On the beaten path

By ANNA JOLLY
Assistant News Editor

I simply cannot resist an online poll. It’s kind of a strange fascination, but I know I’m not alone.
Just look at those fellow addicts voting at the cnn.com poll.

There are tens of thousands of people just like me.

Or maybe there are thousands of people like me who vote repeatedly throughout the day.

Writing the polls for the pressrepublican.com site has shown me how random and truly untrustworthy Web-poll results can be.

Friends have told me they skew results for fun. I vote on my own question — but just once a day — and I can picture people on two sides of an issue clicking every hour to hammer home their point.

For example, the typical poll that runs on our site for two days gets about 200 to 300 responses.

When I get 800 responses to one question, I figure either our site has had a banner day or someone in cyberspace is pretty upset.

Even though I have first-hand experience with the unruly nature of expressing anonymous opinion by clicking a box, I still find myself falling for those meaningless questions every time.

Trust me, the polls are certainly not scientific, but they sure are fun.

Posted by Lois Clermont at 10:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By STEPHEN BARTLETT
Staff Writer

PLATTSBURGH — My daughter is 12.

She prefers hanging out with her girlfriends, though she thinks boys are cute. She doesn’t have a boyfriend and hasn’t had her first kiss yet, but the thought has likely crossed her mind.

I’m calling her pediatrician today to schedule her an appointment to receive the HPV vaccination.

The controversial vaccine was developed to prevent cervical cancer and other diseases in females caused by certain types of genital human papillomavirus (HPV), which is a sexually transmitted disease. Medical professionals recommend that girls get the vaccine before they are sexually active, and the FDA has licensed it as safe and effective.

At least 50 percent of sexually active people will get HPV, which can cause cervical cancer in women. Millions of people contract HPV yearly, while nearly 10,000 women are diagnosed with cervical cancer annually. Nearly 5,000 women die yearly from cervical cancer.

I’m not yet worried about my daughter experimenting, but I also know that when I worked on news stories that focused on teen sexuality, I interviewed a girl who first participated in unprotected oral sex at age 13.

So I’m not going to navigate fatherhood with my head in the sand, and if my daughter does make poor decisions where sex is concerned and suffers as a result, I will not be the dad who sobs each night that he could have saved his little girl’s life with a simple vaccine.

Yet there is unwarranted, intense debate over plans to require HPV vaccinations for girls 11 to 14 who attend public school. Religious groups fear requiring pre-adolescent girls to receive a vaccine against sexually transmitted diseases might slip some sort of perverse message into their subconscious that flies in the face of abstinence-based sexual education. Some Christian conservatives even believe that HPV is valuable as an obstacle to premarital sex.

Not surprisingly, proponents of the HPV vaccine are lending credence to such claims by saying they will allow parents to opt out of the vaccine for their girls on religious and moral grounds. I simply cannot be shocked in a country where only 12 percent of people believe in evolution, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence.

So, it appears, once again, organized religion is going to result in the avoidable deaths of innocents as it did during the Inquisition and witch trials. Even today, people are dying due to their religious beliefs, such as Islamic terrorists who kill infidels and themselves to receive rewards from God; Christian Scientists who forgo medical interventions, such as antibiotics; and Pentecostal snake dancers, who perish from poisonous snake bites.

I believe parents who object to the HPV vaccine for religious reasons are doing nothing more than rejecting rationality and therefore perpetuating a rather tragic state of being in which archaic myths take the place of proven science to the detriment, in this case, of our little girls.

Posted by Lois Clermont at 3:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

By LOIS CLERMONT
News Editor

If you’ve been reading Suzanne Moore’s Mission of Hope stories, you may be thinking she was standing right there in Nicaragua as she did the interviews.

Here are a couple lines from the first two stories:

The team reached the tiny village by four-wheel-drive truck, dodging horses, dogs and cattle on a dirt road that often nudged cliff edges with dizzying drops. The vehicle bounced along two-foot-deep ruts and over craters washed out by tropical rains.

“Nombre?” Dr. Richard Patnode asked a little girl in a dirty red tank top and skirt.

“Senana,” came the soft reply.

Behind the pavilion, a chicken pecked through a mound of garbage; at one side sits a rude shelter draped in plastic that Knutson said a family calls home. A rusty barrel nearby held rainwater collected for washing and, maybe, she speculated, drinking.

Suzanne — we all call her by her childhood nickname, Shan — isn’t in Nicaragua. She did the interviews from her desk here in the newsroom, by cell phone from Nicaragua to Plattsburgh.

She is able to give such good detail and description because she does such a great job getting just the right information from people. It’s really a tribute to her reporting ability.

She says she couldn’t do it without the excellent input of those she interviews, who are terrific about giving specifics about what’s happening around them.

The Mission of Hope volunteers call her almost every day, and she interviews a number of them as they pass the cell phone around.

A frequent mission member, Bonnie Black, whose husband, Roger, is the Press-Republican webmaster, sends us photos by e-mail. This year, for the first time, her daily journal entries are being used as a blog on our Web site.

On the first official Mission of Hope trip, we sent reporter Saul Ferrer, who spoke Spanish, and he dictated stories from one phone at the compound at Chiquilistagua.

It was great to actually have a reporter there, but it was too expensive to do every year, not to mention that we lost a reporter for a whole week.

Shan, who had reported the very first and much-more conservative trip that prompted creation of Mission of Hope, took over again the next year. Using phone cards, she called the number in Chiquilistagua at the same time every evening, as volunteers lined up to share their stories of the day with her.

The connection to that land-line phone wasn’t (and still isn’t) the best. Sometimes it took several tries to get through, and there was an echo that made interviewing a challenge.

Now — even though we can’t talk to reporters on some sections of the Adirondack Northway by cell phone — Shan connects that way every day for her stories.

She collects her details, quotes and information as it all actually unfolds and then crafts them into a beauty of a story ... all within a couple of hours.

Posted by Lois Clermont at 1:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

By KIM SMITH DEDAM
Staff Writer

I’d rather keep this blog spot open for carefree observation.

Some say there are two sides to every story, but I think there are more like five or six.

I’m not fond of writing commentary about politics; there are enough writers doing that.

Over the past few years, I’ve had the good fortune to listen to and then share thousands of stories from people in the North Country.

I’ve come to appreciate how genuinely tender and attentive rural senses can be.

I’ve noticed that people in the North Country are generally stolid and optimistic, often looking out for each other in times of need or not.

Charm is common and easy to find.

Usually, news interviews wind down in laughter, even though only some of the good humor ends up in the paper.

Pressed for time and space, there are a hundred bits of insight that get left off the public record.

Sometimes, it seems that if every funny comment could stay in the story, the mood around us might remain hopeful, upbeat, even forward-thinking and balanced.

A lot of quaint events report to the nature of human kindness.

One so happened to land not long ago at our house when a valentine sent from Gramma and

Grampa took a detour on its way north.

The valentine was opened by an elderly woman some towns west of here.

It arrived, belated and taped shut.

A note, written in tiny cursive letters on a blue index card was tucked inside.

It said:

“Feb. 14 --

I received this letter today and opened it in error.

I’m very sorry.

I can’t get it up to the Post Office today, but we’ll try to see it goes out to you tomorrow. The Post Office really goofed.”

Signed N. S.

Her zip code was similar to ours.

Yep, the Post Office did goof, but so what.

In a way, the tiny blue, hand-written apology was so touching that I was altogether glad she opened the Valentine first.

It made the message seem better for being shared.

Posted by Lois Clermont at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

By LOIS CLERMONT
News Editor

The other day someone told me the Press-Republican is a very liberal, anti-Bush newspaper.

I had to smile to myself because we had just heard from some liberals that we are too conservative and pro-Bush.

I started thinking about what people see that makes them think a newspaper is liberal or conservative.

Here in the newsroom, we think of ourselves as a fairly moderate newspaper. Although a few people are registered as either Republican or Democrat, most of us aren’t registered with a particular political party.

Our newsroom staff comprises a wide range of opinions and ages (from early 20s to early 60s) and a good mix of North Country natives and transplants. Several newsroom employees have military service in their background, and some have children or friends serving in Iraq.

And all of us care a great deal about the Press-Republican being an unbiased newspaper.

The essence of our paper is in the local news. That is our heart and what we think we do best. Those are the stories we create from scratch and what we can best be judged on. On the war issue, for example, we have covered the anti-war protests and have interviewed many soldiers upon their return from Iraq, who talked about the good they felt they were doing.

Our editorials are a reflection of the newspaper’s opinion, as decided by members of the Editorial Board. That’s another place to look if you are wondering if we have any slant. Our editorials, however, almost always focus on local, not national, issues. We have not taken a stand on the war in Iraq.

Most people who think we are liberal or conservative judge us on the national stories we run, and we don’t have anything to do with how they are written. They come from the Associated Press, a worldwide (and, I must add, much-respected) news service to which we subscribe.

I read AP articles with a critical eye, as I do anything, and I have to say that the reporters often make mention of challenges faced by President Bush. Is it biased, for example, to point out that he faces opposition to the war at home or to mention the “spiraling costs” of health-care programs or to focus on war spending when his proposed budget would reduce overall spending? Or is that just fully reporting the situation? Each reader will have to decide that.

But we don’t have time to rewrite the AP stories and wouldn’t anyway; the national reporters who cover the president know more about those issues than we do.

We do have some influence about what stories are chosen for Page A1 and elsewhere in the paper.

We gets hundreds of articles every day to choose from under the headings of International, National and State. We are guided to some degree, at our daily Page 1 meeting, by an AP news budget that comes out several times a day, listing the top stories, in their editors’ view, under each of those categories. Sometimes we follow their suggestions; usually we pick one or two from the top five and some from farther down the list.

The number of national or international stories on A1 depends on how many local stories will be on the page. Local news gets the priority; then we decide how many wire stories we have room for. Seven or eight people usually take part in the Page 1 meeting, and all can make suggestions.

Most days, we have one to three non-local stories on A1; all the other AP stories appear either in the small space on the weather page or back behind the Community, Editorial and Feature pages, the next spot available for non-local news.

We have had some complaints over the years about why we choose to put certain stories on A1 or farther back in the paper. We take every complaint seriously and talk about whether we made good decisions. Sometimes, we realize we messed up and underplayed a national story that should have been on A1.

But I can tell you this, no one here decides to put a certain story on A1 because it makes Bush look either good or bad. We care too much about the paper’s reputation to purposely manipulate the news that way.

Posted by Lois Clermont at 5:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (13)

By STEPHEN BARTLETT
Staff Writer

Walking down the sidewalk last summer, smoking a cigarette, paranoia gripped me when someone fell in step a few paces behind me.

My chest tightened, caught in an invisible vice grip of fear.

American Lung Association statistics flashed through my mind like a reoccurring dream that eaves you sticky and shaking: About 1,200 Americans die daily from smoke-related illnesses, which claim an estimated 438,000 American lives yearly. In 2004, around 44.5 million adults were smokers. About a third of the male adult global population smokes, with smoking-related diseases killing 1 in 10 adults. By 2030, that could increase to 1 in 6 if current trends continue.

I actually quit smoking a few months ago, though I smoked steadily for six years, quit, started, quit, started again, quit.

But while I myself am currently smokefree, I can’t help but recall my walk last summer. As I smoked, I remember picturing myself a shark swimming through society’s waters, the “Jaws” jingle pounding my brain with dark thoughts:

Duh duh — lung cancer caused by secondhand smoke kills about 3,000 nonsmokers yearly.

Duh duh — it causes up to 300,000 lung infections in infants and young children each year.

Duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh — cigarette smoke fills the air with many of the same poisons found in the air around toxic-waste dumps.

Why are my hands clammy? Is that a pain in my chest? Is my breathing labored?

I’m not a bad person. When New York began debating whether to eliminate smoking from public buildings, including bars and restaurants, I fully supported the idea.

Why should nonsmoking employees have to inhale unwanted substances? Why should nonsmoking patrons have to keep out of local bars lest they open the doors to becoming a statistic.

Now, some parts of the country are considering eliminating smoking in public whatsoever. Smokers would be restricted to grabbing a puff in homes and cars.

Smokers instantly decried this further chipping away of their rights in a free society, and I initially agreed, until my walk.

As my prey followed me, sifting through my exhalations, a burnt bulb popped in my head: I am inadvertently sending secondhand smoke this person’s way. What if this person doesn’t want to risk life and limb by inhaling secondhand smoke?

I spotted a child up ahead, veered widely and stepped onto the grass, extending my cigarette hand to save the kid from inhaling active ingredients and additives that, when burned, create toxic, harmful chemical compounds.

There are more than 4,800 chemicals in cigarette smoke, 69 of which are known to cause cancer.

Each inhalation — second or firsthand — brings with it tar, which is the same thing used to pave streets and driveway; hydrogen cyanide, used to kill rats; benzene, a chemical used in manufacturing gasoline; acetone, which is in nail-polish remover; formaldehyde, used to preserve dead bodies; and carbon monoxide, which is in car exhaust.

I grimaced as I pictured corpses driving gas guzzlers under a dark grey sky just below a giant hole in the ozone layer, the sun sitting back and smiling in the knowledge we would all shortly be burnt to a crisp.

Nicotine once had me chained to a thick tar wall, and I emphasize with those who continue to be enslaved or perhaps simply choose to smoke, despite the impact on their bodies.

But, what I don’t think any of us should be allowed to do anymore is endanger innocent bystanders with cigarette-smoke chemicals, which is why I support the elimination of public smoking altogether.

Posted by Lois Clermont at 5:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

By KIM SMITH DEDAM
Staff Writer

Having interviewed medical and rescue people repeatedly over the past several years about communications issues in the Adirondacks, I find their answers are sounding a lot like a broken record.

It’s at the point where people just want to put up a sign somewhere before the Pottersville exit on I-87 North: “Proceed at your own risk.”

Not because our first-response people aren’t great, because they are.

The accidents are too grim, people can’t call for help quickly, and EMTs can make up only so much time in the race to get there.

If you knew how dedicated and caring they are, you’d know the other crime being committed by duplicitous efforts keeping new technology from reaching the depths of the Adirondacks.

The EMTs would give you the shirt off their back; they’ve done that, in fact. They’d go get you gas. They’d change your tire.

But the whole debacle smacks of other things left out of the region: health-care options, business and industry, fair wages, good grocery stores.

Gas costs about $2.48 a gallon.

Some guy came into the store after buying gas one day and complained, saying he’d paid $1.68 per gallon when he left New Jersey.

I’ve learned that insurance companies redline this area because they can’t make money here; it’s too risky. But I can’t prove it, so I can’t write about it.

I’ve learned that one wireless company in a fight to put up cell towers told its competitors not to build the system on the Northway because they would never get a share of the market. But I can’t prove it, so I can’t write about it.

Nobody wants to discuss what hangs on the fringe of poverty. It’s too dirty and conjures up images of ketchup, kerosene and mice.

Decisions like these are made behind vaulted doors with long combinations.

There’s no such thing as open-door profits.

And it’s capitalism’s inner world that drives political sentiment.

People have caved to Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s claim that this is “Appalachia north,” which is wrong by definition.

The Adirondack Mountains are nothing like the Appalachians even if they erupted at the same time. These ridges are made of garnet and iron and anorthacite, the oldest rock on Earth.

There’s no doing business here, we hear. There’s nothing to do.

Standing in Essex County Court on break from covering a trial a few weeks ago, one visitor from elsewhere asked, “What do you do here?”

I laughed, I really did, before pointing out how much history was within eyesight of the court window.

“But you have to slow down enough to see it. You also have to like being outdoors.”

There’s a snowshoe trail on the golf course and good sledding hills, a couple small ski areas within spitting distance.

I’ve had people stop and ask me as I walked through E’town if there’s anywhere to hike.

“Pick a direction, east, south, west or north,” I laughed, incredulous.

Police have told me about people calling from the dark Northway claiming they to be lost, even though they can only go north or south on what is principally a straight line to Canada.

Other people wonder why we’re allowed to live on state land.

We don’t.

Only about half the land inside the blue line is state-owned.

We pay taxes just like you. And the state doesn’t pay the same as we do in taxes, either, I might add.

The people were here before the state land and before the Adirondack Park Agency.

The Adirondack Park doesn’t have gates, it doesn’t have a bunch of fake rides and it doesn’t have lights.

It costs something to get in, though.

It costs a lack of modernity.

So if there’s a way through the catch-22 of rural-keeping for lackluster capitalist desire, I’d like to write about it.

I think it would take a special kind of investor to get it.

They’d get some good neighbors, but nobody cares about that anymore.

I’m pretty sure the answer isn’t in real estate, since a lot of the newly rich need things like cell phones and broadband and wireless.

I asked a developer who owns lots on the other side of Whiteface who he was planning to sell to.

“Don’t they require a remote control for their living room?” I asked.

He didn’t think it was funny and didn’t answer, so I couldn’t write about it.

He did ask me, “Do you ever think they’ll put a cell tower on top of Whiteface?”

I laughed.

“They did that once and had to take it down. It was illegal.”

His response was a deadened, “Oh.”

Maybe we could attach tiny wireless chips to blackflies and at least get service for half the year.

Or maybe we should post the Northway: “Proceed at your own risk.”

Posted by Lois Clermont at 5:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)