Will SNN 6 pull a Phoenix move?

Hearing rumblings last night and today that SNN 6 may not be down for the count after all. Sure all the employees were officially terminated and sure people around town have been saying SNN was done for. But there might be life yet in this local favorite — meaning SNN 6.

I put in a call to Linda DesMarais (hoping for a return call — more on that below) and fingers crossed, the rumblings are all true! (more…)

Death of a news station — a mini timeline

November 13, 2008: The Pelican Press reports on a “rumor” that the Sarasota Herald-Tribune’s 24-hour cable news station – SNN 6 – is on the sale block for $2 million. PP reports that Sarasota H-T Publisher Diane McFarlin answered their inquiry with the following statement “‘SNN 6 is not for sale.’” Though in the news item, PP reports that McFarlin “admitted to hearing the same rumor and the same price figure.”

Two days later, McFarlin says something quite a bit different: (more…)

SNN severance clarification … and a bit more about our man Bruce

Bruce Asbury contacted me this morning to correct one of his statements from our conversation of yesterday. “I made a slight error in the severance,” Asbury told me today. The 26-week severance payout mentioned in yesterday’s post was only for employees who’d been with SNN 6 for more than 13 years, Asbury said today, — not five years as he’d stated when I interviewed him yesterday. Asbury added that he believes that, “Under that rule, nobody at SNN is getting 26 weeks.” (more…)

Sarasota news takes another dive — SNN signs off!

Yesterday I gave a talk at the University of South Florida (more on that later) about blogging and the diminishing content of print and other local media in Sarasota. The class — full of inveterate newspaper readers — loudly lamented the decreasing size of the Sarasota Herald Tribune and the declining offerings of other local newspapers. I’m a newspaper-loving-gal myself, so it’s hard for me to see what’s happening with the disappearing pages in our local print media. (more…)

Hawkish behavior

This beautiful hawk has been visiting my yard for the past several days. I believe he had one of my mourning doves for lunch the other day (the abundance of little white feathers on the ground gave it away). I love having him here, but I do worry about my songbirds in the backyard. If anyone knows what kind of hawk he is, I’d appreciate having a solid identification. For now, I’m calling him Hamlet.

And I think I have a crush (hope it’s not a girl hawk!) 😉

My date with Gwen … a woman in I-full

Hmmmmm … Absolut Yum! I went tonight to see and listen to Gwen Ifill speak at Hyatt Sarasota to a Sarasota audience about race and politics and the Obama campaign and the future of black candidates in American politics. (more…)

Not so social Sarasota

The following column originally appeared in print in 2007, and it brought a plethora of responses from readers. I actually ended up meeting some pretty wonderful people over the ensuing months — a group of wonderful women who’d read the column and invited me to join their book club, and a heavy-hitting businessman who invited me to lunch to talk — really talk — about the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful in Sarasota and beyond.

I received a fair amount of criticism to the column as well, but for the most part, Sarasotans said “Hey — we’re not that bad!”

The funniest part though was when the column was given proof positive by a well-known, local, late twenty-something Sarasotan who’d read it and wrote to me telling me “You’ve got it all wrong — there are people in this town who care nothing about all those superficial things. Let me prove it to you by inviting you to a dinner party to meet the “real Sarasota.” I said I’d be honored to attend as long as he didn’t mind that while I couldn’t claim to be wiser, I was fairly certain I was older than the crowd with which he typically dined.

The dinner invite dematerialized faster than I could sneeze. And I doubt the lad ever picked up on the irony. (more…)

Steelers steal my heart

Yahoo. Liked last night’s game. All the more so because the Steelers pulled it out and made my bet pay off. Don’t worry. I don’t need to call Gambler’s Anonymous quite yet. I just had a bottle of wine riding on the game (hmmmmm, now about that AA call I need to make).

Hey, betting partner, if you’re reading, I’m thinking Chateau Lafite …. but, um, I’ll settle for a cheap Cab!

The bedability of yours truly … and other factors in being a literate society

Speaking of newspapers, the demise thereof, and this writer’s potential contribution to said demise, here’s a column I wrote a year back — in response to a reader’s complaint about my use of the term — send the children out of the room for this one, folks — “bed-ability” in my column called Reality in the Age of Chick-ness.
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One reader’s trash …

I recently learned that American children might actually be reading newspapers in this country. In fact, they may be reading this very paper, perhaps this very column, this very minute. (more…)

Letter to the editors

Dear Editors

Back in the day, you’d buy the Sunday Sarasota Herald-Tribune and be assured of curling up for an hour of juicy reading, drinking one or two cups of coffee while fending off the cats who felt it was their duty to hold the paper down on the floor by sprawling languidly across it, flicking their tails with measured insouciance as you tried vainly to get to the next page.

But now, you can read the H-T faster than you can flip its pages practically, because it seems to be in a frantic free-for-all of diminishing returns on all fronts, and the major loss is to and of the reader. What papers like the H-T are missing is that people will — still — willingly pay for that experience of getting ink all over their hands and fighting the fold. But they want substance for their trouble. (more…)