Interested in seeing what the interior of former Chestnut Junior High School looks like these days, prior to its pending redevelopment?
A press release from the city reveals the details: Miramar Real Estate Management "will introduce its preliminary plans for the redevelopment of 495 Chestnut Street" today starting at 1:30 pm at the building.
Mayor Charles Ryan and Miramar representatives will offer comments and a briefing. A tour of the building will follow.
After the tour, a slideshow presentation about the redevelopment will take place at the Springfield Sheraton Hotel. If you read Tuesday’s piece here, you’re already an expert.
People sometimes are understandably frustrated that they can’t find out about events like this enough in advance to be able to attend. In the case of this event, the press release included the information, "Embargoed until 3/15/07," presumably because the city was attempting to avoid upstaging itself by releasing simultaneously both the news of the ULI report release (have you downloaded the report [PDF] yet?) as well as the news about Miramar representatives being in town to talk about Chestnut Estate. Any development news is also upstaged by crime news such as this week’s shooting.
The fact that the news releases were timed in this way shows two things: one, the city has a skilled, experienced journalist handling releases now in the person of Azell Murphy Cavaan, new community relations director as of late February.
Two, the current condition of reporting and journalism in the city is estimated such that we are perhaps unable to grasp more than one or two big local stories at a time, because they gobble up news resources like precious air time minutes and column inches.
My blog has its own version of that, one I’ve been asking to have fixed among many other fixes, which is the limited number of recent posts that show in the right-hand column. It ties my hands and causes me to post less frequently. Other than that, I’ll post as many big stories as I can fit into this space, as my time allows, but it’s probably true that only a handful can easily be remembered. Most people simply have more important things to do than track news like some of us news-junkies. You know—they have actual lives.
Whether multiple important stories emerging can be "grasped" at once is another question. I think we’re capable of grasping more than what the media tends to feed us.
All that said, I, too find it frustrating when big events are planned and we don’t get much notice, especially when it happens to relate to a pet project or interest. Later, if the event barely gets any play in the news, one feels as though the media cannot even be relied upon to cover such things in detail. Resources are stretched too thin. People who care deeply about the matter at hand might then rightly raise questions because of the thin coverage of an issue—sometimes questions that could have been answered earlier if the initial coverage had been fuller and fleshed out. Thus we eat our own tail, at worst creating a community dialogue founded on not knowing the facts, evolving even into anger and outrage because residents feel so disconnected from the events and happenings right in their own community.
On the other hand, it’s also true sometimes that events are simply scheduled at the last minute, when the right elements pull together, and it’s the best we can manage. Maybe the hope is that the members of the media will drop everything and show up. Sometimes they do, but it’s a judgment call on their part, and they’ll cover it to the degree they think it will matter to their audience—or their advertisers.
City developments are best covered ably and completely, not to tell people what to think but to keep us informed so we can continue to think for ourselves, and save our community a lot of trouble and heartache down the road. We feel more included in the whole process from the beginning when facts are made available, images and context included. This is just one reason why responsible journalism, embracing a genuine civic spirit, matters so much to the health of a community.
