I wrote scores of stories about both, mostly Dickey-Lincoln. Neither project was ever built.

By ARTHUR FREDERICK

AUGUSTA, Maine (UPI) – The head of the Maine Natural Resources Council told the legislative Committee on Energy Wednesday that the proposed Dickey Lincoln Hydroelectric Project could result in more than 30,000 acres of exposed mudflats during several weeks of the year.

Clifford Goodall said the hydroelectric project is flawed because the area would not have enough water to operate efficiently.

The Dickey Lincoln dam would create a long, slender lake instead of a lake concentrated in one area, and dropping the level of the lake to make room for spring runoff waters would result in 33,600 acres of exposed mudflats.

“Hydroelectric projects require water, and there just isn’t that much water up there,” Goodall said. “Passamaquoddy has the water. Dickey Lincoln has practically none.”

“If you’re going to dam up all this water in the spring, you have about a 10-month span in which you are going to let it out,” he said.

Continue reading →

Offbeat stories: Halloween rent-a-cats

Spending 12 years writing for United Press International certainly honed my interest in finding offbeat and unusual stories, especially if they meshed somehow with a particular holiday or news event. As Halloween approached in the early 90s, I decided to call the local Humane Society to see if there were any black cat-related things going on. Sure enough, I found this story –people calling the Humane Society to see if they could rent black cats for their Halloween parties.

Pet adoptions have been a little slow at the Humane Society of North Pinellas, but the phone has been ringing off the hook with calls from people who want to rent cats for Halloween parties.

But even though the Humane Society has about 50 cats, none of them are for rent, not now and not ever, according to Rick Chaboudy, the Humane Society’s director.

“I think people are getting into more elaborate Halloween parties and they try to think of everything,” Chaboudy said. “We try to explain we don’t do things like that – it would be a tremendous amount of stress on the cat, plus we don’t want to give the impression we approve of activities like that.

“We are here to find permanent homes for our cats, not to rent them out as decorations.”

For some cats, particularly black ones, the season can be dangerous.

Connie Goy suspects that someone tried to skin her black cat, Calvin, alive as a gruesome Halloween prank.

When Mrs. Goy returned from the grocery store Thursday afternoon, she found Calvin lying in a pool of blood in the garage. Her other cat, Hobbes, was at his side, meowing and tapping Calvin, who was still alive, with his paw.

“Hobbes was . . . meowing real loud like, `He’s hurt. Can you do something?’ ” said Mrs. Goy, 30. “I started crying.”

One of Calvin’s hind legs had a precise cut, 1 inch long, according to the veterinarian, Dr. Gursaear Singh. It had severed an artery in his right leg. Mrs. Goy and her husband, David, rushed Calvin to All Pet Care Hospital & Animal Inn where he was recovering Friday.

The cut, Mrs. Goy said, was too exact for Calvin to have injured himself.

“About this time of year you never know. It’s just sad that there are people that would do such a thing,” Mrs. Goy said. “It makes me sick.”

The interest in using the Humane Society as a sort of Rent-A-Cat agency is a fairly new twist, Chaboudy said. Calls inquiring about renting cats have been steadily increasing during the past few Octobers. About a half-dozen such calls have come into the Humane Society during the past week, he said.

“It has to be black, and they seem to think if they call early enough they can reserve one,” he said. “And it’s funny – some people feel a little foolish after we turn them down, but others act put out that we won’t accommodate them. They say things like, `Well, we aren’t going to hurt it’ or `We’ll bring it back afterwards’ – like we’re wrong in not letting this happen.”

Even if the Humane Society did rent cats, Halloween party-givers probably would be a little disappointed at the present selection. Chaboudy said of the 50 or so cats, none of them are completely black.

“We do have a few black-and-white cats, but that’s as close as they come,” he said. “If we did have black cats right now, we might not put them out for adoption until Halloween was over.”

And as for Calvin, whether his injuries are Halloween-related or not, Mrs. Goy said, he’ll spend the rest of his days indoors.

“He’s going to be a house cat from now on.”

 

POLITICAL CAMPAIGNS: Position papers

I’ve worked in a number of political campaigns over the years, from U.S. Senate campaigns down to the local level. Usually, I’ve served as communications advisor — press secretary, writer, positions guy. This is a typical position paper, prepared for a candidate for Pinellas County sheriff. In this case, I prepared a number of position papers on different subjects and we posted them on the campaign web site. I like to think that I’m pretty good at taking a complex political subject and presenting it in easy-to-understand language — that’s really the definition of journalism.

Grow houses versus pill mills

Shrinking budgets demand better decision-making within the Sheriff’s Office, as well as throughout county government and, to be sure, throughout government at all levels.

When it comes to enforcing our drug laws, a lack of good judgment leads to policies that fail to differentiate between big problems and small ones. And, this lack of good judgment illustrates just how the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office has been mismanaged.

Pinellas County has the unpleasant distinction of leading the state in opiate-related deaths. While it should be obvious that pill-related law enforcement tactics should top the priority list, the PCSO has spent huge amounts of money on the surveillance of a hydroponics shop in Largo. (Hydroponics refers to the growing of plants in nutrient-rich water, without soil.)

It is believed that hydroponics shops are favored by people who operate “grow houses” – usually residential homes where large quantities of marijuana are grown.

The PCSO mounted a surveillance camera on a pole outside the Largo shop, then noted the license plate numbers of the cars that were parked there. Deputies would then go to the home addresses of the car owners. Sometimes they would take search warrants with them, and sometimes they would simply ask for permission to search the homes. Some of those search warrants have been found to have been obtained with manufactured evidence.

As a result of these shoddy law enforcement practices, a number of arrests made during these grow house investigations are likely to be thrown out by the courts.

While no one is denying that grow house operators are breaking the law, such operations are not threatening to public safety. The same cannot be said for so-called “pill mills,” which distribute oxycodone and other extremely dangerous prescription drugs.

Applying limited law enforcement resources to grow house investigations while pill mills are operating is a good example of the mismanagement we see at the PCSO on a daily basis.