Reading Eagle business story dances around bank-loan discrimination issue

Headlines in the Reading Eagle’s Business Weekly:

Latinos on the move

The Hispanic boost

Latino entrepreneurs are starting businesses

and adding jobs and money to the Berks economy

So the editors just noticed this? This is the news? They need to write a story to prove this? It goes with a series of stories about noticing Latino-Hispanics living outside Reading. The stories sort of treat them as strange but generally friendly creatures we can peer upon with curiosity. A bit like our earlier model of other, the Plain People of Berks County.

First, how about defining Latino. Is it anybody who speaks Spanish? Somebody from a Spanish-speaking country except Spain? Somebody whose parents or grandparents are from a Spanish speaking country except Spain?

Immigrants identify with their native countries much more closely than with a shared language. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie shows in her novel “Americanah,” Africans aren’t black until they come to America.

[The Eagle reporters dug up some great statistics, which should have been made into charts rather than the lame graphics the story had.]

Why not examine issues, rather than people. How does the Reading School District teach English as a second language? Do non-whites have more trouble getting business loans in Berks than whites?

In the same edition, editor Dan Fink presses Carl W. Staples, a vice president at Brentwood Industries, on what it’s like to be a black man in the upper leadership of a big company in Berks.

This is the most honest local treatment I’ve seen of this subject, handled with sensitivity by interviewer and interviewee.

Staples: We live in a community that is at the higher levels of organization still very Caucasian.

BW: It's white men, essentially.

Staples: Essentially. And when they look for their replacements or people to come into their company, they look for people that look like them people [sic] who you think share the same values and the same beliefs that you do.

Another story writes about a micro-loan program geared toward minorities and women. The story doesn’t mention Reading’s very own micro-loan program. I’d like to know how that’s going. Why do we need two? What’s the difference between them?

The Reading Eagle hallucinates an economic-development plan for the city

The headline on the Saturday Reading Eagle page-1 story about economic development in Reading is “The plan is developing.”

But the story doesn’t mention a plan.

A photo shows a group of unidentified people who “the city hopes are potential buyers,” but reporter Don Spatz doesn’t talk to any of them to see if they are potentially planning to buy anything.

Instead Spatz talks to the usual suspects, including the well-paid people in charge of that vaguest of activities, economic development.

“The solution is economic development,” said Ellen Horan, president of the Greater Reading Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

That’s like saying the solution to hunger is food. Why waste paper and ink, and readers' patience, with quotes like that?

“We need to get creative about economic development,” said state Sen. Judy Schwank.

“Economic development is the key,” said Brentwood Industry president Peter Rye, also the leader of a group that tried but failed to get a state-designated City Revitalization and Improvement Zone.

The city hopes to get a CRIZ in the next round, he said, and that will be “a paradigm solution, a turnaround solution.”

So where is the plan the Reading Eagle hallucinated? What is the budget? What is the time-frame? What are the goals? If the local newspaper would ask some worthy questions, leaders might try harder to have answers.

How better journalism could prompt better crime-fighting ideas in Berks County

Here’s an example of why Berks County needs better journalism. My BS detector is chirping away.

bctv.org has an exclusive story that Berks County is getting almost a quarter of a million dollars in state crime-fighting money – the verbatim press release from state Rep. Tom Caltagirone.

Somebody should ask a few basic questions about this funding, and inform the public.

♦ “The Council on Chemical Abuse [remember when it called itself “COCA,” the plant from which we get cocaine?] will receive $49,583 in Substance Abuse Education and Demand Reduction funding … for the implementation of the council's Relapse Prevention: A Mindfulness-Based Approach support service.”

Cost for each of the 262 county residents served: $190.

How does the council declare success? How many relapses will mindfulness prevent?

Reading Eagle is most likely source of local news, survey shows

Most people in Berks County get their local news from the Reading Eagle newspaper, WFMZ television station, and Berks Community Television’s website – bctv.org, according to recent surveys.

And initial findings show that the Latino community is underserved by some of Berks County’s traditional news outlets.

Heidi Williamson of the Berks County Community Foundation was kind enough to write a summary of the findings of the information-needs assessments, funded by the Knight Foundation.

“The questions focused on the ability to access specific pieces of information that people need to function in a democracy. It did not dig into the deeper social issues surrounding whether or not people are actually accessing community information, or if there are stories that are going unreported. More research would need to be done to determine the answers to those questions.

“Here’s a summary of the findings:

“Overall Berks County residents can find the information they need to perform basic tasks in Berks County, like sign up for an absentee ballot, renew their driver’s license, find a place to go this weekend, or contact their local officials.

“People rely heavily on Google to find information about local issues. When they search for local news, they’re most likely to find it at the Reading Eagle website. WFMZ and bctv.org were the next most-often sited information sources. For government or emergency information people were most likely to end up at the county’s website or the city’s website.

Reading's economic developers should set doable goals, then do them

I’m glad the people in charge of Reading’s revival have finally figured out what the city needs to prosper – the ReDesign Reading Community Development Corp.

The new group joins a crowded field of economic-development organizations in Berks. Their well-paid professionals quote the vaguest goals and the fuzziest measurements and seem to show the least progress compared to other cities in the region.

ReDesign Reading Community Development Corp. Executive Director Brian Kelly, on the job for four months, seems to fit right in. [It’s hard to walk through Reading without tripping over an executive director.]

He isn’t sure what the purpose of it all is, Reading Eagle reporter Don Spatz’s story suggests.

Kelly “still is seeking the best roles for the economic development support agency,” Spatz writes.

“Because so many groups are focusing on economic development in and around the city, the agency was looking for what niches are vacant, and aims to fill them.

“Creating a community bank had been one of those goals, but it's now tabled for awhile [sic]. Kelly said the agency has chosen four other goals.”

Why is the Reading Eagle newsroom run by a man who admits he is so confused by so much?

“Five things I don't understand and likely never will,” writes Reading Eagle Editor Harry Deitz.

The headline alone makes me wonder why this guy is in charge of our local news coverage, the face of our community to people deciding to move here or maybe bring a business to Berks.

I generally wouldn’t waste time with his preachy Sunday banality. If it were written by a wingnut blogger like me, I'd just chuckle. 

But this essay needs to be examined, because Deitz is an opinion leader in Berks County. He seems to be sincerely explaining his world view to help us understand ... what? His news judgment? Why he is the chosen one to run a newsroom? How economic development efforts are failing in Reading?

I hope that in 1550, Deitz would not have been one of those inquisitors arguing that the sun clearly goes around the Earth – all you have to do is look up.

Or in 1850, been one of those many editors who spoke out against abolishing slavery, pointing to the local science of the day that described black people as subhuman. Not to mention the Biblical evidence.

bctv.org scoops Reading Eagle with exclusive interview on Reading schools progress

I’m thrilled that one local journalist has worked hard to find out what’s going on at the Reading School District.

Kudos to Madelyn Pennino at bctv.org!

On this major topic, she sure scooped the Reading Eagle, which has thousands of times more readers and whose newsroom has about 100 more people than bctv.org.

Her interview with BCIU chief John George, the acting superintendent of the dysfunctional district, paints a frightening scenario.

Charter school proposals in Reading deserve more attention

So a guy named Bernard McCree is part of a group that wants to open the “Key Charter School” in Reading, according to a ReadingEagle article.

Is he married to Karen McCree, a shrill Reading School Board member for 14 years who kept winning elections as the district decayed into a near-corpse of rotten finances and morbid curriculum? County records show that a Karen and a Bernard McCree own a house on North Ninth Street.

I think the public should know, and the Eagle reporter should have asked Bernard about Karen, to help his readers connect the dots. Chasing people after meetings is half the fun of reporting.

After winning the election in November, Karen McCree resigned without explanation in early December, soon after a public shouting match with newly elected Board President Rebecca Acosta, the wife of the president of Reading City Council.

I’d like to know who’s behind any charter school proposal.

Well-run charter schools are probably good for needy students, but the death rattles of an urban district like Reading's could attract attention from do-gooders and vultures alike.

Is the Reading Eagle outsourcing its investigative reporting?

Who is Jacob Klinger?

The “correspondent” wrote a long, investigative article for the Reading Eagle about Andrew Haines, co-owner of indoor football and soccer teams that play in Reading’s downtown arena.

The subheadline: “Co-owner of indoor soccer and football teams has a history of running short-lived franchises that leave legal troubles, unpaid debts in their wake."

[The story was the big Sunday-morning front-page eye-ball grabber, but on the Eagle website, it’s oddly 20 stories down in the “Berks” section, just below the week’s PennDOT projects, and nowhere on the homepage. Either somebody has no clue how to manage the site, or the paper’s trying to bury the story!?!?]

I can’t remember the last time the major Berks County newspaper ran a story putting somebody in a less-than-favorable-light, other than people charged with crimes.