I continue to be astonished when reporter/editor colleagues tell me with a roll of their eyes that they “don’t use Twitter.”

“I don’t really have the time,” they will say.

Right, I find myself thinking. Good luck to you, then.

Another illustration why if one expects to continue to make one’s living in the news business one would be wise to find the time to master Twitter may be found in the WaPo story excerpted below about how the news that a gunman was holding hostages at the Discovery Channel headquarters broke, as more and more stories have, on Twitter.

…The news of a gunman at the Discovery Channel’s headquarters in Silver Spring indeed traveled fast on Wednesday, but none of it came through radio, TV or newspaper Web sites, at least not at first. As it has with other breaking news events — the landing of a jet on the Hudson River in 2009, the 2008 massacre in Mumbai — the story unfolded first in hiccupping fits and starts on Twitter, the much-hyped micro-blogging service that has turned millions of people into worldwide gossips, opinion-mongers and amateur news reporters.

Before camera crews and reporters could race to the scene, a shot of alleged hostage-taker James Lee was flashing around the world via Twitpic, Twitter’s photo-sharing service that lets people see whatever a cellphone camera captures seconds after the shutter snaps. The shot — full of menace and dread — was apparently taken by an office worker peering from a window several floors above the Discovery courtyard

Read the rest here.

INNOCENCE FACT OF THE DAY: Before exoneration, 54 DNA exonerees claimed ineffective defense counsel. Appeals courts threw out 81% of those claims.

–courtesy of the Innocence Project

With 697 people awaiting execution in our fair state, California has the largest death row population in the nation.

Despite this pile up of the condemned, the CDCR’s attempt to restart executions after a four year hiatus, was temporarily derailed on Tuesday by a Marin County judge because, the judge said, the state’s new lethal injection procedures were still problematic and may constitute cruel and unusual punishment.

(I’ve written a bit about this issue in the past on WLA. Suffice it to say that we—along with various other states—used to use a cocktail of drugs that American veterinarians have long eschewed as too cruel.)

Attorney General Jerry Brown will challenge the ruling.

Now, as we wait to see if the courts will permit capital punishment to be jump started here, the LA Weekly’s cover story on Chet Atkins, one of California’s Innocence Project exonerees, seems like just the right thing to be reading simply as a reminder of what can happen when the judicial system misfires and mistakenly convicts the innocent.

The story is by Charlotte Hsu .

Here’s how it opens:

Herman Atkins Sr. keeps every receipt. About this, he is meticulous. For every bottle of water, every pack of gum, he will ask the cashier for a sales slip. Each day, he brings the slips home to his wife, Machara Hogue, who files them away in chronological order, a separate folder for each month.

When Atkins is out of the house and realizes that he has not bought anything for a few hours, he sometimes swings by a mini-mart to make a purchase so he can get a receipt. If the store has a surveillance camera, Atkins will make sure to walk past it.

If he is on the road and cannot stop somewhere, he will call Hogue. The cell phone statements are not as good as receipts, which pinpoint a person’s location at a specific time on a specific date. But they are better than nothing.

Atkins is building an alibi for a crime he has not committed.

“Herman is never driving in the car without talking to someone on his cell phone,” Hogue says. “He understands that he has to have a record of every minute of every day of his life, because when he couldn’t prove that he was somewhere else at a certain minute of the day, his freedom was taken away from him.”

Twenty-two years ago, when he had no receipts or bills or surveillance cameras to establish his whereabouts, a jury sent Herman Atkins to prison for rape and robbery in Lake Elsinore, a place he had never been.

He received a sentence of 45 years and served about a fifth of it before a DNA test proved his innocence and he was released.

“A lot of people will tell him, ‘That’s bull, it doesn’t happen like that,‘ ” Hogue says. “But you can’t tell a man who’s been through it that it doesn’t happen like that.”

For the innocent who are locked away, no apology, no amount of money, can replace the lost years. While they’re imprisoned, the world outside moves on. Children grow. Loved ones die. Birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, funerals, births, graduations — all are missed.

When an innocent man is freed, the world sees his release as a resurrection. The media is obsessed with recounting his good fortune. He is driven, intent on reclaiming his life. Opportunities open to him seem limitless.

But the reality of exoneration is ugly and complicated. After the media frenzy comes a reality the public doesn’t see: The trauma of a wrongful conviction isn’t only the years it claims. It’s also the way it changes you forever.

Spend time with Atkins and you see that he is struggling. He is nervous, suspicious, leery of women as well as law enforcement and strangers of all kinds. He describes himself as distrustful.

“People tell me, ‘Herman, you’re too hard. You’re not approachable.’ I don’t want to be approached,” he says. “Even today, I admit that I’m not so open-minded with dealing with people. I don’t like people.”

Atkins says he prefers not to dwell on the past. He has seen the way that some exonerees allow bitterness to consume them. He won’t be like that.

He insists he will not be devoured by history, obsessed with transgressions impossible to reverse. But the truth is, the past stalks him anyhow….

Read on.

Today, LA Weekly’s J. Patrick Coolican writes about the startlingly divergent reactions to LA writer Rodger Jacobs’ account of his slide toward homeless.

Coolican rightly notes that it is probably simplistic and unfair to draw any kind of conclusion about the differences between Los Angeles and Las Vegas based on the fact that one set of reactions seems to cleave to LV, the other in LA. Then again, says Coolican….

Here’s how the post opens:

Sunday the Las Vegas Sun published a first-person essay by Rodger Jacobs, a longtime L.A.-based journalist, playwright and documentary film producer, who moved to Las Vegas to care for an ailing mother, who has since died. The simple yet powerful headline: “I am frightened.” He describes how through poor health, the Great Recession, a horrible run of luck (not the gambling kind) and a few bad decisions, he and his girlfriend Lela were on the verge of homelessness, with eviction coming Tuesday. His opening exhortation seemed simple enough: Citing the classics, he asks the reader to walk a mile in his shoes. And so the people of Las Vegas did. And they basically spat on him.

Here’s a small sampling of the venom, which careens from finger wagging to beating him over the head with their conservative politics to outright hostility:

For someone who can write in a very moving way, Rodger sure has made some poor choices.

In many parts of the world this man would be rich.

I think there must be more to this story.

The guy has to stop buying cigarettes for starters….its time for a career change.

What a sob story. His girlfriend needs to get her butt out to McDonald’s and find a job.

Come on. Bad choices were made all along that got you to this point.

And a personal favorite, for its religious meaning: After reading the essay and then attending church, the commenter writes: Then I went to church, but thought about Rodger’s situation some more…The sympathy I felt after reading this story the first time has drained away, and I have read it twice more since.

No doubt, they made a bad decision or two, and sure, the nicotine addiction is a bit off-putting, but for the love of God, they’re about to be homeless.

Of course, it’s impossible to know if these commenters are in Las Vegas, but they are among the first of the hundreds of comments and were likely regular local readers of the Sun and so probably many, if not most of them. are local.

The drubbing got so bad that the paper’s editor had to jump into the comments and defend the guy. Jacobs tried to defend himself as well.

Then something happened this week — in L.A…..

Read the rest here.

WitnessLA coverage of Rodger Jacobs’ story may be found here and here.

PS: It also might be tempting to pass off the opposing reactions to conservative versus liberal. But having just spent nearly a month in the conservative-leaning Flathead County of Montana, where I retreat for part of most summers, I cannot possibly imagine most of my Montana neighbors reacting in any way but with kindness.

(Okay, yeah, knowing Montanans, they likely would have trotted out a few pithy personal opinions as they helped, but they would have helped, no question—and no strings.)

A highly respected American literary magazine, The Virginia Quarterly Review, announced Tuesday that it was going on “indefinite hiatus,” pending an internal investigation by the University of Virginia following the suicide of the VQR’s managing editor, a man named Kevin Morrissey.

It seems that the tragedy of Morrisey’s death was followed by allegations of what is being called “workplace bullying” brought against VQR’s editor, Ted Genoways, reports the C-Ville, Charlottesville’s News and Arts Weekly, one of the few publications to provide sober-minded coverage of the painful story that has triggered a minor media frenzy, but little fact checking or accuracy.

My friend, the wonderful author Tom Bissell, is one of those who wrote for the Virginia Quarterly on many occasions and knows the accused editor Ted Genoways quite well.

After listening unhappily to morning show hosts and self-styled “bullying experts” as they speculated mindlessly on the tragedy, Bissell decided to write his own narrative version of the complex human crosscurrents he thinks may have contributed to the death of one bright man and the pillorying of another.

Here is how Tom’s essay begins.

On July 30, Kevin Morrissey, the managing editor of The Virginia Quarterly Review, one of America’s most respected and ascendant literary journals, took his own life, apparently unable to abide the pressures of his job. His suicide has since opened a debate on the issue of “workplace bullying” and called into question the integrity and morality of his boss, Ted Genoways, the editor of VQR, whom I have known, and for whom I have written, for the past seven years. This unrelentingly sad story saw only limited coverage at first but has now jumped the regional transom and been featured in many prominent media outlets, including, earlier this week, The Today Show.

It says something about the nature of the story’s initial coverage that while reading it over for the first few days, I felt as though I must not have known Mr. Genoways very well at all. A man I have never witnessed even raise his voice was, suddenly, an office Iago who shouted at his staff, sent traumatizingly cruel emails and singled out Morrissey in particular for what his sister described on The Today Show as “ongoing, daily assaults.” Many of Mr. Genoways’ writers have come to his defense, only to be told that the issue here is not Mr. Genoways’ editorial skills but rather his managerial competence.

Meanwhile, the comments on sites that have run pieces about this tragedy are now reaching into the hundreds, the vast majority of which are purely speculative, written by people uninformed as to the particulars of this situation. The most heartrending comments come from members of Morrissey’s family, from whom he had been estranged for some years, and who understandably want an explanation for how and why this happened. However, a disproportionate number of comments have been provided by workplace-bullying experts, who have a vested interest in stepping to the forefront to display their expertise and thereby control the narrative. Virtually all of these “experts” have concluded that Mr. Genoways is a hideous bully….

Read the rest. The essay is smart and psychologically insightful, as is usual for Bissell’s writing. Even if you know nothing of the Virginia Quarterly Review, I promise you’ll find Tom’s analysis worth your while.

PS: In this week’s issue of C-Ville, Bissell, along with 29 other Virginia Quarterly authors, signed an open letter citing the “speculative accounts and egregious errors have already found their way into mainstream media outlets” and calling for an impartial investigation into the matter.

Let us hope that the University of Virginia is wise enough to make such an unweighted investigation possible.

In case you missed it, this story on the $3 Million in fraud and mismanagement accusations leveled at the principal of a San Fernando Valley charter school, New Academy Canoga Park Elementary School, is a doozy. It seems that the man allegedly deposited more than $1 million in his own investment account, misplaced a million or so, and spent the rest on questionable items and phony expenses.

KPCC’s Adolfo Guzman Lopez has an audio version of the story.

And the LA Times’ Howard Blume reported on the jaw-dropping story as well.

Here’s a representative clip:

Among their findings, auditors contend that the school’s former principal, who isn’t named in the audit, withdrew cashier’s checks totaling $1,073,700 from school accounts to deposit in an investment account between July 1, 2007, and Sept. 30, 2009.

“The former principal claimed that funds deposited into his personal Ameritrade account were not withdrawn, but were deposited and repeatedly lost,” the auditors wrote.

Okay, on Monday when CBS radio head, Harvey Nagler sent out the memo to all of the network’s reporters, he didn’t actually use the word “DIE,” but he was pretty emphatic.

Below you’ll find a copy of the emailed memo itself:

From: Nagler, Harvey
Sent: Monday, August 30, 2010 3:09 PM
To: @CND Radio
Subject: Twitter

Field reporters, beat reporters – it’s time to tweet.

More and more news consumers are turning to places like Twitter to keep up with the news, and we want to be there for them. That means that if you cover a beat, or if you regularly go into the field to cover stories, we want you to tweet. No exceptions.

If you haven’t joined Twitter yet, do so now, and start tweeting. If you’re already on there but you’re not tweeting regularly – please tweet more.

What should you tweet about? Breaking news, your observations when you’re out on a story, retweets of stories from other CBS News accounts…anything that can help inform our listeners and help them connect with you. Listeners love it because they have a connection with a knowledgeable news reporter that up to now has only been a voice on their radio. And you will have the opportunity to engage with them, and get feedback.

Twitter also is a great place to monitor sources…whether they be on breaking news or on your beat. Politicians tweet. Representatives of medical schools and journals tweet. And people in the middle of a developing news story tweet, to share what’s happening around them. It can work for you to give you a jump on your story.

In-studio anchors, we’d love your participation as well, when relevant.

See me if you have any questions about this new effort. See Dustin or Aliah if you need tips or if you need help creating your account.

Harvey

Monday night I got an email from writer Rodger Jacobs in which he delivered good news about his seemingly imminent plunge into homelessness that I posted about Monday.

His email read in part:

“I think we’re going to be okay, Celeste, for a few months at least; some kind (and mostly anonymous) benefactors have stepped forward. We rented a room at the Budget Suites Extended Stay hotel on Rancho this afternoon — with media in tow — and it is very conveniently located to shopping, affordable restaurants, and (this is what thrilled me) both a Barnes and Noble and Borders Books only three miles away. The room is about the size of your basic studio apartment with fridge, stove, microwave, basic cable, and wireless internet (five bucks a week).

As my friend Rudy Wurlitzer is fond of saying, keep the wind in your sails even when there is no wind…

Oh — one more thing I forgot to mention: in light of our circumstances (and the media presence), the Budget Suites waived all deposits for us, which saved us about $75.

Meanwhile, in the Sun’s comment section and around the web, the reactions to Rodger’s essay swung wildly between two extremes. There were those who opined with varying degrees of disdainful fury that Rodger’s situation merely evidenced some kind of failure of character and will.

More often, however, those who commented were empathetic—evidently figuring that, in this economy, given a few really bad reversals of fortune, all too many people could find themselves facing similarly scary circumstances.

Rodger tells me he will have a follow-up essay in the very near future–which I will, of course, post as soon as it is available.

A report released on Monday by Michael Gennaco and the LA County Office of Independent Review, found that Los Angeles County officials have, in multiple cases, ignored state law that requires them to publicly disclose child deaths resulting from abuse or neglect.

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky told the LA Times that dozens of such cases may be involved.

Garrett Therolf of the LA Times has the full story.

Here’s a clip.

….Yaroslavsky said auditors uncovered the discrepancy [between the number of deaths that occurred, and the number reported] when they reviewed the case of Jorge Tarin, an 11-year-old Montebello boy who hanged himself with a jump rope in June. In confidential court filings, social workers declared his death to be the result of abuse or neglect, but when it came time to report abuse or neglect deaths to the public, the department left his case off the list.

In the audit, Michael Gennaco, chief attorney for the Office of Independent Review, noted a dramatic change last year in the amount of information released by the department, with disclosure in only four of 18 cases. Gennaco said the pattern has extended into 2010. The Times has been denied in repeated public records requests for information.

A 2007 state law requires release of numerous records in such cases unless doing so would jeopardize a criminal investigation. Gennaco found that child welfare officials were asking law enforcement agencies to object to the release of documents before investigators had the chance to review the case files. The effect has been blanket objections to disclosure that resulted in “a virtual paralysis of the statute’s intent.”

DID WALMART DISCRIMINATE AGAINST A MILLION WOMEN?

It’s an really, REALLY unfun month for big corporations trying to dodge lawsuits from gaggles of angry women.

First Walmart. Monday’s New York Times editorial explains the matter well.

For nine years, Wal-Mart has fought to stave off a class-action lawsuit alleging that the company has long discriminated against its female workers in pay and promotions. So far it has avoided a trial on the merits of the issue. The battleground instead is whether the million or so women who have worked for Wal-Mart since 2001 really constitute a class, which the company vigorously disputes. In 2004, a federal district court judge said they did, and in April the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed, ruling the case could proceed.

Now Wal-Mart has taken the class issue to the Supreme Court. It is probably a smart legal move, given the court’s clear tendency to rule in favor of corporations, particularly when big classes or discrimination claims are involved. We hope the court resists the temptation to toss out the case, which would force women to file lawsuits one by one. Wal-Mart’s employment practices deserve a full hearing.

Agreed.

It seems the whole thing started when nine women working for WalMart realized that they were being paid less than men who did the same work, plus the guys were being promoted more often.

A district judge who found in favor of the women noted that, according to statistics, women working in Walmarts in every region of the country were being similarly underpaid when compared to their male counterparts.

What the Supremes will have to decide is whether that means every one of the one million woman working at Walmart have been discriminated against. In other words, do the female workers at Walmart constitute a class? Or should their suits be—as a very jittery Walmart hopes—simply taken on a case by case basis.

One million women in a class action suit would make the Walmart action the largest employment discrimination lawsuit in American history—a stellar designation that Walmart would prefer to avoid.

WHICH BRINGS US TO PREMPRO—FEWER WOMEN SUING, BUT BIG POTENTIAL PAYOUTS

PremPro is the hormone replacement drug that, at one time, was the most popular on the market. It is made up of Premarin, a form of estrogen that is made from the urine of pregnant mares (gross, but there you have it), and Provera, a form of artificial progesterone.

Wyeth made Premarin, Upjohn, Provera. Wyeth eventually packaged the two together as PremPro. And, for years, doctors prescribed by the bucketful.

Around 20 years ago, however, some of the nation’s more research-savvy OB/GYNs stopped prescribing PremPro when other hormone replacements drugs were developed that more closely mimicked the body’s own original hormones, and thus were deemed safer (and had fewer side-effects).

Still the preponderance of American doctors continued to go with the familiar PremPro. To date, it is estimated around 6 million women worldwide have taken the drug.

Then in 2002, the Women’s Health Initiative made headlines when they stopped a massive study (sponsored by the National Institute of Health), after they found that women in the study who took PremPro were more likely to get breast cancer than those who did not.

PremPro-taking women with breast cancer wondered if Wyeth had suspected the risks and ignored them. Lawsuits resulted. Then more lawsuits.

Pfizer bought Wyeth around a year ago (and Upjohn in 2003)– along with it, as many as 9000 lawsuits filed by women with breast cancer who claimed that PremPro was, at least in part, to blame for their illness—and that Pfizer/Wyeth hid what they knew of its dangers..

At first, Wyeth/Pfizer was able to get a bunch of suits dismissed, but now the stronger suits are arriving in court, and the tide appears to have turned.

Out of the 12 cases that have thus far gotten in front of a jury, the score is Pfizer 5, women 7. (Here’s the result of one such case from last year., in which the jury concluded that the drug company purposely hid the risk of cancer.)

At the end of last week, Pfizer settled another case before trial.

Monday, a Pennsylvania Superior Court gave plaintiffs another win when she ruled that the two-year statue of limitations for women who allege their breast cancer was caused by PremPro started, not from the day they were diagnosed with cancer, but from the day the Women’s Health Initiative study was released.

Stay tuned. This issue is far from over.

Rodger Jacobs, a wonderfully erudite, warm and funny California writer, author and documentary producer is teetering on the edge of homelessness and is frightened of what life will hold if he falls off that edge—a possibility that, at the moment, is looking all but inevitable.

At the request of editors at the Las Vegas Sun who know him , Jacobs wrote an account of his situation, which the Sun printed on Sunday.

I knew Rodger had moved to Las Vegas and was having financial trouble because of a worsening physical condition. But I didn’t know things had gotten this fiscally perilous until Rodger dropped me a note Sunday night to alert me to the story in the Sun.

Below you’ll find the editor’s note and the beginning of Rodger’s piece. It is worth taking the time to read the whole thing—and then to take an extra moment to send him whatever good wishes you can. (However, if you have some freelance writing assignments to spare, send those instead.)

Editor’s note: Think “homeless” and most minds turn to scenes of disheveled men and women living in makeshift tents along Foremaster Lane near downtown Las Vegas. Many of them have adopted homelessness as their lifestyle. But the Great Recession has created the new homeless, people with good work histories who are victims of unemployment and foreclosures. We won’t necessarily find them sleeping on a downtown sidewalk. We asked Rodger Jacobs to tell his story, in his own words.

As I write this, taking a brief late night respite from packing books into boxes, I am just days away from an uncertain future, a Black Tuesday when the Sword of Damocles will, under legal edict, fall upon my head; and, as the ancient Greek and Roman tale of Dionysius and Damocles urges, I invite you to walk a mile in my shoes for a few brief moments.

Within a matter of days I am going to become one of the more than 13,000 homeless people living in Clark County and, frankly, I am frightened.

I am a 51-year-old professional writer; throughout my 20-year career I have been an award-winning feature documentary producer (“Wadd: The Life and Times of John C. Holmes” and multiple educational documentaries), a trade and arts magazine journalist, a successful playwright (“Go Irish: The Purgatory Diaries of Jason Miller”), a true crime author and a literary event producer. For the past two years, I have enjoyed my role as a book and literature columnist for Pop Matters, a popular online journal of cultural criticism.

But in the larger scheme of things, my credentials are utterly meaningless. In less than two weeks, my girlfriend and I will be without a home in a town where we have no friends, no family, and apparently no safety net to catch us when we fall.

I have been medically disabled for the past eight years; my primary source of income is my monthly Social Security disability payment of $926 and whatever supplemental income I can earn within the $1,000 monthly limit, but with jobs in the freelance market few and far between in the new economy, several months often pass without additional income.

My girlfriend, Lela, and I relocated to Las Vegas in 2007 from San Francisco to care for my terminally ill mother; the plan at the time was to liquidate my mother’s meager estate upon her passing, see to her funeral arrangements and return to California. But by the time my mother succumbed to her illness two years ago this week, the recession had hit, jobs for myself and Lela — a freelance editor — were scarce, my health was worsening, and we found ourselves effectively stuck in Southern Nevada. We were living a hand-to-mouth existence, with no savings and uncertain where the next month’s rent was coming from — let alone money for groceries, transportation, prescription and doctor co-pays and medical supplies not covered by Medicare…..

Read the rest.

The photo, by Sam Morris of the Las Vegas Sun, was taken as Rodger talked to one of his editors to see if he could expedite a check he is owed. Reportedly, the editor wasn’t able to do anything about speeding up payment.

UPATE: Commenter sbl pointed out that the blog Griffith Park Wayist has information as to how someone can help Rodger if anyone has a mind to do so. They’ve also posted the video that the Sun made of Rodger and his circumstance, which is assuredly worth watching.