News, Notes, and Notions for 7APR24

Why I write for a local newspaper as demonstrated by a week where the sky fell down locally, and things worth watching, reading, and listening to.

The Fayette Tribune at the entrance to Heart of Gold Diner, Oak Hill, WV.

One thing about my writing and media career is since I fell into it without meaning to, I missed a few steps most published writers and commentators take. Having mostly put words out online, and those words mostly dealing with broader, national issues, I didn’t really do the “work my way up" so much as jumped in the middle and learned to swim. So, I made a conscious effort to try and write more locally, and much more about my beloved West Virginia.

I’ve been very grateful to write for The Fayette Tribune, the local paper in Fayette County, WV and a subsidiary paper of The Register-Herald and CNHI newspapers. I won’t bore you with the current state of affairs for local newspapers, but anyone who has paid a lick of attention in the modern media age knows that local media - especially print media - has struggled to stay relevant in a digital world.

But local news is important. Folks will, rightly, point out that print newspapers are archaic. But they still serve a role, and the print edition, while lessening, is part of a healthy paper that evolves into digital, media, and various other things to keep serving the communities. Communities that otherwise get little news coverage unless something big happens that brings outside interest.

Like a rare EF2 tornado ripping through Hico, WV, one of 8 verified tornados that wreaked havoc across West Virginia this past Tuesday.

I grew up going to church in Hico, drove the section of US Route 60 that was hit untold times, and know most of the families affected. Driving through the area and seeing sights destroyed that have been frozen in time in my memories was brutal. But nothing compared to the folks who lost homes.

This, this is why having in place local news is so important. While tiny Hico - which is an intersection and homes, there is no “town” at all - suddenly appeared on all the news with the pictures of destruction, it was our local paper who knew which house to go to, who to talk to, how to tell the story of friends and neighbors in their own backyard. The working knowledge of the area from having covered it allowed Steve Keenan to know how to tell the story of Kay Persinger being thrown from a garage that came apart around her but somehow only suffering injuries.

“I was in the garage because I don’t smoke in the house,” Persinger said by phone Wednesday afternoon. “I heard it start to rain ... then the wind really started blowing.”

In short order, she saw a garage door get “ripped out” and go flying. For protection, she wedged herself between a refrigerator and freezer and another door.

The garage roof eventually blew off, and tools inside the garage scattered. “I just knew it (the roof) was going, but me and the door went last,” she recalled.

At the time, she had a sense of foreboding that the precarious situation wasn’t going to end well for her. “I knew I was going to die, but I didn’t,” Persinger said, adding that she still can’t explain exactly how she survived.

While the garage was demolished (and the freezer wound up in a neighbor’s yard), Persinger said she was thrown “not very far” and wound up suffering fractures in two toes, as well as a banged-up knee. “All I can think of is how grateful I am,” she said.

While Persinger was undergoing her travails in the garage, her daughter and a sister-in-law and their children successfully sought refuge in a bathroom in the house, although windows were blown out and the roof was partially damaged. Persinger said it was “very fortunate” they weren’t injured.

That is the difference in local news: stats on casualties and pictures of destruction make the rounds and bring outside attention. The local newspaper folks, who already do it mostly as a labor of love and calling, put names and faces to people in the story. Not just because they are excellent journalists, but because the local newspaper writers understand that their audience is the very neighbors, friends, and family that already have heard most of this story. At the same time, the local paper can give that wider world that is suddenly paying attention to our otherwise overlooked corner of the globe accurate, knowledgeable, and personally flavored coverage that folks not only need, but deserve.

Now the trick to local news surviving is in monetizing that, making that monetization sustainable, and balancing that need to turn a profit against the needs of turning out good news reporting. That’s the hard part and the current dilemma news media is working out not just locally, but across almost all platforms. So, yes, print newspapers are old fashioned; but local newspapers aren’t just the ink and printing presses. The ones that will survive bring local news wider attention, and should be positioned to be the go-to source when wider attention comes upon local folks.

I’ve been blessed and fortunate to get to do many things in writing and media, especially as someone who just wandered into it with no ins, foreknowledge, or really having a clue what I was doing. I can honestly say while getting magazine covers, featured stories, op-eds, tv appearances, and radio hits are all fun and a privilege, nothing is as satisfying for me as writing in that local paper. I’m proud to help them out in any way I can.

If you think the online comments section can be wild, write an opinion piece for your local newspaper so that the church ladies can cut it out, mark it up with comments, and bring it to your own mother at church.

Who has it better than me, a local writer? Nobody, that’s who. What a blessing.

From Me This Week:

I wrote about math, not just how I didn’t like it as a student, but how the recent reviewing by the University of California of the Algebra 2 requirement for admission might need some tweeking.

As much as I hate math as a student, I do not think UC is wrong here to be reviewing and thinking about the Algebra 2 requirement. The old complaint of “when are you going to use this math” can be productively applied here as a bit of a litmus test, a term you learn about in Chemistry, another college course I have avoided like the plague. If the requirement is only for admission but not needed for the actual chosen course path, the requirement is more gatekeeping than productive. The “they might change their minds” is rather weak sauce for an academic institution that could readily mandate a course or two of mathematics as a requirement for those changing majors to a math heavy field of study.

I do think UC is right that even in the school systems offering alternative math courses, higher math like algebra underpins so much of the technology that everyday usage of advanced mathematics – or at least the principles thereof – is probably higher than ever before. What is needed long-term here is secondary-level math courses that are designed with the modern world in mind. A non-STEM curious junior or senior in high school may very well not need Algebra 2, but designing a social media-era “Principle of Mathematics” that slides in plenty of higher-level math to explain those algorithms which increasingly dictate information and life to teens and young adults would be sensible bridge both academically and practically.

Mathematics – particularly higher level mathematics like advanced algebra, calculus, trigonometry, and such – inarguably has many applications to the modern world, perhaps more so than ever before. What needs to change and update a bit is the interpretation of who needs what math for what reason. In that there should be some flexibility, beyond just “if they can’t pass Algebra they don’t belong in college” yelling at clouds gatekeeping that helps no one. If the point is to get more students taking higher-level mathematics, the smart thing to do is to make sure there are a few more steps leading up to the haughty temple of numbers in the Groves of Academe for students to work their way up.

I wrote about the West Virginia Waterfall Trail, specifically the Fayette County/New River Gorge portions, for The Fayette Tribune’s special section here:

Getting the internet-curious and social media-obsessed outside into the wild and wonderful is a winning strategy that recognizes the need for tourism and the ready supply of natural wonders West Virginia possesses. Things like the West Virginia Waterfall Trail are smart, innovative ways to promote that, and Fayette County is blessed with more representation on the trail than any other area.

As the National Park draws increased crowds to the area, state and local initiatives like the waterfall trail are important to emphasize that the farther from the beaten paths you go in West Virginia, the more there is to discover and explore. And in this era of social media, sharing those pictures, memories, and experiences not only makes for a good Instagram post, but helps tell the world about the wonderful places and people of West Virginia.

As long as the reception holds up, that is. But don’t worry, West Virginia has a hill to raise you up and get you better reception close by, wherever you may be chasing waterfalls.

Worth Reading:

Matt LeBash takes on RFK, Jr. and how he ranks among other no-hope candidates:

“It’s hard for me to make straight-up comparisons. I have profiled all those others up close, spending plenty of quality time with them. I have never even met RFK Jr. (I know people who know him well, and speak fondly of him.) But with all those aforementioned former subjects of mine, even when I virulently disagreed with them, or thought them demagogues, outlaws, or con artists (often all three, simultaneously), they were, to the man, great showmen. They kept you feeling alert and alive, no matter how many hours of interview tape you had to slog through on the back end. Whereas, I watch a five-minute cable hit of RFK Jr. prattling on about one conspiracy or another, and I feel like I’ve washed down a half a bottle of Benadryl with a fifth of Old Grand-Dad. For a purported exciting outsider, he makes me feel less like, “Yes, we need new blood!” More like, “Yes, I need a long nap.”

Due to the spasmodic dysphonic croak that beset him in his forties, which causes his voice muscles to spasm, making the poor guy sound like a frog in a Cuisinart, Kennedy has self-deprecatingly said, “I cannot listen to myself on TV.” I know the feeling. Not because of his voice, but because of the actual words his voice forms. Whenever I hear him connect-the-dots in his latest nut rant, it makes me nostalgic for a simpler time. When I used to cover political conventions, and would have to jawbone with conspiracy theorists — often guys wearing sandwich boards with disheveled hair and suspect hygiene — they were usually in the protest pit outside the arena, not The Man In the Arena. Times have changed.“

Erik Kane talks the popular “Helldivers 2” game and how folks are getting the thinly-veiled Starship Troopers vibes but still missing the point…

That it is not already at the point of dissonance boggles my mind. It bugs me (heh) that The Critical Drinker would take such an obtuse stance on the game. He’s constantly talking about “The Message”—aka, the social justice / woke politics that are being inserted into movies, shows and games etc—but there is another “Message” and it’s what he’s doing right here. This other “Message” is the anti-woke side’s version. When you no longer trade in nuance and thoughtful discourse and you just push “go woke go broke” bullshit and “Disney bad” and “game journalists bad” and blah blah blah you become just as tiresome as the people overdoing it with the social justice crap. There’s no room for critical thinking when everything is just a culture war whipping post to pillory your perceived enemies with.

I sometimes agree with the Drinker’s takes and I sometimes disagree. I am a lefty who often critiques the left; he is a conservative. We may find similar things annoying, but my problem with The Message is in its execution rather than its intent. He’s certainly pointed out some big flaws with modern movies, but he’s boxed himself into a sort of reactionary, right-wing space and while some of his takes have been more nuanced, this tweet is a clear example of the way drinking too much of your own Kool-Aid (or whiskey) can make you blind to your own biases. There’s a kind of audience capture at work as well, I suspect. It’s far more lucrative to take extreme stances than be reasonable. “There is but one assured path to peace . . . And that path is war” after all.

I also think he’s wrong about Reacher Season 2, but right about Shogun. And in a sane world, we could stop placing everyone into their little ideological prisons, or “other” statuses and just disagree amicably, but that’s a ship long out to sea. To do that, we’d have to listen to one another. And it looks like the Drinker didn’t even bother to read the review he so sneeringly dismissed before firing a shot across the bow. But hey, look at all those likes! Look at all that engagement. I’m sure someone will say something about me getting “ratioed” because Drinker’s tweet will be far, far more popular than mine. Appeals to popularity are one of the most common fallacies we encounter on social media. It’s pretty much designed with that in mind. And that’s a shame, it really is. We are all dragged down into the dirt.

Sniping at someone’s review without giving it a fair shake is what we refer to in the business as “a dick move.” Not a good look, or a good approach to critical discourse. Disappointing, too, because as I’ve said I do think the Drinker makes some good observations about the problem with modern entertainment at times.

Worth Listening To:

I joined Brady Leonard on his No Gimmick Podcast for something different; after a week of God Bless The USA Bible hawking and the “Christian Visibility Day” Trump was dubbing the upcoming 2024 election day I talk more about faith here than I probably ever had publicly, but these charlatans have me provoked. Just a note here, Brady and I both come similar evangelical backgrounds so that’s the framing for a lot of this.

Since I was bashing the business model of modern evangelical Christianity on Brady’s pod above, our friend Dennis Sanders had an interesting episode about rethinking funding of churches here:

Ever wondered how churches can sustain their missions in a world where the traditional offering plate falls short? The financial fabric that supports our churches is undergoing a radical makeover. This episode isn't just about recounting struggles; it's a treasure trove of inventive solutions, from the entrepreneurial spirit of minority and immigrant churches to the pioneering use of digital platforms like crowdfunding. We'll explore the rich history of church funding with Grace Pomroy of Luther Seminary. We'll learn how churches are reinventing church funding—to secure a future where faith communities not only survive but thrive.

If you don’t know who Chuck Ritter is, you will by the time you finish this, as one of America’s most decorated - and combat wounded, as he jokes “I suck at my job so bad I’ve come home on three MEDEVAC birds” - soldiers who talks here about recovery, mental health, training a new generation of troops on stress and resiliency, and his own amazing story of recovery and overcoming.

Join us for an insightful and inspiring conversation with Charles "Chuck" Ritter, a veteran with 23 years of dedicated service to the United States Army. From his beginnings as an infantryman to his current role as the Deputy Commandant for the SWCS Non-Commissioned Officer Academy, Chuck's journey is marked with valor, resilience, and a commitment to recovery.

Having undergone thirty surgeries over the past 13 years due to combat-related wounds, Chuck's passion for recovery and resiliency is truly remarkable. Join us as he shares his experiences, insights, and the importance of prioritizing mental health in post-service life.

Stay tuned as we delve into Chuck's military career, his leadership consulting firm, LYCOS GROUP, LLC, and his role as a board member for the Talons Reach Foundation. Don't miss the opportunity to gain valuable wisdom from a true hero.

Worth Watching:

Since folks are taking the eclipse calmly and with minimum hype and chaos (sarcasm) our resident expert on all things space and scientific Michael Siegel explains the technicalities, and uses seven examples from movies good, bad, and indifferent.

If you don’t know, my mother was a special education teacher for 35 years, part of the first generation of specially trained special education teachers in the late 60s and spent decades fighting just to get classrom space and education for those students at all. So this sort of thing infuriates me beyond words:

As bad as that Prince Andrew interview a while back was, the news of how that went down and everything around it makes it even worse, and Netflix has a whole documentary around it. Times Radio summerizes: