The New York Times's new "San Francisco Bay Area" page edition is out, and has given quite a few members of the San Francisco Chronicle both print and online reasons to gripe or just plain cuss. The reason: the almost subject-for-subject and paragraph segment-by-segment borrowing of original SF Chronicle content.
Look, I'll tell ya, this blog post is designed to be a deliberate search engine torpedo. Something's got to get the cyber attention of the NY Times execs so this kind of questionably lazy work doesn't happen again.
The problem is the first story about Oakland's new police chief Tony Batts, or Anthony W. Batts", written by the NY Times' Jesse McKinley, who's the head of the San Francisco Bureau and has been since 2006, so he's new to our area.
What Jesse did was write an obvious quasi-replication of an older San Francisco Chronicle article dated August 18th 2009 "Oakland officers' killing led to Batts job"
McKinley's article released Friday, October 15th and called "New Oakland Police Chief Inherits a Force, and a City in Turmoil" wins points from me for its attention to search engine optimization in the title, but, as SF Chronicle Executive Editor at Large Phil Bronstein points out, has words and paragraphs ordered in such away that "there was just a gnawing deja vu sensation about it".
But my question is why, with the Bay Area story line being the 20th Anniversary of The Loma Prieta Quake, would Jesse McKinley chose to write a stale story almost three months old?
If the New York Times wanted to show it was really a part of the Bay Area, isn't the best move to write about and present an event unique to this area instead of the East Coast, knee-jerk, "Let's dial up the Oakland crime story!" habit?
Well, guess what? He did write about the quake celebrations but its in an area called "San Francisco Journal" and not on the new San Francisco Bay Area page online!
(And as I'm not an offline newspaper reader, but online, if the Times' intent was for the quake story to be part of their new Bay Area coverage even online and not the "San Francisco Journal" they really missed the Internet mark.)
Forget that Oakland too sustained a lot of damage from that disaster and that there are people around - like me - who have memories that are too painful to want to recall in a blog post, that story should have been the Times Bay Area opener.
I'm so confused! There's not even a widget to tell us about the Times' new Bay Area coverage on Jesse's Loma Prieta story; it's over at the article about Oakland's Police Chief Batts!
This is driving me batty. What was the NY Times thinking? What was going through Jesse's mind? And who's Jesse McKinley anyway?
A young David Letterman look-alike
Jesse McKinley
David Letterman
McKinley looks for all the World like a young version of talk show host David Letterman, and like Letterman he was a New Yorker.
Heck, he probably knows Letterman.
Before his new job here in San Francisco, Mr. McKinley was best known for covering the New York cultural arts, specifically the New York theater scene. That's logical because according to McKinley's Linkedin profile, theater was his major at New York University. He has no real Bay Area ties such that he knows what "Tightwad Hill" is or for that matter who "Elihu Harris" is. He wasn't around for Loma Prieta and probably thinks "The Big Game" is Harvard v. Yale.
Geez,
Jesse, it's Cal v. Stanford. And if you need tips on who to root for just contact me, but here's a hint: GO BEARS!
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