Category Archives: Uncategorized

August’s slow news days are over, and news is popping off around the globe. Three big stories this week are worth careful reading. Oh, you don’t want to wade through pages and pages of links and analysis? Fine — I’ve done that, and have links to a bare minimum of articles with the inside stories of the assassination and aftermath in Libya, the Chicago teachers’ strike, and taxes in Minnesota. Continue reading →

Homicide Watch tracks every homicide in Washington, posting news reports and court records and hearing dates and verdicts and sentences. Its motto: “Mark every death. Remember every victim. Follow every case.” Continue reading →

The Romney-Ryan campaign paid good money ($120,000 per day) for the Twitter hashtag #areyoubetteroff. Then they waited for the “no” answers to roll in. And waited. And waited. Continue reading →

The Chicago battle between the teachers union and the city/school district is about the “reform agenda,” not about salaries and benefits. That agenda focuses on standardized tests — to test students, to judge schools, to evaluate teachers. If students fail, they don’t move from one grade to the next, or don’t graduate. If schools fail, they are closed, or restructured (with principal and teachers fired), or privatized and turned over to charter schools to run. Teachers are evaluated on how their students perform, though study after study shows that the numbers don’t provide consistent or accurate evaluations. Continue reading →

HuffPost may feature a Kim Kardashian cleavage article (with photos! and poll!), but right here in the Twin Cities, we’ve got plenty of our own headline click bait. There’s the 17-year-old arrested after taking a naked stroll in Minnetonka, a large snapping turtle on a suburban road, a car vandalized with a cucumber, and, getting down and dirty, cops reportedly found “crack in a Richfield man’s ‘crack.'” All local headlines — and great click bait — right here in the Twin Cities metro area. 

This post was first published in Twin Cities Daily Planet

As a news junkie, I scan lots of news sources every day, and I see some strange headlines, including local “naked man” stories. (The latter don’t seem seasonal — my favorite dates back to February: Naked Man In High Heels Flees Police Near Minnehaha Creek.)

As one journalist tweeted shortly after that February story, “naked” in the headline is a sure way to get readers to click on the story. Stories about dogs, cats and other animals usually generate lots of reader clicks, too.

Sadly, the Daily Planet lags far behind in the naked sweepstakes. A Google search today showed only one TCDP listing for “naked” in the past month, and that wasn’t even in a headline. In contrast, the Star Tribune had at least half a dozen headlines including the word, and more than 50 Google listings for the past month.

The snapping turtle was also a Star Tribune headline — at least on my Kindle version of the newspaper. Turned out to be a one-liner, presumably copied from a July 29 police report, and “updated September 4, 2012 – 9:18 p.m.” It’s not clear what the update was, but then it was never clear what made up the news in this “article.”

Local Patch sites do a great job on headlines (including the crack and cucumber stories), though the stories often have no more substance than the Strib’s turtle report.

Our reader numbers keep growing every month, but I’d like to see them grow even faster. Maybe I should work harder at headline writing. Or maybe we should run more police blotter stories about naked men and snapping turtles — or Kim Kardashian’s cleavage.

Photo by GSankary, used under Creative Commons License 

If politics runs in my blood, it’s because of my father, Howard L. Turck.  He was the DFL County Chairman in Meeker County. The Farmers Union president. A member of the REA county board of directors, and probably chaired that, too, for a while. (For you youngsters, that’s the Rural Electrification Association, a federally-supported consumer cooperative that brought electricity to farms back in the 1930s and 1940s, when the electric companies wouldn’t do it because it wasn’t profitable enough.) County board of directors and chair of the board for “the Co-op,” back before it was renamed Cenex. Continue reading →

Tom Chapin’s song is a gentle lament for the abandonment of so many things that are “not on the test.” September’s new year hope is in the air tonight, despite over-testing and teacher-bashing. Continue reading →

Back in the eighties, when we traveled back and forth to Central America and protested the various U.S. involvements in wars there, we heard noises outside the house. Small noises in the night. And clicking noises on phones. Continue reading →

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Eight Jewish teens beat a 17-year-old Arab boy almost to death in Jerusalem’s Zion Square on August 16.  This week, reports the New York Times, “The education minister instructed all junior high and high schools to conduct a lesson on the episode” as the new school year began. The educational response to the hate crime won’t “solve the problem” but it seems like one right response. What would a similar, pro-active response to racism — or bullying or homophobia — look like here?  Continue reading →