D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
April
2008
Your Opinion, Please
Our annual reader survey.
This issue — the fifth anniversary of our taking the reins of Desert Exposure — contains our annual reader survey. Every year since we've been at the helm of Desert Exposure, we've asked you, our readers, to help us make "the biggest little paper in the Southwest" the very best it can be. What do you most enjoy in our pages? What elements each month are just a waste of ink and newsprint, as far as you're concerned?
We also like to know a little about your relationship with Desert Exposure. (It may sound silly to outsiders to talk about a "relationship" with a mere publication, but not if you know how fiercely loyal Desert Exposure readers are.) How much time do you spend with each issue? Do you share your copy with others or hog it all to yourself? Either way, we're OK with it — we even know couples who pick up two copies, so they can read Desert Exposure simultaneously and no one has to wait (or, worse, have the other person reading aloud all the best jokes from Desert Diary).
Every year, too, we try to get a sense of where Desert Exposure fits within readers' media universe. One year we asked about radio-listening preferences, which led us to the discovery that Desert Exposure readers don't listen to the radio much — with the notable exception of public-radio station KRWG-FM. Learning how much our audiences synchronize led to our annual "Summer Fling" with our friends at KRWG-FM, bringing those folks to Silver City to meet listeners/readers here.
This year, as usual, we ask about what other print publications you regularly read. It's not just that we compete with some of these periodicals for advertising dollars; it's also useful for us to know where else you're getting information — or not — so we aren't merely duplicating what you're getting elsewhere.
Readers' favorite part of each year's survey seems to be the opportunity to "rate" our regular columns and recurring departments. In addition to asking how often you read each of these standbys, we also have a question probing what else you'd like to see in future issues.
And new this year is a question about how long you've lived in what we like to think of as "Desert Exposure country." In watching folks snap up each new issue, we've been struck by the wide range of readership Desert Exposure appears to enjoy. It doesn't look as if our readers are only new arrivals, their worldly goods barely out of boxes, or just long-time residents who remember when the Grinder Mill spot on College Avenue was the Ranchburger. But we thought it would be interesting to see more exactly how our readership breaks out in terms of regional longevity. (With all the changes around here in recent years, we admit that — at five years and counting — we're starting to feel like old-timers ourselves!)
Whichever boxes you check, we hope you'll once again take a moment to share your thoughts and a bit about that "relationship" with Desert Exposure. We promise to use your responses to make a good thing even better.
We even have a solution for those of you who save your issues (and we know from past surveys that this is a significant fraction of readers) and would rather not clip out the form on page A7: Fill out the survey online. It's fast, it saves a postage stamp, and it's much easier for us to compile the results. Simply go to our survey page and tell us what you think, in a flash.
The Daily Press Skinny
The printing presses in Silver City go silent.
A funny little bit of publishing-industry "inside baseball" went on as our last issue was going to press. It all started when we noticed that the Silver City Daily Press, like many daily newspapers including such titans as the Wall Street Journal, had reduced its "trim size." Suddenly, on Feb. 11, the Daily Press that our carrier so efficiently rockets onto our doorstep (if the Diamondbacks need another pitcher. . .) unrolled to an inch narrower width.
What struck us as odd was not this cost-saving move, all too common in the economically hard-pressed daily newspaper business, but the absence of any announcement about it to readers. Maybe, being in publishing ourselves, we were the only ones who noticed — or cared. But it made us curious, and led to Business Exposure columnist Donna Clayton Lawder looking into the "shrinkage" for an item in her popular column.
Soon, however, her reporting uncovered a much more significant change than just shaving an inch of newsprint. As we broke the story in last issue's Business Exposure column, the size change was the result of the Daily Press outsourcing its printing from its own building and presses in Silver City to Signature Offset in Las Cruces (which also prints Desert Exposure). The family-owned daily, part of the community for almost 73 years, will no longer be printing its own pages.
The "inside baseball" bit (as a former boss of ours used to call stories that probably don't interest anybody but insiders) apparently sprang from Donna's phone calls to Tina Ely, publisher of the Daily Press, trying to confirm the news and ascertain any effect on jobs at the paper. Ely never returned Donna's calls, as we noted in our little scoop.
Suddenly, however, 18 days after making this significant change, the Daily Press decided to announce the move to its own readers — in a front-page story, with a color photo, on Feb. 29. We can guess what prompted this revelation.
Happily for us — and here we're getting really "inside baseball" — our March issue began reaching readers on the morning of Feb. 29, a couple of hours before the Daily Press' own announcement. When you run a monthly instead of a daily, you don't get to claim many scoops — even small ones — so we hope Ely and her hardworking staff don't begrudge us this tiny one!
The truth is, we wish nothing but the best for the Daily Press as it battles to remain one of fewer than 600 family-owned, truly independent daily newspapers in America. We hope that, as the paper assured readers in that page-one story, this move signifies nothing beyond a more cost-effective, better-quality way of printing the news. (Having once worked on an afternoon newspaper, though, the thought of the Daily Press deadline now being 10 a.m. makes us want to reach for the aspirin.) The last thing we'd want to see is the Daily Press joining the Albuquerque Tribune in publishing its own obituary one of these days, or being gobbled up by a newspaper chain more interested in profits than publishing great journalism.
The Daily Press has gone head-to-head with the deeper-pocketed Sun-News, when the easy route would have been to sell. The people of Grant County benefit by having not one but two daily newspapers — surely one of the smallest markets in the nation that can still make that claim. It's a good, old-fashioned "newspaper war" we hope never ends in a truce or surrender.
We're just glad that, once a month, this busy media marketplace also makes room for Desert Exposure.
Unsafe at Any Speed
Perennial candidate Ralph Nader reaches a nadir.
If somebody shoves a clipboard in your face and asks you to sign a petition putting Ralph Nader on the ballot in New Mexico, just say no. Nader's recent descent into complete egomania, opting to run for president yet again, can only serve to muddle one of the most important elections in a generation. The fact that Nader has chosen to inject himself into the race despite the candidacies of two of the US Senate's most lobbyist-bashing, reform-minded members — Barack Obama and John McCain — gives the lie to his purported reasons for running, not only in 2008 but in 2004 and 2000. The awful truth is that this twisted little zealot, a caricature of the consumer advocate who once truly deserved headlines, can't stand to relinquish the spotlight.
If that sounds harsh, if you believe Nader is still guided by principle rather than an ego that's run off the rails, read Ron Klain's "Campaign Stops" column in the New York Times. Klain devastatingly reminds us of Nader's willfully insidious effect on the 2000 presidential election.
Nader knew full well that he might throw the 2000 race to George W. Bush, Klain reports — which is why Nader "initially promised supporters that he would not campaign in swing states or take other steps that might make him the 'spoiler' in the race." That's a promise Nader broke in the closing weeks of the campaign, with predictable results.
Not only did Nader know he might get Bush elected, Klain continues, he apparently actually preferred that outcome. Noting that "the Sierra Club doubled its membership under James Watt," Nader told the Times on Nov. 1, 2000, that "a bumbling Texas governor would galvanize the environmental community as never before." We wonder if Nader's fellow progressives now think that eight years of George Bush's environmental policies — or 4,000 Americans dead in Iraq — were a price worth paying for this "galvanizing."
By now, anyone who believed in 2000 that there wasn't much difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush has been proven wrong to an extent perhaps unprecedented in history. Bush gave us the Iraq War and the Patriot Act, among other legacies. Gore has since won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to combat global warming.
In hindsight, as Klain recalls, Ralph Nader's slanders against Gore look even more unforgivable. Nader called Gore "a coward," "an environmental poseur" and a "broker of environmental voters on corporate terms"; he said environmentalists backing Gore had a "servile mentality." Nader has never apologized — to Gore or to the American people.
Moreover, in light of Nader's glee at the prospect of throwing the 2000 election to Bush, his subsequent protestations that he isn't to blame for Bush's narrow victory ring hollow. He's also simply wrong mathematically: Nader's votes not just in Florida but also in New Hampshire were larger than Bush's margin of victory over Gore — 97,488 Nader votes in Florida versus Bush's contested 537-vote margin, 22,198 Nader votes in New Hampshire compared to a 7,211-vote Bush edge in New Hamphire. (Yes, switch tiny New Hampshire's four electoral votes and Gore would have won even without Florida.) Exit polls in 2000 showed that, had Nader not been on the ballot, his votes would have overwhelmingly gone to Gore instead.
Countless factors contributed to Bush reaching the White House in 2000 — culminating in "hanging chads" and a dubious Supreme Court decision — but it is irrefutable that without Nader on the ballot, Gore would have been elected president.
And New Mexico barely escaped the status of Florida and New Hampshire in 2000, remember. Gore's margin of victory here was a razor-thin 366 votes — while 21,251 New Mexicans voted for Ralph Nader.
In 2004, another nail-biter election, Bush carried New Mexico by 5,988 votes — barely more than Nader's shrunken total of 4,053.
Be careful, in short, when you decide to cast a "protest vote."
But shouldn't New Mexicans have that option? Don't independent candidates and third parties deserve a chance?
Go ahead, if you must, and help the Purple Party or the New Communist Prohibition People's Workers Alliance get a position on the ballot. But not Ralph Nader. He has proven himself unworthy of your signature on a petition.
Supporters of Sen. John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, who sign a petition for Nader are being pernicious, playing tricks with the machinery of democracy. And progressives who would give Nader yet another chance suffer from memories that are unpardonably short.
David A. Fryxell is editor of Desert Exposure.