With donations from filmmaker Michael Moore and others, WikiLeaks provocateur Julian Assange made bail today and was released from a British prison, awaiting extradition to Sweden on sex charges.

A judge had set Assange's bail at 240,000 pounds, which equals about $380,521. Moore donated $20,000, which equals about 12,633 pounds.

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There are a lot of things that don’t make it into any given news story. When you attend an event as a reporter, such as Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s visit to Union Terminal last Saturday (as I did), you wait in line for about an hour, then wait inside for another hour while security checks every visitor.

During that time, you’re talking to people who are attending, taking notes to provide color for the story (things such as what songs are playing, slogans on shirts or signs, the general mood or atmosphere) and getting information from the event staff, such as how many tickets were given out, how many people are estimated to attend, etc.

Then there are the speakers — about an hour of politicians talking. After that, there’s the counter press conference with local Democratic officials. Then you make phone calls to fill in any gaps.

With all of that material and the average reader attention span on 800 words, a lot of information gets left out of any given piece. So here are some things I found interesting from Romney’s visit that didn’t make it into my story that day.

The most popular attire seemed to be Reds items. Many event-goers wore Reds T-shirts or caps, and U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, who spoke at the event, wore a Reds ballcap and opened his speech with “So Cincinnati, how about these Redlegs?” and talked about Jay Bruce’s homer the previous night.

U.S. House Speaker John Boehner attended the rally. I remember seeing him on TV at the Republican National Convention and commenting that he didn’t look as tan anymore. Must have been the cameras. In person, he was at least five shades darker than the pasty Portman.

U.S. Rep. Steve Chabot also spoke at the rally. While most speakers stuck to short speeches meant to pump up attendees and introduce Romney, Chabot got local. He encouraged attendees to vote against Issue 2, a ballot measure appearing in November that would change the way redistricting is done in Ohio. Currently congressional redistricting is done by the Legislature, which can give one party an advantage if they control both houses and the governor’s mansion. Chabot said Issue 2, which would set up an independent commission to redraw congressional districts, would allow special interest groups to take voters out of the equation and have the lines drawn by “unelected, unaccountable” people. (CityBeat covered this year's redistricting issue here and here.)

As politicians do, speakers from both Republican and Democratic camps tried to spin the message. Portman told rally attendees that we were in the midst of the slowest economic recovery since the Great Depression, a statement independent fact checkers determined to be false. UPDATE 9/5/12: According to Republicans in the Joint Economic Committee and a report by The Associated Press economic growth and consumer spending have recovered more slowly from this recession than any time since The Great Depression. A PolitiFact check of Romney's claim that it was the slowest jobs recovery was deemed to be false.

Meanwhile, in their press conference after the rally, Democrats had maybe a dozen local Cincinnatians in a small public area near Music Hall. Obama’s campaign provided signs and had them all crowd behind a podium where local politicians spoke. For the TV cameras, it probably looked like a sizeable crowd, which is an old trick.

The Internet’s strange allure can’t be resisted.

First, local blogger and veteran journalist Bill Sloat decided to revive his excellent Daily Bellwether blog after an absence of several months, once again offering his fresh take on news around Ohio’s major cities.

Now Jim Hopkins has brought back his insightful Gannett Blog, offering news, analysis and criticism about the newspaper and media giant that owns The Cincinnati Enquirer and USA Today.

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Enquirer reporters and editors should be satisfied with their initial tabloid effort. Today’s inaugural edition — smaller and printed in Columbus — is a curious hybrid. It arrived on time. It feels and looks like a tabloid, but it reads like a familiar Enquirer rather than something exciting and new. 

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus held a conference call with Ohio reporters Wednesday morning in response to Tuesday comments by Democratic Vice President Joe Biden that the middle class had been “buried” in the last four years.

“Obama and Biden have buried the middle class, and now they want to bury them some more,” Priebus told reporters. 

“I mean, just imagine what Barack Obama would do. He buried us economically in this country knowing that he would have to face re-election. Just imagine what he would do with nothing but daylight in front of him. Just imagine where this economy would go.”

Biden made his comments before an audience of about 1,000 in Charlotte on Tuesday. He said Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s tax cuts for millionaires would raise taxes for the middle class.

“How can they justify raising classes on a middle class that has been buried the last four years?” Biden said.

Biden tried to clarify that he meant they had been buried by policies supported by Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan.

Republicans, however, jumped on the comment immediately, with Romney tweeting, “the middle class has been buried the last 4 years, which is why we need a change in November.”

Priebus said despite polling showing Obama pulling ahead of Romney in Ohio that the state would be very close. He said Republicans have a better ground game and would “crush” Democrats. 

“I think we’re going to crush the Democrats on the ground,” Priebus said. 

“I just don’t think they’ve got a very good ground game. I’ve looked through it, I’ve seen it. It’s all smoke and mirrors.”

Priebus said if Romney were to lose Ohio, he was still optimistic about Wisconsin, Iowa, Colorado and Nevada.

“We’ve got it all on the table. Ohio is, of course, extremely important. It’s nothing new, but I also see avenues to 270 (electoral votes) opening up for Mitt Romney in places that weren’t there in ’08.”

Enquirer editor Carolyn Washburn’s recent note to readers assures us that the continually shrinking page will elicit readers’ joyous cries of “new and improved!”

Don’t hold your breath.

The 10-1/2 x 14-2/3 page — about the size of the Business Courier — will be printed in Columbus on the Dispatch’s new press. The tabloid should given designers greater freedom to fill the news hole with large photos, graphics and headlines. The local section is so small now that I’m almost inured to diminishing returns on my rising subscription rates.

Page size isn’t the issue; what’s on them is what matters. I’ve worked on tabloid-format dailies in three countries. Today,  few papers are sold on the street and huge headlines to grab passersby are wasted space. “Headless Body in Topless Bar” and “Ford to City: Drop Dead” were perfect in New York but not here. We need smart, patient reporting. That requires space in the paper. Whether we get it has nothing to do with page size. 

• Publisher Margaret Buchanan’s subsequent page 1 note to readers last Sunday was hardly reassuring. It repeats much of editor Carolyn Washburn’s memo (above) and reinforces my fears: “The pages will be organized with fewer jumps so you don’t have to turn pages to continue reading the same story. Headlines will be bolder. The print edition will be more colorful with larger photos and graphics to help tell the stories. Most importantly, we’ll continue to provide unique in-depth news stories ..."

Buchanan comes from the advertising/business side of Gannett journalism, so maybe she isn’t troubled by the contradiction in her assurances: short stories burdened by big headlines, photos and graphics on tabloid pages can’t be “in-depth” unless they jump from page to page. And she’s promising “fewer jumps.” Is the next innovation with purpose a shift from “readers” to “viewers”? 

• Does the Enquirer have a policy about naming juveniles accused of crimes or is it an adhocracy among editors? When Avondale kids wanted for shoplifting fled in a car, they were named in the first story. When a suburban high school student was accused of a central role in a major drug ring, the first story didn’t name him and said that discretion was Enquirer policy. “Avondale” long has been code for black at the paper. “Suburban” or identifying with a suburban high school means white even if that is no longer a reasonable assumption in many cases. 

• Last Sunday, WVXU carried a fine conversation between Enquirer sports reporter and author John Erardi and WVXU politics reporter (and lifelong Reds fan) Howard Wilkinson. They talked about Barry Larkin and why he was being inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. They know their stuff, they obviously enjoy each other’s company, not least because Wilkinson also spent decades at the Enquirer writing about politics and on rare occasion, Reds baseball.

I enjoyed their insights and storytelling even though I’m not a baseball fan. I think I’ve been to three, maybe four Reds games in as many decades. Blame my parents. The Twins didn’t exist when I was a kid; it was Minneapolis Millers v. St. Paul Saints at Nicollet Park in Minneapolis and I don’t remember seeing them. We didn’t have modern Vikings either and the Lakers left town. No way to nurture a fan. 

• I wish I wasn’t eating when I read Dan Horn’s recent encyclopedia update on water quality in the Ohio River. His Enquirer report was well done. The photos were marvelous. My upset was personal: memories. 

When we moved to Cincinnati in 1967, we moored our boat at Elmer & Jenny’s Yacht Club downriver in Bromley, Ky. Wonderful people, but “yacht club”? I don’t think so. 

I water-skied in the river, aware of its water quality but in denial; it’s hard to give up the one sport I enjoyed from childhood ... in Minnesota. I only swam in the Ohio to put on or retrieve skies or to drop the rope and wait for my wife to pick me up. I didn’t swallow. 

I don’t remember infections or gastro-intestinal problems from Ohio River water. After all, I had skied for years in the St. Croix between Minnesota and Wisconsin, in  the industrial Upper Mississippi at the Twin Cities and downriver to the the two rivers merged. God knows what was in those pre-EPA waters then but maybe I brought immunities to the Ohio. 

After three years, we left Elmer & Jenny’s Yacht Club for Rocky Fork Lake near Hillsboro in Highland County. We sought fresher breezes and a ski zone free of barge tows and increasingly wild, mindless boaters in the Ohio’s Cincinnati basin. Cleaner water was a bonus. I still didn’t swallow.  

Recalling the Ohio River in the 1960s — aided by Horn’s detailed story — was the best appetite suppressant I’ve experienced in years. 

• If you’re going to do gotcha journalism, do your homework. A conservative blogger challenged Cleveland columnist Connie Schultz, sure she was a liberal who gets too close to leftwing politicians she covers. “We have found numerous photos of you with Sen. Sherrod Brown. In one of them, you appear to be hugging him. Care to comment?”

Here’s part of Shultz’s response, courtesy of jimromenesko.com: “He’s really cute. He’s also my husband. You know that, right?” Shultz told her former employer, the Plain Dealer where she won a Pulitzer Prize, that she hadn’t named the blogger because she wants him to “pick better company and do better journalism.”

Romensko said Schultz told him in a telephone interview, “I don’t want to be a bully. I can say he was working for one of the larger conservative blogs, but that his name is not in the staff directory. Maybe he’s an intern, maybe an editor was playing a joke on him or maybe he was trying to get a reaction out of me. But I just want him to stop hanging around with those people and learn something out of this.”

• Jimromenesko.com (see above) also reports that elsewhere in northern Ohio, the Sandusky Register posted a voice mail message left by Erie County Tom Paul for reporter Andy Ouriel. Paul said there was a mistake in the previous day’s edition. Here is part of the relentlessly F-bombing message: “You don’t know your ass from a fucking hole in the ground. And you know what? — sorry about that but you make me mad. Give me a call back, 419-357-2985, ya shithead.” 

• Louisville’s Courier-Journal chose discretion over valor by not naming two juveniles convicted of sexually assaulting 17-year-old Kentuckian Savannah Dietrich. Lots of people, however, already knew despite the judge’s gag order. She tweeted their names to protest over what she fears will be judicial slaps on their wrists. Dietrich told the Courier-Journal they assaulted her when she passed out after drinking at a party. The youths also shared digital images of the assault with others. After negotiations with prosecutors, the pair pled guilty to first-degree sexual abuse and misdemeanor voyeurism. Dietrich faces up to180 days in jail and a $500 fine if the judge convicts her of contempt. 

• If you’ve followed news stories about the run-up to the London summer Olympics, you must know that security for the events and sites is a shambles, even by British standards of bumbling through. The firm that was paid to provide security failed in every way. The government minister responsible for domestic security failed to respond promptly or adequately. The badly stretched Army — already being dramatically reduced in strength and losing historic regiments — is filling roles designed for civilian rent-a-cops and ushers. One cartoon expressed its contempt for the organizers with soldiers being told they’ll be able to return to Afghanistan after the Olympics. Be grateful that Cincinnati’s bid for this colossal money pit was rejected. 

• Here’s a question I haven’t seen asked by the national press: Do we want a president as detached as Romney says he was from his responsibilities as owner and CEO of Bain? He says he didn’t know if his subordinates were shipping jobs overseas. The screwed up Salt Lake City Olympics — which he did help save — were more important. I believe him. But how does that salvage his claim to being a keen businessman who can sort out our country’s economy? 

• Get over it. With more than 300 million citizens and immigrants and almost as many firearms, Americans have nut jobs and a few will be violent. So I wouldn’t be unhappy if our mainstream news media suffered massacre fatigue. Maybe the latest Colorado shootings will speed that process. Similar fatigue already is evident in diminished foreign/war news.

It isn’t a question of whether to focus on the victims or the shooter or a  search for “reasons.” You don’t ask mass killers for reasons. Given the utter inadequacy of mental health services and our easy access to firearms, our rational response is to accept the risk that someone else will die in irrational mass shootings. That’s a price the NRA and its pusillanimous  legislative allies find acceptable if the alternative is more effective firearm regulation.   

A different rational response might be a news media campaign for a costly, annual federal tax stamp for every high-capacity magazine for every firearm to which they can be fitted. This wouldn’t disarm hunters in any way. Semi-automatic hunting rifles and shotguns don’t have or require 20 or 30 cartridges to put venison or duck on the table. 

The tax would include the stick-like magazines for semi-automatic pistols and submachineguns and the familiar curved magazines for civilian versions of the AK47 and its kin. Drum magazines - like that found at the Aurora theater - can hold scores of rounds and be fitted to some military and military-style weapons as well as the Thompson submachinegun and its descendants. Drums would be covered, too. 

This tax wouldn’t take away anyone’s firearm or testosterone-enhancing firepower. It doesn’t limit the number of rounds  shooters can load into their weapons the way the extinct Clinton-era 10-shot limit did. The sole function of high-capacity magazines is to make it easier to kill lots of people. That’s why real military weapons like the AK47, the M16 or even the World War II Browning Automatic Rifle — the famous BAR — had high-capacity clips. 

The tax would not be a Second Amendment issue ... or shouldn’t be. It copies the longstanding $200 federal tax required for fully automatic weapons owned by civilians. Americans buy those firearms and pay the tax. 

• Americans own more handguns, shotguns and rifles every year and reported violent crime has sharply declined. Coincidence? Absolutely. Second Amendment? When’s the last time you heard about someone with a licensed concealed firearm  and an extra-high-capacity magazine stopping a crazed gunman? Believe me, the news media would be full of such a story or NRA complaints about liberal suppression of a patriotic tale. 

I’m talking about a news media campaign to make it harder to kill lots of people in a few seconds or minutes. However, that throws us into the confused world of acceptable risks. There isn’t a chance in Columbine of doing more than taxing high-capacity magazines when Americans also accept as normal the thousands of daily deaths from drug, tobacco and alcohol abuse, obesity, medical errors, etc. 

• There’s still another related, rational response for the news media to the Batman killings: Give less prominence to nut cases worrying whether the Muslim Brotherhood has a sleeper agent at Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s right elbow, or that less than a 20- or 30-round magazine will allow Mongolian mercenaries in UN blue helmets and black helicopters to enslave us to a world government. On the other hand, while the GOP and its crazier allies promote distrust, fear and hatred of government, don’t expect such courage from the news media. That could risk being seen as partisan. 

• Enquirer reporter Sharon Coolidge’s use of open records law documented Cincinnati’s lax enforcement of lead paint removal orders. She told CityBeat that her coverage included positive impacts in addition to those above in my main column:

The day after her story was published, Mayor Mark Mallory ordered health officials to explain why they hadn't forced problem landlords to clean up their properties. 

Three public hearings led to a comprehensive city plan to eliminate childhood lead poisoning by 2010. The plan lowers the medical threshold at which health officials can intervene, thus catching lead poisoning in its earliest stages. 

City Council gave the health department more than $1 million to finance reforms. Poor families are getting kits to detect whether their homes are contaminated.

In one of his first acts as new governor, Ted Strickland allowed cities to sue lead-paint producers; Cincinnati is suing Sherwin-Williams.

State lawmakers are considering a new law, named after a family featured in the Enquirer story, to provide $20,000 grants for lead removal.

• A more recent public benefit from open records laws involved the Enquirer suit to obtain secret streetcar vendors’ bids.  Attorney Jack Greiner, who handles First Amendment issues for the paper, said that Cincinnati's ordinance requires bids be available for public review. Faced with resistance, the Enquirer went to court. Hamilton County appellate judges agreed with the paper, rejecting company arguments that records were exempt from public records law as "trade secrets." 

• Unless you’re living under a Rock of Cliches, you’ve read or heard that flu is sweeping the nation. Every sneeze, every cough, every chill and shiver warns us that the Fourth Horseman of the Apocalypse is tethering his pale horse at our curb. The catch is that despite breathless news media offerings, little unusual is happening except for an early, aggressive onset of the perennial scourge. Thousands die every year from flu, most of them elderly. It would be news if we didn’t. Annual death estimates — hampered by incomplete reporting and similar health problems — range from 3,000 to 49,000.  

• An Enquirer Sunday Forum carried Michael Kinsley’s column about Hillary Clinton’s extensive foreign travel as secretary of state. Kinsley doubts the value of much of her travel but in today’s world, “The less important the trip, the more prestige you gain by taking it.” Having time and money to waste proves you have time and money to waste . . . even if you’re on the taxpayers’  clock and paycheck. Maybe that explains an otherwise inexplicable Enquirer revelation that Steve Chabot is a foreign policy expert, citing his extensive foreign travel at taxpayer expense.

• Enquirer reporter Dan Horn produced two nay-saying front page stories. Both were welcome surprises from Cincinnati’s “get on the team” daily. One questioned the argument that right-to-work laws provide an economic boost in states like Indiana, Michigan, or, potentially, Ohio. That anti-union policy was a staple topic in my 1950s high school debating days. Economic analysis, like divining why crime rates change, is more complicated than whether union membership is optional or required in a “union shop.” Too many union/right-to-work debates — fueled by no-compromise advocates putting re-election before public benefit — ignore complexity. 

• A second invocation of skepticism by the Enquirer’s Dan Horn raised serious doubts about feel-good gun buy-back programs. I’ll go this far on guns: each firearm bought back and destroyed (not bought back and sold to dealers for resale) is a gun that won’t kill someone. Cincinnati Police destroy buy-back weapons not needed for investigations. Buy-back, however, won’t change life on Cincinnati streets where scores of young men kill each other each year. Anyone who wants a firearm can get one faster than you can say, “Your money or your life.” Similar doubts about Cincinnati’s gun buy-back program made Page 1 of the New York Times.  

• Fox 19’s Dave Culbreth came up with a smart take on the controversial idea of arming teachers and school administrators. He interviewed Target World assistant manager Amy Hanlon who demonstrated how a woman could carry a concealed handgun. As Culbreth noted, there was nothing special about her clothing: slacks, blouse, overshirt.  By the end of the interview, she’d removed nine concealed semi-automatics or revolvers, including one tucked under her bra in a holster that also was displayed on a counter-top mannequin bust. 

• WCPO-TV plans an online local news challenge to the Enquirer’s  Cincinnati.com, according to Business Courier’s Jon Newberry. It’s a pioneering effort by Cincinnati-based E. W. Scripps that could go national, Newberry suggested. Whether additional reporters, producers, editors, etc., will come from the Business Courier and other established news media was not clear. Scripps — a Cincinnati-based national print and broadcast company—  published the Cincinnati Post until it closed the barely-sustaining joint operating agreement with the Enquirer ended in 2007. 

• Blogger Peter Heimlich tipped me to Channel 19 anchor Ben Swann’s web gig called Full Disclosure. Swann says there are enough witnesses to challenge official police narratives of single shooters at three recent massacres: the Oak Creek, Wis., Sikh temple; Aurora, Colo., Batman movie premiere, and Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.  Salon.com challenged Swann about his apparent validation of those counter-narratives and he replied in part, “The bottom line for me is the issue of asking questions. As you will notice, I don’t call these operations ‘false flag’ as many people do … (his ellipses) But as a journalist, that is not my job. Rather, my job is to be a critical thinker.” And he added, “most of our media fail to question stories . . .  a journalist’s job is not to have the answers, it is to ask the questions and search for truth.” 

• There’s a pathetic undercurrent in the Enquirer’s Monday Page 1 profile of Henry Heimlich’s efforts to regain American Red Cross support for his eponymous “maneuver.” The physician claims there is no research to support the Red Cross’s decision to return to back slaps rather than Heimlich abdominal thrusts as first response to choking. Other than Heimlich’s self-serving claims, there is no research proving his maneuver works as well or better than back slaps. Assertions are not evidence. Moreover, the Red Cross adopted Heimlich’s maneuver years ago without the research Heimlich is calling for now. Heimlich has anecdotal evidence of lives saved but that’s not research. Wisely, reporter Cliff Radel quoted skeptics and critics of the maneuver. That kind of even-handedness usually escapes admiring Enquirer stories about Heimlich. And if the paper ever corrected a Memorial Day feature on water safety, I missed it. The Enquirer drew national ridicule with its illustration on how to use Heimlich’s maneuver to revive a standing near-drowning victim. 

• It’s spitting into the wind to ask sports reporters to question what jocks tell them, especially when truth-telling endangers future access. In the Good Old Days, who read about fornicating, drunken and racist professional athletes? More recently, golf reporters and publications didn’t write about married Tiger Woods’ screwing around. This time, it’s Notre Dame football star Manti Te’o’s stories about the heart-ripping death of girlfriend Lennay Kekua from leukemia. Editors loved it. Now, it seems she was a fiction amplified by incurious and credulous reporters. It took sports blog Deadspin.com to reveal the fraud after its reporters could find no public records of her birth, life, education or death. Almost as nauseating as the saccharine original stories about her death are the faux introspection by sycophant reporters caught by the fraud. 

• We’ve gone a week without a promo for Oprah’s interview with champion liar-cheater Lance Armstrong. That’s closure.  So what does Armstrong do now? Pitch performance enhancing drugs and blood transfusions on ESPN and late TV? 

• Al Gore sold his troubled Current cable network to Al Jazeera, the satellite network based in Qatar in the Persian Gulf. Good. Nothing bars foreigners from owning a cable network here, unlike the law that forced Australian Rupert Murdoch to obtain U.S. citizenship after he bought Fox.

Backed by the ruling Qatari emir, Al Jazeera scandalized Americans for broadcasting tirades by Osama bin Laden and other anti-western Arab leaders.  We should have welcomed what they said in Arabic for home audiences. Too often, we  rely on sanitized remarks for non-Arabic-speaking audiences or Washington assurances it was trying to verify that speakers were who they said they were.  Al Jazeera also infuriated Arab audiences by carrying interviews with American and Israeli officials that others in the Middle East ignored or rejected. 

Most American cable companies won’t carry the newer Al Jazeera English but its website is one of my daily stops, especially when, say, AQIM kidnaps oil workers in Algeria or French Legionnaires assist Mali’s pathetic army in trying to halt and turn back Islamist rebels. 

Al Jazeera coverage of “Arab Spring” was so aggressive that embattled North African rulers correctly accused it of supporting anti-government demonstrators. So is Al Jazeera open to interference by the Qatari government? Yes. Are its biases plain to anyone who listens or reads? Yes. We don’t ignore Fox News for its biases. 

• American news media employ local nationals in foreign bureaus for their contacts and language skills. That reliance failed when no one reported the 2010 anti-semitic rant by Mohamed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader who now is Egypt’s president. In part, Morsi called Jews “apes and dogs” and shared the fantasy that the Palestinian Authority was “created by the Zionist and American enemies for the sole purpose of opposing the will of the Palestinian people and its interests.” 

Still nastier, he urged listeners “to nurse our children and our grandchildren on hatred for them: for Zionists, for Jews . . .  bloodsuckers who attack the Palestinians, these warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs.” 

A stump speech in his Nile Delta hometown, it took more than two years to reach English-language news media. The original Arabic video is on YouTube now. I encountered a translation of Morsi this month on a Forbes website that, in part, chided the New York Times for missing or killing the story. Days later, it was on Page 1 of the Times. After that, the Obama administration an official “tut-tut.” 

• Maybe they’ll blame one of those ominous Canadian Cold Air Masses (meteorological, not theological) for the brain freeze that disabled news judgment at the Toronto Star. Flippant columns about rape aren’t funny. Jimromenesko.com posted these first two paragraphs of Rosie DiManno’s column about testimony during the sexual abuse trial of a local physician: 

“She lost a womb but gained a penis.

“The former was being removed surgically — full hysterectomy — while the latter was forcibly shoved into her slack mouth..."

• Headlines are an art that always risks a step too far in an attempt to cure the copy editor boredom and draw readers to a story. This one, from philly.com, achieves both in what has become a national story about a popular and well-connected parish pastor: “Catholic priest/meth dealer liked sex in the rectory.” You know you’d read more. 

• Finally, this from Shannyn Moore, who blogs on HuffPost as “Just a Girl from Homer, Alaska.” It appeared first in the Anchorage Daily News and makes her points without venturing beyond the pale into bad taste: “I'm not advocating for no guns. I like mine and am not about to give them up. But in this country, my uterus is more regulated than my guns. Birth control and reproductive health services are harder to get than bullets. What is that about? Guns don't kill people — vaginas do?”

Gretchen Carlson continues to make Cincinnati — her one-time home in the 1990s — proud of her accomplishments as Fox News morning host. The former WCPO-TV reporter and anchor (and former Miss America) is the latest national media personality to take the brave stand of supporting the little-known and underappreciated holiday of Christmas.

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“In order to continue the highest level of care for our growing patient volume, we have adjusted our office hours. Effective January 2nd, 2013, (sic) hours of operation for Phase II cardiac rehabilitation will be Monday, Wednesday and Friday, 6:00 AM through 4:00 PM. Hours on Tuesday and Thursday will be 6 AM to 2:30 PM. Thank you for choosing The Christ Hospital Health Network.” 

That significantly shortens the afternoon/evening hours daily for a “growing patient volume.” Didn’t anyone read this Orwellian language before it went out over an exec’s signature on hospital letterhead? To continue the highest level of care Christ will provide less, especially if patients need outpatient cardio rehab after work?    

If outpatient rehab has too few clients, are cardiologists and cardiac surgeons at this aggressively marketed heart hospital urging patients to work out at the Mount Auburn facility? Aren’t these docs telling us to quit smoking, lose weight and exercise more?

It’s not a question of the quality of the care by therapists and RNs at the outpatient rehab center; if it were, it would be closed. 

• The Sunday Enquirer carried a valuable column on Dec. 30 on what Ohio laws passed in 2012 mean. Picked up from the Columbus Dispatch, it’s a marvel of brevity and clarity and it proves there still can be substance inside the Sunday Enquirer Local section. 

• In the Good Old Days, the Enquirer would fill local pages with “evergreen” stories written before holiday slow news days. If these timeless trivia weren’t used, they could be spiked or recycled for future fallow news days. Today, evergreens apparently have been tossed on the editorial pyre while this metropolitan daily’s diminished staff is filling its shrunken news hole with staff and reader pet photos. 

• God help the Enquirer photographer who brings in a horizontal (“landscape format”) photo for page A1. It won’t fit. Formulaic layout has ads and promos bannered across the top and bottom, a deep multi-column vertical photo or graphic on the left and a little bit of news beside and beneath that photo or illustration. It seems to be the same every day, regardless of events. It hardly qualifies as design. Cover pages on the Local section fare no better. My guess? The format saves thinking every day about how best to present the news (“content” or “product”) for remaining page editors at some central Midwest location.

• The Nation offers evidence-based insights into school shootings from Katherine S. Newman, coauthor of Rampage: The Social Roots of School Shootings and dean of arts and sciences at Johns Hopkins. 

For starters, teach kids it’s right, good and potentially life-saving to tell adults when other children or teenagers talk about killing, shooting, etc. Peers of potential killers are our best early warning system. 

Newman’s research also rebuts NRA’s grandiose goal of an armed “guard” in every school; most schools are unlikely to become killing grounds. She wrote:  

“These shootings tend to happen in small towns with no history of background violence rather than in big cities which suffer almost every other kind of brutal attack except this one. There has been only one example of a rampage school shooting in an urban setting since 1970. All the others have taken place in rural towns miles from places like New York or Chicago, or in suburbs in the Western states.”

Paducah, Ky., was one of the towns that her team studied after Goth-wannabe Michael Carneal shot five Heath High School classmates: three died, one is paralyzed and another was badly wounded. 

Newman’s research reflects that of many others in describing Carneal as typical of school shooters. He was a nerdy young white male who couldn’t make lasting friendships and never fit in at school or in his football-worshiping community. He was looking for acceptance and “shooting people is drawn straight from the Hollywood playbook that equates masculinity with violence.”

Carneal talked a lot about shooting and killing but no one risked being called a snitch by alerting his parents or adults at school. 

• What Were They Thinking? Gannett’s Journal News in suburban New York went online with the names and addresses of handgun permit holders in two counties in its circulation area. The paper says it will sue to force a third county to provide that information. The paper claims the list and accompanying interactive map showing permit holder’s locations are a public service. Malarkey. Horse puckey.  Madness. So what if the data come from public records? So do names of men and women who claim to be victims of sex crimes. We don’t publish that. So what is a reader supposed to do with the handgun information? Cui bono?

Wingnuts spin wild fantasies about burglaries to obtain handguns from permit holders or burglars hitting homes where no one has a conceal/carry permit. My problem is different: it’s hard enough to wrest public documents from dim and self-serving officials. Decisions by the Journal News can’t help but undermine remaining public support for investigative/database reporting.  

The Enquirer, Louisville Courier Journal and Indianapolis Star also are Gannett papers.  I hope the Journal News'  perversion of First Amendment assertiveness doesn’t become a route to Gannett corporate rings for editors and publishers. (My name will appear if the Enquirer identifies permit holders in its circulation area. I took the class, passed the exam and obtained my permit for a cover story a year after Ohio allowed counties to issue conceal/carry permits.)

• Anger over the Gannett paper’s online posting of names and addresses of handgun permit holders (above) quickly morphed into online retaliation. Some critics posted what they said was the home address and photo of Gannett corporate CEO Garcia Martore. Other Gannett execs’ home addresses have been posted and bloggers have listed home addresses and contact information for staffers at the Journal News. The paper has hired guards for its Westchester headquarters. If guards aren’t active law enforcement officers, they must have handgun permits and could be included in lists published by the paper. 

• The daily Brattleboro Reformer bannered this headline across page 1 recently: “Let is snow, let is snow, let is snow.” Executive editor Tom D’Errico told romenesko.com that it was a “terrible, terrible typo. The night crew was short-staffed and we had an unusual last-minute early deadline with the storm marching in.” Later, he wrote in his blog: “I kept running over the reasons in my mind . . . of how or why a mistake like this can and does happen. But everything just sounded like an excuse. And the truth is: there is no excuse.” 

• Ailing former President George H.W. Bush had one of those “greatly exaggerated” brushes with eternity recently. (That now-a-cliche expression originated in Mark Twain’s response to a reporter who confused him with ailing cousin James Ross Clemens. Snopes.com says Twain actually told the reporter, “The report of my death was an exaggeration” but  added “greatly” in a manuscript.)

Back to Bush the Elder. Houston’s WBAP-AM blasted an email saying, “The Death of a President: George H. W. Bush.”  Romenesko and Texas Observer reported that news director Rick Hadley blamed the error on a common practice among news media: “We get our obituaries ready to go for people who aren’t doing well.” When Bush entered a local hospital’s ICU, WBAP prepared an email blast for his death. Hadley said a problem with the email system sent the death message to about a third of the station’s subscribers. Thirty minutes later — after callers alerted the station to its misstep — WBAP quickly sent out a corrected email. Hadley said the bulletin was not read on the radio. 

WBAP was typical of smart news media: It updates obits of prominent men and women to avoid being unprepared when the inevitable occurs. Unfailingly, that’s on deadlines when staff is short and sources are unavailable because of holidays or late/early hours. These advance obits have blanks for timely details: age, cause of death, where the person died and a credible confirmation of death. Then they are filed in ways meant to prevent all-too-common premature release. 

That caution didn’t prevent Germany's respected news weekly Der Spiegel from mistakenly publishing Bush’s obituary in late December. AP said, “The unfinished obituary appeared on Der Spiegel's website for a few minutes before it was spotted by Internet users and removed.  In it, the magazine's New York correspondent described Bush as ‘a colorless politician’ whose image only improved when it was compared to the later presidency of his son, George W. Bush.”  A Der Spiegel Twitter feed said, "All newsrooms prepare obituaries for selected figures. The fact that the one for Bush senior went live was a technical mistake. Sorry!"

Years ago at UPI, we put out HOLD FOR RELEASE obituaries of leading figures worldwide.  Some of our client media saved the incomplete obits to await news of the death. Others removed mention of death and often published them as space-filling weekend feature stories.  

The Associated Press doesn’t send out advance obits as a practice but Dan Sewell, AP’s correspondent in Cincinnati, noted a different problem: the subject outlives the byline reporter. Last year, New York Times ombuds Margaret Sullivan wrote generally about obits after talking to obit editor Bill McDonald and touched on that problem: “Occasionally, the author of the obituary was already dead by the time the piece ran – Vincent Canby on Bob Hope and Mel Gussow on Elizabeth Taylor, for example. Mr. McDonald said that in most cases when an obit subject outlives the writer, The Times does a new piece. ‘But in select cases,’ he added, ‘we feel the obit is too fine to discard, particularly if it is by a writer who brings a certain authority to it.’ The Times assigns a live body to update the obit and, in the case of Mel Gussow, offered a note to the reader acknowledging the status of the author.”

• We’ve all won another battle to hold cops accountable.  The American Civil Liberties Union sued to preempt Chicago police who object to an ACLU project on police accountability. ACLU wanted to make sure its employees wouldn’t be busted for recording officers’ words. The federal appellate court in Chicago said we all share a First Amendment right to record what police say to us. The U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the Chicago police appeal, affirming the lower court ruling. Earlier last year, federal courts said we have a right to  photograph police in public. My guess is dimmer, bolder police everywhere will continue to arrest reporters who record their words and others who photograph their actions. That’s not futile. The possibility of an arrest record — even knowing the charge will be tossed by a judge or prosecutor — can be intimidating and leave cops free of scrutiny.   

• Let Congress obscure methods and goals in naming legislation but reporters should challenge any legislator who  talks about “preventing” gun violence. 

We can’t prevent it. With some nuts among the 300-plus million living in this country and almost nonexistent mental health programs, some killers will find and use firearms on other people. We can’t prevent it. That we have hundreds of millions of firearms makes massacres even likelier. Reporters should press vote-seeking legislators on how their proposed restrictions will limit casualties from inevitable firearm violence. That brings us back to the 1994 restriction on high-capacity magazines for semi-automatic weapons. Hunting weapons and pistols for self-defense don’t need or use them.