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Table of Contents: March

On the River
Jonathan Lindberg: The Race for Memphis Mayor, Part II
Mick Wright: Resurrecting the Overton Shell
Commissioner Mike Ritz: Challenges for Big Shelby

On the Road
Nicholas Carraway: Al Gore Jr.

Judith’s Picks
Judith Conroy

Lead Article
Michael Roy Hollihan: This Just In: How the Memphis television news is adapting to the internet age

Feature Articles
Daniel E. Johnson: Group-Think: Does science encourage open-mindedness?
John Fund: Pass the Salt: Why the 2008 Election is no sure thing

Ties that Bind
What is Really Happening at the Temple Mount
Stop Subsidizing Iran

On the Shelf
Jonathan Lindberg: How the Other Half Lives

On the Money
Chuck Bates: The Financial State of the Union, Part II

The following is an excerpt from our March issue:

By: Michael Roy Hollihan

The evolution of local television news has definitely reached new heights. Never in this city have so many local options been made available from so many different directions. Consider this: in 1980, there were two stations doing local news, with roughly ten hours a week in programming. Twenty-five years later, the number of stations has doubled, delivering well past one-hundred hours per week altogether. The twenty-four hour cable news phenomenon has created a public hungry for immediate news. That expectation has transferred to local television, which now broadcasts throughout the day, breaking into regular programming and scrambling to beat-out any competitors by minutes and even seconds. Local television news has reached its height, and the competition has never been so fierce.

There are four news stations in Memphis – NewsChannel 3 (WREG), Action News 5 (WMC), Fox 13 (WHBQ) and Eyewitness News24 (WPTY). Their corporate owners (The New York Times, Raycom, Fox News, and Clear Channel, respectively) spend a small fortune each year on market research, audience surveys, anchor and reporter research, focus groups, and polls, all in an effort to find out what people want to see and how they’d like to see it. Every aspect of presentation is dissected. Anything that can be tweaked is studied and improved.

Stations will fight tooth and nail to get a story on the air just seconds before their competition. Then they will crow to their viewers when they do. They will brag about exclusives. They will brag about equipment. They will fight as though their lives depended on beating the other guys out. And in many ways, it does.

Still, according to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, local news has seen a twenty-five percent drop in viewers since 1997. Despite an unprecedented growth in programming, fewer people than ever are watching. All four local news stations in Memphis fill the day with broadcasts – morning shows, noon, late afternoon, evening, and late night news. Not to mention Saturday morning news, weekend evening and late night news. Still, with all these options, stations are no longer pulling in the viewers they once did. Instead, they are cannibalizing each other’s numbers.

“You aren’t going to get people who don’t watch TV,” says Peggy Phillip, former news director for Action News 5. “Non-watchers have already made up their minds. You get people who watch other stations. It’s a much easier job.” The hope is to create viewers that remain loyal to a particular broadcast, despite changes.

And there have been changes. (more…)

The following is an excerpt from our March issue:

By: Jonathan Lindberg

There are really two kinds of books on poverty. The first are stories of sympathy. These books are meant to pull on the heartstrings. They come with pictures and usually offer guilt. There are protests, there are cries for utopia, but these studies offer little substance when it comes to actually dealing with poverty. The second approach is one of numbers. Poverty is a problem of economics. Forget the individual. The key to eliminating poverty is basic economics applied properly.

The End of Poverty, which was reviewed in these pages (09/05) falls into the second category. Despite its utopian title, economist Jeffery Sachs acknowledges poverty can never be eliminated. Still, with economics-done-right, extreme poverty (the one-billion souls in this world that live on less than one-dollar a day) can be greatly reduced. It is a book worth reading.

However, neither approach seems to tell the whole story. Either the individual is ignored, or they are elevated to the station of sainthood.

How the Other Half Lives (reprinted Barnes & Noble Books, 242 pages), written by New York Tribune reporter Jacob Riis during the height of the New York tenement epidemic of the late nineteenth century, offers a relevant look at the problem of poverty that is neither utopian nor cold. For this reason alone, the book is still read, though the tenements have disappeared. The book has recently been released in an updated edition, complete with introduction and notes.

The brilliance of Riis is his ability to remain detached from his characters, while at the same time deeply involved in their plight. Riis was the first to use images to heighten the feeling on poverty. However, his pictures (published in the new edition) are not syrupy and manufactured. They are raw. Riis was famous for refusing to give money to the begging poor. However, Riis was also known for providing food for children of families that were packed into suffocating tenements. (more…)

The following is an excerpt from our March issue:

By: Nicholas Carraway

For those of you who do not know Nicholas Carraway (I assume everyone does), he has spent the better part of the last twenty years traveling the country in a renovated R.V., working as a freelance reporter for a number of wonderful publications. His recent kick has been one-on-one interviews. Mr. Carraway has agreed to send the Main Street Journal his notes. Since he does not believe in the use of computers, the notes come in a large Federal Express envelope and are usually jumbled. The quotes you find in this article are mostly accurate; however, the questions may be somewhat out of place. This interview took place with former Vice President and Oscar Award Winner Al Gore Jr. at the plush Mondrian Hotel on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, California.

NC Mr. Gore, it is an honor to sit down with you again.

AG Please Nicholas, just call me Al – Al Gore. I used to be the next president of the United States of America.

NC Yes, I have heard you say that before. Actually, we have all heard you say that before.

AG (laughing) Those were the good ol’ days, weren’t they Nicholas?

NC If you say so. We are here to talk about the Oscars though. Did you ever imagine you would one day win an Oscar? (more…)