You're still in good shape, Geoff, and as long as you're willing to work on improving the site, I'll keep it in my RSS reader. This thread's a good example of what the Pres can do, thankfully. Bill Anderson's got some great ideas below. I'd add better publicizing and enforcing of disclosure rules. For a decisive measure, you could even hire an army of editors to work with writers to improve stories before they're posted, too. Each idea has their cost in "openness", though. I think this comes down to an odd trap the Sac Press is caught in: it can't grow without quality writing and reporting, but it's hard to maintain quality if you're actively soliciting input from everyone. You'll have to draw the line on submissions somewhere, and I don't envy you the task of figuring out where.

Advocate, feel free to dismiss me as an arrogant elitist as well. Condescension aside, sactoe raises some good points, and her first paragraph largely sums up my thoughts about the Sac Press. After slogging through more than a few stories that desperately needed an editor's hand and personally posting stories about groups and organizations I was part of (and thereby noticing how easy it is for the site to be misused), I grew disillusioned with citizen journalism as practiced, and now the Press is now a steadily growing unread RSS subscription I'm daily tempted to delete. There's a very noble ideal at the center of the Press (everyone is invited to participate to help improve local reporting), but that ideal also holds a fundamental contradiction: the act of letting everyone participate doesn't necessarily improve the quality of the articles. Some sort of gatekeeper is needed (traditionally, editors and staff writers -- both of which the Press now has) to separate the wheat from the chaff. For an article on a major issue, like city charter revisions, there are likely going to be enough readers to ferret out propagandists and malcontents, but I can't trust that the readers will uncover and call out every person using this site for their own ends rather than to inform the community, especially on articles that receive low levels of traffic. To be taken seriously, you have to present a quality product. For journalistic enterprises, quality can be measured by factual accounts, trustworthy writers, and quality writing. Unfortunately, putting the onus on your consumers to enforce that quality is little better than just showing them the door. Sactoe and I (and likely others) have already reached for the doorknob.

That's not uncommon. When one paper in a metropolitan area has a perceived bias, other papers in the publication area tend skew the other direction. Compare the New York Post as a counterweight to the New York Times, Boston's Herald to its Globe, the Sun-Times and Tribune in Chicago, or even our own Union and Bee before the former's collapse. The Bee reaches Davis with its leftward tilt, opening a niche for right-leaning local content. http://infochimps.org/static/gallery/politics/endorsements_map/endorsement_graph.html graphs out papers by size and recent endorsement, so it's not a definitive left/right split, but it does show that cities with multiple papers tend to split them ideologically.

"How did Sacramento rate only 88th most liberal when it is 79.7 percent Democrat?" Perhaps because it's not actually 79.7 Democratic; voters registered as independent or decline-to-state would show up as neither. It's an interesting quick glance at Californian political divisions, but it would be as interesting to see another breakdown that included Green and Peace and Freedom Party voters on the "liberal" scale and Libertarian or Constitution Party voters with the "conservatives".

Dan's got a good start, but considering how controversial video surveillance is, there's a lot of questions to consider for a follow-up article: Will video be fed directly to a surveilling officer, or is it going directly to storage? What is the Department's method of discerning whether a given fragment of video contains evidence of crime (therefore deserving of long-term storage)? How granular will video storage be? What issues did the ACLU raise, and were their concerns satisfied? How will the Department discriminate between private and public spaces captured on camera, and at what point in the process are private areas obscured? At capture? After video review by an officer? Will this video surveillance system work with identity recognition software, and does the Department have any plans to expand this surveillance into identity recognition? Depending on where the cameras are placed, they may capture financial transactions and therefore sensitive information like PIN codes. Will those be obscured, and if so, at what point in the capture and retention process?

Having been in the "catacombs" in the Crest's basement and the one-off park system tour of Old Sacramento's underground areas, I can happily testify that these are some neat historic passages. Unfortunately, since they tend to be walled off block-by-block, it's going to take a very widely coordinated effort to make any contiguous district or tour-worthy area out of them.

Well, I guess my lack of fifteen years of anarchy zine back issues betrays itself; nobody I talked to was familiar with any rides before the 2001 set. I would take issue with your characterization, though. Considering that the cyclists are moving with (albeit slower than) prevailing traffic, don't prevent traffic from moving around them, moved back the start time to 6:00 from the more "rushy" time of 5:30, and usually avoid riding through the areas of town with freeway entrances and exits, calling them out for deliberately blocking rush hour traffic seems unwarranted.

Production costs aside, you can't discount the advantages of a growing base of 300,000 paid daily subscribers, in terms of direct revenue, advertising leverage, and classified leverage. Unfortunately, without hard numbers in front of us, we're not going to be able to find that service-to-costs balancing point where the Bee can break even or profit. And as I suggested in my article, one of the pertinent numbers is how much revenue McClatchy has been sucking out of its flagship paper.

That attitude (which I share) is the exact problem; consumers are notoriously unwilling to pay subscription fees for most online content, and it's impossible for any organization to keep a subscription lid on what they publish. Besides, citizen-journalism only goes so far; we still need full-time professional investigative journalists, and that's not exactly cheap. I highly doubt that an ad-supported online presence would be enough to keep the lights on at the Bee. It's a vicious cycle: to fund its operation, a newspaper needs a strong subscriber base, which isn't going to develop online. As sactomaya suggested, the Bee might want to look at the revenue models that sustain public radio and TV, or perhaps look into endowments, as for-profit incorporation has done it a grave disservice and it can't survive with online-only revenue.

This is getting away from David's issue, but I'm optimistic about the direction the Press is going, I just think it's going to take some time to develop the cache and respectability of a paper-and-ink publication. There's been some good reporting so far, but the last couple of days have also seen my own "newsified" press release about Critical Mass, an opinion piece by mayoral spokesman Steven Maviglio in favor of a city council decision, an opinion piece about the mayor's "message," and an opinion piece by a firefighter about the state of the department. This isn't to say the pieces were bad, but that the Press might benefit from an editorial system. Maybe not dedicated editors, but at least a community process that can identify "fluff" pieces like press releases and opinion articles and separate them from the more serious original reporting. If you want to discuss this more, I'd be more than happy to do so; my e-mail address should be in my profile.

I have to come out in defense of psuedonyms, which is the basic question here. While using one's real name can promote civil discourse, it's not the only way to do so, nor would it guarantee that civility. A strong sense of community and shared purpose are much more effective. The lively and civil comments section here speak more to our esprit de corps than the names we use. After all, civil society isn't poisoned when we use peoples' preferred nicknames or abbreviated names in the real world. Addressing people by what they prefer to be known as is one of the examples of civil engagement. But if we are going to ask for real names only, what would be the recommended style guide -- could someone named Douglas Bartholomew Surname go by Doug Surname or even Bart Surname, or would he be pressed to post as Douglas Surname? Any call to use real names be only half the fight, anyway; shouldn't we also ask for full-color, full-size close-up portraits from commenters? As long as the Sacramento Press publishes on the web, it ought to reflect the way people assemble their identity on the web. I've used my real name here in deference to the popular style, but that naturally disconnects this "Ryan Sharpe" from the myriad forum posts, blog entries, and comments I've made as "rgsharpe" or "sharper." Press readers and contributors looking to get a better feel for who I am are going to be sorely disappointed when it looks like I haven't contributed anything else anywhere else. I hate to say it, but the Press as yet feels like an outpost mainly for press releases, opinion pieces, and non-primary reporting. As long as that's the case, there's little reason to expect real names. Besides, if false names were good enough for Hamilton and Clemens...

Steven, should we assume you're no longer the official spokesman for one of the council members that voted for this proposal, since -- in the interest of transparency -- you didn't include a disclaimer identifying you as such?

I'm glad I ran into you at the Mass, too; I wouldn't have written the article if you hadn't suggested it!

Having lived on H Street at 25th before and after the no-entry installation at 26th, I can safely tell you that it was a much nicer area once the daily commuters were removed. If your route into the central city absolutely requires you to use the northern midtown residential streets rather than major corridors, consider bicycling or using RT's 34 bus; both are allowed through such obstructions. As for the "sudden onset do not enter" you describe, the city seems to be working on that: H Street eastbound from 16th has signs warning that through traffic should use J, then points you down 19th to get to it.

"Did you ever hear of them lowering the price when the price of oil goes down? No." There might well be a gas price conspiracy, as you contend, but you're not exactly laying out the argument. As you say, the day-to-day price of oil isn't tied to the day-to-day price of gasoline, in part because supplies of each aren't used up at identical rates. Looking at longer trends, gas prices do mirror oil prices. When oil prices dropped from $140 to $40 a barrel over the last year, gas prices likewise fell -- from $4.50 to $1.75 or so.

I for one didn't know that if you planted some 2x4s in that fertile Natomas farmland, added some water, and waited a few months, you'd have a beautiful row of $400,000 (erm, $300,000 (sorry, $250,000 (I mean, $190,000)) houses.

How convenient; this meeting will only be off the ground before the Alkali Flat/Mansion Flat Neighborhood Association meeting, previously reported at http://sacramentopress.com/headline/3245/Alkali_FlatMansion_Flat_community_meeting I hope the city's non-Flatters make up for my lack of attendance.

To be fair, Senator Ensign is partially right: now is not the time to just build bike paths -- after all, bike lanes as currently implemented are just state mandates to expose yourself to an opened car door. Where he's really wrong: now is the time to entirely rethink our transportation infrastructure and try to overcome the failures of the automobile culture.

I miss the Darth Vader building's observation deck for the reasons you've shown above. It's always neat to be reminded that central Sacramento looks like a sea of trees with little islands of buildings from the air.

Bob Shallit covered this a couple of weeks ago: http://www.sacbee.com/shallit/story/1556985.html Apparently, we should be getting captions added to the pictures soon enough, so we won't have to rely on the captions written on the original photos.