Sears Island coverage: a continuing mixed bag

The travails of Wasumkeag - what Sears Island was known as for several thousand years, until the Colonization - the trials of Wasumkeag continue. 

While there are backroom maneuverings and wheeler-dealerings aplenty, little of it attracts the jaundiced eyes of Maine journalists, (to the majority of whom  "investigative reporting" is a long lost might-have-been that was probably the initial motivator for many to choose the media career path, was bruited about in journalism school, but, in the new media world of short attn spans, has been dropped as not cost-effective by the business mavens struggle to keep the news fleets afloat.).

So one must  empathize with the reporters and producers strapped with tight deadlines and facing shrunken news holes nearly hidden amid the commercials and adverts. One must attract their eyes with shiny  flashy news baubles that glitter with enough truth to be worth following up on.  Must arrange facts with enough grace that they glide effortlessly into busy reporters' minds and out their keyboarding fingers.

Something I've always tried to do, and with some small successes. But their smallness can get frustrating

 Though they didn't attend,WCSH gave a heads-up: Public Hears Opposing Views on Sears Island Development

 Sears Island Takes Center Stage  Village Soup's article by Tanya Mitchell.  Here a good deal of backstory is added in, and a fair bit of coverage of the speakers, but the overriding issue detailed by supporters of a fully protected island- the threat to the greater bay's fisheries of such a port - received short shrift,   beyond noting that one panelist "bemoaned" the threat to the bay, though reporter Mitchell didn't see fit to describe just what in the bay was under threat.  "Bemoaned"?!  A word more useful in an editorial than in a news story, unless the reporter then proceeded to detail the bemoanables. Tch tch Tanya. An otherwise fine piece.



In Blogland, Penobscot Bay Blog offers complete audio recordings (mp3s) of the WERU-sponsored Sears Island Forum, conveniently broken into individual speakers