The Reading Eagle is mum on Reading's Main Street woes

The state’s Main Street program helped West Reading become a regional place to shop, dine and meet friends.

What’s up with Reading’s Main Street program, which helps municipalities get state resources for economic development?

The Reading Eagle has the latest news, but it’s hard to find, in the third paragraph in a story by a stringer in the middle of the B section:

“[Reading Community Development Director Lenin] Agudo and Community Development Manager Crystal Edwards said the nine-member Main Street board hasn't had a quorum since its inception in 2010 and currently has only four members.”

How the city is handling the state designation seems like news to me. But the local newspaper ignores issues such as this.

KeystoneEdge has a big story about how leaders in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are using art to develop their cities.

“Across the state, artists help rebuild and unify up-and-coming neighborhoods.”

What’s going on with Ricktown, Reading’s proposed arts district?

The newspaper is mum.

It appears the paper gets pressure to have big front-page stories when these efforts begin, and pressure NOT to report on them when they fizzle.

I think the public needs to know about such failures and why they happen so the problems in leadership and planning can be fixed.

These are examples of how a lack of good journalism is contributing to Reading’s stagnation compared to other cities in Pennsylvania.

The newspaper should police the police in Berks County

Police are happy that a state Supreme Court ruling makes it easier for them to search vehicles, according to an article in Monday’s Reading Eagle.

Could you think of a duller slant for this story?

In their efforts to make the paper as boring as possible, it seems, whoever OKs the story angles consistently ignore the issues. Not only does that make for biased, one-sided news articles, it violates the first rule of narrative, fiction or non: explain the conflict.

The conflict in the police-search story is obvious. Considering anybody’s ability to search me or mine, start with the Fourth Amendment and work down from there. I’m very suspicious of laws that make it easier for government-paid people with guns to go through my glove box.

“With the ruling, there's no reason to get a judge out of bed just to sign a warrant in a case in which, for instance, an officer smells marijuana in a car stopped for running a stop sign,” police reporter Steve Henshaw writes.

Reasonable people would say there’s no reason to wake up a judge in this case, with or without the latest ruling.

I can understand why police reporters want to be gung-ho crimefighter. If the cops don’t like what they write, the cops clam up. But the editors should flag this.

Why not talk to a couple of defense attorneys and civil-rights supporters to balance the comments from the district attorney and three (count them) police leaders?

I can see why the idea would perhaps not occur to Editor Harry “Follow the Rules” Deitz.

But questioning expanding police power is one role of watchdog journalism.

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.