Thursday, May 6, 2010

Audio of DCPC and City Council Meetings as well as various other blog updates

Today's Bike Rack @ Dunwoody Elementary

April 26 & 29 City Council Meetings

Last week I missed my first couple City Council meetings since the city began and though I wasn't there, I did take steps to have the precedings recorded.
04262010_work.mp3 - agenda
04262010_Voting_Session.mp3 - agenda
04292010_Signs_Meeting_Special.mp3 - Notice
Dunwoody Chamblee Parents Council of May 5

I attended Wednesday mornings DCPC meeting and as I have a tendency to do at public meetings, I recorded it in order to share the presentation with my neighbors. Councilman Robert Wittenstein was there as were Tammy Anderson and Tom Taylor who are both candidates for the state legislature.

I was very impressed with the candor and honesty of Interim Superintendent Ramona Tyson. I won't attempt to give a complete recap of the meeting since the new Dunwoody School Daze blog did such a nice job, but the full audio of the meeting can be found in the links below.
0505201_DCPC_1_intro.mp3
0505201_DCPC_2_Tyson.mp3
0505201_DCPC_3_Radovian.mp3
0505201_DCPC_4_Questions.mp3
Today was also a DCSS Budget committee meeting and there is a recap here.
Misc Dunwoody Blog updates
Today after I walked my son to school, I attended the Dunwoody Green Market and seemed to buy everything Donna Nall bought except that I also bought Lavender soap and Jalapeno jelly.  On Sunday, Donna & I also spent some quality time at the the Dunwoody Nature Center with our families supporting the Odyssey of the Mind team.  Be sure to look for (and financially support) the team at the Children's area of the the Dunwoody Art Festival this weekend.

I haven't talked to Mayor Wright about his position on eduKALB but I am thankful he is there and I like the goal of the organization.  I don't have much insight but some members of the community do have questions on the organization, fund raising and intentions of the DeKalb Chamber.

Besides buying everything in sight at the farmers market, I'm looking forward to spending some money at the Dunwoody Art Festival this weekend.

 The Dunwoody Crier has nothing to fear regarding me or any other blogger on the net.  Bloggers are opinionated blowhards who use the media to reach out to our five or six readers whereas the Crier owns every driveway in town with professional reporters covering in depth the stories that are important to this community.  The rest of us are just hacks - and we know it.

8 comments:

  1. I had to respond, buddy.

    We don't FEAR you, per se; we just acknowledge that your blog (as well as a number of other blogs) has an advantage over us: the ability to have an infinite and publish anytime, mostly anywhere, whereas we publish weekly.

    Like I said in my blog post: If you want to read Dunwoody news, pick up The Crier. If you want to read the musings and opinions of a good writer, go to Heneghan's blog.

    -R. Brent Adams
    Dunwoody Crier

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  2. Actually, The Dunwoody Crier has an on-line version that "occasionally" gets updated in-between the print version deadlines.

    Unfortunately, The Crier does a really inadequate job of keeping this current. For example, if you were to go to "www.thecrier.net" right now (May 6, 2010 @ 1:30 PM) and look under the "Dunwoody Daily" tag on the left (3rd down) you'd see the headline story is dated January 15, 2009.

    And, goodness knows, there is probably more stuff "submitted" to the Crier than can be printed in a weekly, that the on-line version would be able to handle.

    If The Crier wanted to be a real hometown paper....and, please don't let me start on the obvious biases of the editorial writers...

    Chip

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  3. Chip: Contact me privately for my opinions on that matter. RBrent.Adams@Gmail.com.

    Suffice to say... I hold some differing views on how the paper should be run than my managers. But it's their paper, so they have the right to do whatever they want to with it. And frankly, they've been right more often than not over me.

    But the fact my managers and I often disagree does improve the over quality of the newspaper. Holding dialogs on ethics and how the newspaper should be run are always good. Discourse leads to more understanding.

    As for bias... well, no matter how you look at the news, it's going to be biased. Period. Even the blogs that decry bias themselves are biased. This is why I tell everyone to take everything they hear with a grain of salt — including what I say. :)

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  4. Let's also note that blogs are for interaction, not just pontificating. For me, that this the line between news publishing and blogging. Online newspapers can be both but they tend to only do the publishing part well. While blogs tend to be better at the opposite.

    Vive la difference!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Chip - unfortunately, as the managing editor, supervisor of our student and part-time freelancers, administrator of our website, chief reporter, business new compiler, school news coordinator, Monday copy editor and headline writer, and calendar page editor, as well as the go-to person for the complaint department, it does not leave me much time to update the website between editions. I'd love for you to walk in my shoes some Monday when I've put in about 13 hours, then wake up Tuesday morning and spend about two hours working to post our current edition to the website before 9 a.m. You'd probably lose your enthusiasm and good humor about mean-spirited posts too.
    Cathy Cobbs
    Managing Editor
    Dunwoody Crier

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  6. ^ That's what I was going to say if you e-mailed me. Madame Cobbs is quite over-worked.

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  7. Hey, Cathy Cobbs...no one singled you out for criticism, personally. We were talking about "The Crier" and the online addition.

    You know, you could "delete" those sections that you rarely get around to updating...it wouldn't be any less effective than what's happening now, and wouldn't make it painfully obvious that "the bow-tied one" really doesn't care for electronic media, and is stuck in the last century.

    If you've let yourself become "the indispensable employee" shame on you!!! Good management and good editorship requires that you delegate effectively, not do everything yourself.

    You not only suffer because you're harried and overworked, but the paper and the community it serves suffers because the information that you're presenting is out-of-date by the time you present it.

    Please don't take this personally, but professionally speaking, you know your understaffed and I doubt that pure economics is the reason why.

    Chip

    ReplyDelete