Extry, extry! Chronicle staggers in at last!
January 31st, 2007 · < mtheo >Well, well. Twelve days after the fact the Chron has finally reported — after a fashion — on the Bonneville/Entercom story, the absence of which from Bay Area reportage has so perplexed us. The splendid Leah Garchik has a small item about KDFC today (01-31, p. E8 in the print edition, on line here, down toward the bottom — God forbid the Chron should have to go to the effort of tagging individual items). Curiously, it lacks any reference to the seller, or to the other two stations being traded away. Still, Ms Garchik gets the Tin Star with Choking-Doberman Cluster for being the first to break the Chron’s silence on this story.
Kinda reminds one (one of a certain age, at least) of the days when the real news would show up as an aside in Caen’s column. Ms Garchik’s column is the closest the Chron can muster to a regular Caen-style “gossip” — a highly inadequate term for what the brilliant but astonishingly nasty Caen actually practiced, by the way — feature; its preoccupation with those most boring of creatures, local politicos and the class of hangers-on who have replaced “socialites,” is no fault of Ms Garchik’s, but of the town she has to cover. And it features the brilliant “Public eavesdropping” item, which resurrects the premise of Stan Mack’s Real Life Funnies (“Guarantee: All Dialogue Is Reported Verbatim”) with the additional virtues of concision and community participation.
At any rate, I prefer to assume that she found the story herself; I’d hate to think the editors (finally tipped off by a certain letter, perhaps?) are using her as cover for their own lousy performance on this one. So congratulations, Leah Garchik — coverage at last!