Yesterday I intimated that the mainstream print media pretty much ignored the August 23 proceedings of the Central Wastewater Treatment meeting at Neuhoff, which Enclave exhaustively chronicled. Neither of the Nashville daily newspapers gave any indication that a reporter was present for the meeting.
No stories appeared in either the Tennessean or the Nashville City Paper with details about the meeting other than Nancy Deville's Tennessean piece that came out before the proceedings. The Tennessean didn't even mention the meeting yesterday; not even in the North Nashville section of the paper.
The NCP published a piece yesterday by Craig Boerner, which looked more like an advertisement for Metro Water Services than a report on the meeting. It is the standard puff piece that probably followed a press release. It simply describes what the new biosolids buildings will do once built, as told by Metro Water's communication liaison, Sonia Harvat (who was also interviewed by Deville beforehand). Boerner did not even reference the meeting, let alone give any neighborhood responses, choosing instead to channel Harvat on how the fertilizer produced by the new human waste facility would resemble "rat pellets."
Reporter Bill Harless, who covers neighborhoods for the NCP, was silent on neighborhood response to the meeting. I understand that he was covering the Brentwood City Commission on Monday night; he published something on that yesterday. And it looks like while he was there he milked a second story on a Brentwood police charity for today's edition, but he wrote nothing on the North End response to the wastewater meeting, either before or after the meeting.
All in all, the print media's showing on this important meeting was truly poor and barely extant.
The more that Lynn and I discussed your piece on the 'waste-to-pellet-world', the more I think you should send your piece to the Tennessean and tell them that this is an important story they missed. At the very least it would make a good Nashville Eye op-ed piece.
ReplyDeleteI read the article in the NCP and was unimpressed. I like how they really pushed the point that Metro Water was trying to become a better neighbor to the community however.
ReplyDeleteI know we weren’t asked about the design of the buildings and maybe this has all been set in place already with out much community input… But I actually understand in a lot of ways. For example if I were to ask my clients things like, what they wanted their server rooms to look like and what color CAT5 cables they wanted me to pull for data and phones; I would not be able to get anything at all done. I’m not saying this whole thing has been handled correctly but I do know how it is to deal with people who have a limited understanding of the service that I’m providing and most of the time it’s far easier and both parties are happier with the final product with they just trust the experts and let them do there job.