I’ll get back to the mayor’s stuff in a minute. But a reader, Dick, wants to know the following:
How come the Voice was missing in action for much of the pension trial? Not even a mention of the early and abrupt resting of Aguirre’s case for Phase 1? How about an analysis of strengths and weaknesses of the City Attorney’s case and those of the intervenors?”
Every day we have to make a decision on how best to use the resources we have. There are stories that go on each and every day in San Diego that I would love to cover, but we simply don’t have enough reporters to cover them. (See our fall membership drive if you’re interesting in helping us hire more reporters.)
That said, it is the pension trial. It’s a big deal and will have a huge impact on city finances. And one of our major foci is City Hall. How can we not cover it?
We are keeping close tabs on everything that happens and trying to forecast the days we need to go. So each day we must weigh whether it is a better use of our resources to have our writers working on original stories or in the courtroom, watching the same thing any number of other reporters are already watching.
For instance, in the last two weeks, Evan McLaughlin was able to do this story on the SEC no one else had written or this story on unfinished pension reforms because he didn’t go to the courthouse. No one else had written those stories. (And then, we did pop in on Monday when we thought the actuary’s testimony would be important. And it turns out we were the only ones that picked it up.)
With our resources, we need to decide each day how we get the best, freshest and most interesting stories we can find.
And oftentimes the issues that are getting dealt with in this slow-moving trial we have already written about. Remember, this is just Phase I of the trail. It is just dealing with what issues will actually get handled during a jury trial.
We’re still at least a month away from an actual jury trial.
E-mail me and let me know if you have any concerns or complaints about this coverage.
Here’s another question from Helena:
I can’t seem to find the listing of your Board of Directors on your website. Who is on the Voice Board? If it’s confidential, why is that? Thanks.
It’s not confidential. In fact, here’s the link.