media maven / By Marcy Burstiner

Dope beats

(May 3, 2007)  A small item in the April 21 issue of the Reporter began this way:

The unsanctioned celebration of the illegal drug marijuana on Friday commonly referred to as “420” didn’t go unnoticed by the Arcata Police Department.

Forget the problem of the double negative. I ripped this 127-word brief out of the paper because it exemplified a problem in the local media. Here’s what caught my eye:

Arcata’s Redwood Park has become one of the main areas were [sic] celebrants congregate, according to the news release, and the crowd on Friday was estimated at approximately 3,500 people.

That’s almost 4 percent of all people in Humboldt County 15 and over. The police were there, but the Eureka Reporter and Times-Standard missed it. So did the North Coast Journal, but that’s because Heidi Walters was over at Clam Beach covering the several hundred campers over there. We don’t know how many participated in 420-related activities elsewhere because the newspapers didn’t follow it up. Omission of a newsworthy event is curious, but more so when the issue is one that affects a great number of readers, is controversial and, in this case, inherently sexy.

Consider another overlooked story. On April 18, the Lumberjack, of which I’m faculty adviser, reported that 80 people marched from the Arcata Community Forest to City Hall on April 4 to support the cultivation of medical marijuana. The march was in response to concerns HSU President Rollin Richmond raised earlier in the year that proliferation of indoor grows hurt the school’s enrollment and added to the housing crisis.

I don’t know how an assignment editor could ignore a rally of some 80 people in a town of 15,000. Years ago I covered a routine house fire. My managing editor asked me if I thought it should go on page one. I asked her what other stories she had, and she laughed. In Humboldt County on any given day, how many local stories are bigger than a march of 80 people from the forest to City Hall to counter HSU President Rollin Richmond, and how many are bigger than a gathering of 3,500 people at exactly 4:20 p.m. to illegally puff weed while police watch?

Last year I asked then Times-Standard editor Charles Winkler why no reporter on his paper covered marijuana as a beat, since it was an important part of the local economy. He said the Times-Standard did cover marijuana - through its crime reporter. Hank Sims, editor of the North Coast Journal, suggested to me that as someone new to the area, I didn’t know that much of the big production had moved away.

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