I've been a critic of the asinine Erie airport runway expansion project purported to cost about $80 million, but which will inevitably vastly exceed that misleading estimate.
An article in today's Pittsburgh Post Gazette reporting yet another huge decline in traffic at that city's international airport further confirms the waste of public monies here in Erie on this runway to nowhere. Following that is a blog I posted on this topic back in November of 2007.
Airport traffic declined again last year
Friday, February 12, 2010
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Passenger traffic dropped another 7.8 percent at Pittsburgh International Airport last year, continuing a trend that began after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and has yet to abate.
Overall, eight million travelers used the airport in 2009, compared to 8.7 million in 2008. That's only about a third of the 20.7 million passengers that used the airport in 1997, its record year, when it was a major hub for US Airways.
The Allegheny County Airport Authority attributed the latest decline to a 20 percent decline in passengers posted by US Airways, which eliminated its Pittsburgh hub in 2004 but still is the region's dominant carrier with nearly 29 percent of the traffic.
AirTran Airways posted a 24.8 percent gain in 2009 and Southwest Airlines, the airport's second largest carrier, showed a three percent increase, but neither was enough to offset the US Airways losses.
Mob hysteria fuels runway project
A contagious mob hysteria has overtaken Erie county council and executive Mark DiVecchio, egged on by the development-at-any cost crowd and its mouthpiece, the Times Publishing Co., as they bind taxpayers to superfluous runway expansion at the Erie airport to expand services already underutilized by Erie’s anemic air passenger market,which should be directed towards more traditional and critical county needs.
All county residents must pay one way or another for the runway project, despite the fact that nearly half the county’s residents outside city and Millcreek/Summit boundaries will derive little or no benefit from it. Most of the relatively few who use air passenger services at all, prefer to drive to Buffalo, Cleveland or Pittsburgh where a more convenient and timely array of flights await to serve them.
Any benefit to them from this wasteful expenditure is negligible or non-existent.While all council members share in the political depravity inherent in the airport runway scheme, the principal culprit is the county executive who is pandering to Times-News editorialists and their sycophants.
Proponents claim the runway project is needed to fuel future economic growth which will enhance the entire county. But no one has produced a single credible survey or study to support their contention, nor anything resembling a cost-benefit analysis. Rather, county officials are flying, so to speak, by the seat of their pants
Friday, February 12, 2010
The death of community journalism, revisited
Just below is a comment from D. Homan posted about a week ago pertaining to a blog I penned here more than two years ago dealing with the Times Publishing Co.'s, decision to junk the network of weekly newspapers throughout the county once known as the Brown Thompson Newspapers. In defense of this callous money-grubbing move, the Times promised to uphold a commitment to community journalism in those communities by featuring one of them each week in its daily rag, the Erie Times-News. Needless to say, that promise was short-lived, as asserted by Mr. Homan.
D. Homan said...
"It's very disappointing that the Times-News has not kept its promises to have a section for each community to replace their local Brown-Thompson newspapers. This monopoly on the local news should be against the law!Then they make it so hard to submit a comment on the story. No wonder there are no comments!"
February 7, 2010 11:07
Here is a copy of the blog to which his comment pertains, first published here back in October, 2007.
An epitaph for community journalism
This is the story of how the Times Publishing Co, five years ago, killed community journalism in Erie County. In July of 2002, the Times, publisher of the only metropolitan daily newspaper and seven weeklies within Erie County - which it had acquired years ago known as the Brown-Thompson newspapers - confirmed rumors rampant throughout the county for several months that it would close all seven.
They included the North East Breeze, which had been in continuous publication under one name or another for more than 100 years, longer even than the Times’s daily newspaper, as well as papers in Girard, Edinboro, Union City, Millcreek and elsewhere. While I can’t speak for the other communities, what happened in North East was prototypical.
Citing rising costs, the Times said in place of the local coverage hitherto provided by the weeklies, it would incorporate news coverage of each community in a weekly zoned or regional section of its daily newspaper, the Times-News, which it would call "NEIGHBORS."
But the reality which soon emerged was that the new weekly sections in the daily paper were loaded with copy from half dozen other communities, including some just across the PA-NY state line, Ripley, Westfield and Chautauqua. The Times did not explain how it was going to fit all the local news and editorial copy previously contained in seven weeklies - typically running from more than a dozen to several dozen broadsheet or tabloid pages - into a single weekly zoned section, for the obvious reason that it would be impossible.
Most of what the Times’s "Neighbors" section published about North East is what is known in the trade as “fluff:” soft, fleeting, feature and human interest articles which are fun and easy for newspaper writers to write, but which contain little of substance.There’s a place for that kind of newspaper writing, but not at the expense of more relevant and meaningful reporting requiring tough, time-consuming, gritty, dogged digging out of facts, or investigative and analytical reporting, which constitute a newspaper’s principal trade-in-stock.
Soon after the Times had acquired the Breeze and the other weeklies, the only ones within the county, from Brown-Thompson, it proceeded upon a premeditated and cynical long-term voyage of attrition that would ultimately eliminate them as advertising competition to the Times’s flagship daily in Erie.
The Times gradually cut staff, expenses and coverage at the Breeze, reducing the number of pages and its local “news hole,” using countless galleys of stock pages and trivial syndicated filler to flesh it out.
Much of the coverage had little or no relevance to North East readers and subscribers. Weekly inclusion of canned news and events from the other communities was indiscriminately shoveled into the shrinking news hole of the Breeze. It eventually became, in effect, a regional rather than a local weekly covering most of Erie County and parts of Crawford County and Chautauqua County, NY, although it was still called the North East Breeze.
For all these reasons: reduced staff, smaller newshole, irrelevance to local
interests, and non-professional journalism practices, the Breeze soon began losing local reader and advertiser support. Once cherished in the community, the Breeze eventually became an object of contempt among the vast majority of local residents.
By the time it was shuttered by the Times, over-the-counter-sales of the Breeze at the town’s most prominent news stand had dropped from about 60 to 16 copies per week, mirroring its drop in subscriptions, as well as reader and advertiser interest.
Immediately North East, like the other small towns which had been robbed of their local newspapers by the Times, lost its principal community bulletin board and consistent coverage of its local government entities, including the borough council, township board of supervisors, planning and zoning commission, water and sewer authority, and others, from which it has never recovered.
It also lost its only outlet for local advertising. Accustomed to print advertising costs geared to the size of the community and its small mom and pop businesses,local advertisers were suddenly faced with costs apropos to metropolitan Erie, which they could ill afford.
Costs of legal advertising for the local government entities required by law doubled overnight, forcing them to cut back drastically in other budget areas and eliminating critical services and programs.
In the wake of these sobering events, I wrote a letter to the editor of the Erie Times-News. It concluded::
“It's tragic that a faceless and indifferent absentee corporation purportedly dedicated to the freedom of information and press with no ties to or stake in the community, except for its bottom line, has with impunity put an inglorious end to one of this community’s most precious and long-lived assets and institutions, a reflection of its unique culture and heritage, its local newspaper.”
Needless to say, the Times never published my letter.
D. Homan said...
"It's very disappointing that the Times-News has not kept its promises to have a section for each community to replace their local Brown-Thompson newspapers. This monopoly on the local news should be against the law!Then they make it so hard to submit a comment on the story. No wonder there are no comments!"
February 7, 2010 11:07
Here is a copy of the blog to which his comment pertains, first published here back in October, 2007.
An epitaph for community journalism
This is the story of how the Times Publishing Co, five years ago, killed community journalism in Erie County. In July of 2002, the Times, publisher of the only metropolitan daily newspaper and seven weeklies within Erie County - which it had acquired years ago known as the Brown-Thompson newspapers - confirmed rumors rampant throughout the county for several months that it would close all seven.
They included the North East Breeze, which had been in continuous publication under one name or another for more than 100 years, longer even than the Times’s daily newspaper, as well as papers in Girard, Edinboro, Union City, Millcreek and elsewhere. While I can’t speak for the other communities, what happened in North East was prototypical.
Citing rising costs, the Times said in place of the local coverage hitherto provided by the weeklies, it would incorporate news coverage of each community in a weekly zoned or regional section of its daily newspaper, the Times-News, which it would call "NEIGHBORS."
But the reality which soon emerged was that the new weekly sections in the daily paper were loaded with copy from half dozen other communities, including some just across the PA-NY state line, Ripley, Westfield and Chautauqua. The Times did not explain how it was going to fit all the local news and editorial copy previously contained in seven weeklies - typically running from more than a dozen to several dozen broadsheet or tabloid pages - into a single weekly zoned section, for the obvious reason that it would be impossible.
Most of what the Times’s "Neighbors" section published about North East is what is known in the trade as “fluff:” soft, fleeting, feature and human interest articles which are fun and easy for newspaper writers to write, but which contain little of substance.There’s a place for that kind of newspaper writing, but not at the expense of more relevant and meaningful reporting requiring tough, time-consuming, gritty, dogged digging out of facts, or investigative and analytical reporting, which constitute a newspaper’s principal trade-in-stock.
Soon after the Times had acquired the Breeze and the other weeklies, the only ones within the county, from Brown-Thompson, it proceeded upon a premeditated and cynical long-term voyage of attrition that would ultimately eliminate them as advertising competition to the Times’s flagship daily in Erie.
The Times gradually cut staff, expenses and coverage at the Breeze, reducing the number of pages and its local “news hole,” using countless galleys of stock pages and trivial syndicated filler to flesh it out.
Much of the coverage had little or no relevance to North East readers and subscribers. Weekly inclusion of canned news and events from the other communities was indiscriminately shoveled into the shrinking news hole of the Breeze. It eventually became, in effect, a regional rather than a local weekly covering most of Erie County and parts of Crawford County and Chautauqua County, NY, although it was still called the North East Breeze.
For all these reasons: reduced staff, smaller newshole, irrelevance to local
interests, and non-professional journalism practices, the Breeze soon began losing local reader and advertiser support. Once cherished in the community, the Breeze eventually became an object of contempt among the vast majority of local residents.
By the time it was shuttered by the Times, over-the-counter-sales of the Breeze at the town’s most prominent news stand had dropped from about 60 to 16 copies per week, mirroring its drop in subscriptions, as well as reader and advertiser interest.
Immediately North East, like the other small towns which had been robbed of their local newspapers by the Times, lost its principal community bulletin board and consistent coverage of its local government entities, including the borough council, township board of supervisors, planning and zoning commission, water and sewer authority, and others, from which it has never recovered.
It also lost its only outlet for local advertising. Accustomed to print advertising costs geared to the size of the community and its small mom and pop businesses,local advertisers were suddenly faced with costs apropos to metropolitan Erie, which they could ill afford.
Costs of legal advertising for the local government entities required by law doubled overnight, forcing them to cut back drastically in other budget areas and eliminating critical services and programs.
In the wake of these sobering events, I wrote a letter to the editor of the Erie Times-News. It concluded::
“It's tragic that a faceless and indifferent absentee corporation purportedly dedicated to the freedom of information and press with no ties to or stake in the community, except for its bottom line, has with impunity put an inglorious end to one of this community’s most precious and long-lived assets and institutions, a reflection of its unique culture and heritage, its local newspaper.”
Needless to say, the Times never published my letter.
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