We go out of our way to make the Advocate a different kind of newspaper, and this month is no exception.
Our cover story is a unique question-and-answer session with Mayor Steve Bartlett, one unlike any we’ve seen published in Dallas.
During typical sessions with newspaper or television reporters, many of the questions and answers go unreported or are significantly shortened. After all, since most national readership studies indicate Americans have a 30-second attention span, many in the media believe it’s fruitless to offer longer, more comprehensive stories – since no one will read or watch them.
We’ve elected to buck the trend and publish virtually an unedited transcript of our mayor’s comments during a neighborhood-oriented, 45-minute interview.
After all, how often do you have a chance to sit down with the mayor of our City and pick his brain about issues that really make a difference – issues such as neighborhood crime, code enforcement, education and race relations?
How often do you have a chance to hear our mayor, in his own words, explain how he feels about the City and evaluate his job running it?
The result is an admittedly lengthy story – more than 5,700 words, to be exact. By way of comparison, the Advocate’s typical cover story is approximately 1,500 words, and our typical inside feature story is approximately 600 words.
Bartlett makes some interesting, maybe even surprising, comments during this interview. But you’ll have to read the entire interview to understand the context in which he makes these statements and whether you agree.
At times during the interview, we could have adopted the patented television-interviewer technique and interrupted Bartlett’s answers with pointed questions designed to land a media punch on a political heavyweight.
Or we could have asked and had answered many more questions, reporting only those that would make the biggest headlines on the 10 o’clock news.
But we consciously decided not to pursue this tactic for one simple reason: We elected this guy to be our mayor, and every once in a while, all of us should have a chance to hear all of what he has to say about the complex topics affecting our lives.
Certainly, it’s convenient when Tracy Rowlett or Clarice Tinsley spoon-feed us a 30-second report on the murder(s) or drug bust(s) of the day, complete with a one-sentence response from the mayor or some other public official. But think about it: How valuable is that information, especially when we see the same thing every night?
In 30 seconds, what can we really learn about crime or our elected officials’ response, other than that death and drugs are pretty frightening, and that people tend to look pretty helpless when their solutions to complex problems are restricted to one sentence?
It’s no wonder that some of our neighbors are convinced Dallas is on a hopeless, downward spiral, thinking only the foolish and the poor remain here to go down with the ship.
Well, that’s “30-second thinking” – based purely and simply on what the TV news reported last night, and the night before, and the night before.
There are plenty of good people and positive accomplishments occurring in our neighborhoods every day; in fact, every hour. And while you typically won’t find much of this good news reported in the big media outlets, you’ll find it here in the Advocate each month.
The biggest difference between the Advocate and other local media outlets is that our primary goal is making our neighborhoods better places to live, not selling more papers (ours is free), winning national media awards (we don’t know of any for monthly newspapers), or making our elected officials look like fools (some of them don’t need our help, anyway).
But this isn’t a one-paper or one-man task. We need your help. And here’s what we’d like you to do this month: Keep the Advocate handy until you have 30 minutes or so to read the interview with our mayor, and then drop us a letter and let us know your response. (Each of you who writes us will receive a 100-percent-cotton, Advocate t-shirt for your effort.)
We like to think reading the Advocate is a productive way to spend a few hours each month learning about your neighbors, discussing issues that affect us all, finding out about local retailers and business people who also care about our neighborhood, and supporting those around us who actually are working on solutions to our City’s seemingly hopeless problems.
The Advocate works hard to ensure that if a neighborhood problem is identified in our pages, a potential solution or two also is identified. We don’t want to be dispassionate journalists when it comes to addressing issues that affect our lifestyles, our home values and our children’s education. We live here, too, and our paper can’t be successful if our neighborhoods don’t thrive.
That’s why we’ve decided to do things a little differently than some of our media cousins, including printing an interview long enough to substitute for the television news one night.