Friday, October 30, 2009

The District Weekly: Teacher layoffs, parks and recreation and "PostKiller.com"

Ed. note: Apologies for the light posting the past few days, I've been under the weather. As of now, this is a one-man part-time operation, so "daily" might not always happen.

It's been a headline week for the D.C. Council, with a hearing about the D.C. Public Schools layoffs and more discussion of the parks and recreation contracts. Aside from that, the media world has been dominated with talks of the new local news site for D.C.

D.C. Council holds hearing on the controversial teacher layoffs. This was the big cannot-miss local news story for the week. There's a whole ton of analysis floating around the Internet, so I'm not going to spend too much time rehashing it right now. The main story here is the same story we're seeing with the Parks and Recreation hubub, a lack of communication, oversight and respect between the Council and the rest of the D.C. government. Yesterday's hearing stretched for several hours, and the tone of animosity between the Council and DCPS was hard to ignore. There's significant discontent between many on the Council and Rhee. Those who have a bone to pick with Fenty are going to continue pressing this. It looks likely that Rhee did go around the Council's directives in order to get her way. But, she's smart, and knows how to testify at a hearing. The same can't be said for her CFO, Noah Wepman. Wepman appeared unprepared and shaken by the questioning.

All of this, of course, revolves around the controversial firing of teachers. Hundreds of teachers were laid off just as the school year started, with Rhee citing budgetary reasons. The Council had previously slashed $20 million from the DCPS budget. Prior to the firings, DCPS had conducted massive hirings over the summer. Rhee is accused of using the budget excuse to fire tenured teachers and replace them with new, younger hires. Rhee claims she had no choice but to cut jobs. A matter of this much importance, and involving this much money should not come down to a he said/she said argument. Sadly, though, that is where we are. It looks like either Rhee knew exactly what she was doing (likely) or the books at DCPS are so poorly kept no one could have figured out there would be budgeting problems for FY2010.

Right now, Council meets to discuss Parks and Recreations contracts. Today the Council is meeting to discuss the questionable contracts sent through the D.C. Housing Authority. The City Paper has learned the total is now at $120 million. City Administrator Neil Albert is testifying at the moment, and CFO Natwar Gandhi is scheduled to appear as well. Albert is denying any sort of conflict of interest problems, and the Council is trying very hard not to use the "corruption" word. I'll have more on this once the meeting wraps up. Again, it is difficult to make the claim that either Albert or Gandhi didn't realize there was something fishy going on.

Can Allbritton revolutionize local news? Well, it seems they are going to try. The creators of Politico are looking to create a local D.C. news web site. Allbritton also owns local ABC affiliate WJLA-TV as well as the local cable news station NewsChannel8. I spent some time talking about the future of local journalism last week; this is a topic that is not going away anytime soon. Allbritton believes there is still money to be made with a local news web site, and wants to dedicate a staff of 50 to making this work.

Well, as other people have mentioned, it's hard to believe that Allbritton will be able to find some magical advertising market that no one else has been able to tap into. I'm very much in favor of seeing more local news coverage, and I think it would be wonderful if an organization with vast resources would dedicate some time to our city. As it stands now, WJLA and NC8 have resources (even news trucks!) but the only product they put out is a television newscast. Rather than hiring 50 people to start a new web site, it might make more sense to hire a team of a few writers and editors to put out quality web-based versions of the stories already being covered.

We'll see what happens, but I wouldn't hold your breath. The Next Big Thing in journalism will need to take bigger risks than just throwing some money at a new web site. We'll need to see a completely new model. We'll need to see something that stops everyone in their tracks and says "wow, that's gutsy." There's a difference between gutsy and foolish optimism. Unless there's some huge part of this that Allbritton is keeping a secret, this is will not be the future of local news.

by Dave Stroup, filed under District Weekly at 1:00PM

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