I just got this email from San Clemente Green, so instead writing about it, I will post the original notice that was sent to me:
SAN ONOFRE: Los Angeles votes to oppose reactor restart without public hearings
LA council joins other SoCal cities in concern over safety.
LOS ANGELES – The Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously today to ask federal regulators not to allow the restart of the crippled San Onofre nuclear reactors before the formal public process to determine whether Edison’s experimental restart plan is safe and all needed repairs or replacements are completed.
The resolution by District 5 Council Member Paul Koretz and District 11 Council Member Bill Rosendahl, which passed 11-0, expresses support for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to:
make no decision about restarting either San Onofre unit until it has fully reviewed public safety through a prudent, transparent, and precautionary process, has allowed independent experts and the public ample opportunity to comment, and has confirmed that Southern California Edison has completed any resulting mandated repairs, replacements, or other actions necessary to guarantee both short and long-term safe operation of San Onofre . . .
[The City also encourages the NRC] to take the time needed to independently determine whether or not the information, analysis and actions provided by Southern California Edison constitute a solid technical basis for the adequate protection of the public and resumption of operations.
Los Angeles finally decided to join a number of cities in Southern California to say “no” to Edison’s restart proposal, asking the NRC that it be allowed to restart reactor Unit 2 at partial power. They wanted it to do a test run for five months to see if there were anymore problems. Here’s the kicker, Edison also wanted a license amendment with a “no significant hazard” provision that would allow a restart without public hearings. The public could weigh in only after the reactor was back on line.
Several other cities already passed a resolution against or sent letters opposing the restart to the NRC. Friends of the Earth circulated a petition to the NRC a few months ago and it looks like it worked. The NRC is finally taking notice — they will conduct two official proceedings which could require Edison to seek a full license amendment that includes more public hearings, expert testimony and rules of evidence.
I have to admit, I was beginning to think petitions were a waste of time, because the persons we send them to ignore us. I am happy that at least time, I am wrong.
[Ed. note: This post has been hijacked to become your Weekend Open Thread, because more people should read it than did. Talk about this or whatever else you want to, within the bounds of decency and reason. — GD]
*America. See….it does still exist.
The U.S. Constitution begins with “We The People Of the United States”… enough said!
I might have done a story on this given more available time, but this will have to do:
LULAC’s state leader Benny Diaz has apparently invited about 1500 of his closest friends to this annual convention, so even if you didn’t get an e-mail or a Facebook invite to the event, you can probably expect to be welcomed as if you had. You don’t have to be Latin American yourself to attend and enjoy this meeting and support this organization.
Here’s this week’s OC Register Dearthwatch, which tracks the decline in the newspaper’s online readership since the implementation of its paywall at the beginning of this month. We track the Register and 14 other sites that could potentially see a compensatory bump in the readership each week in the Weekend Open Thread. Eventually, some larger publication will probably note and take over this task, but you will have seen it here first!
As you can see, the storyline is starting to take shape. (Ideally, we’d have tracked websites for a while before the paywall went up, but we didn’t. Maybe the Orange Lady herself did.)
Bear in mind that a change in rank for a site at the level of the LA Times, almost one of the most popular 500 in the world, take a much larger change in readership (or clickership, whatever) than a change in a “top 2,500,00 — almost” site like our friendly rival OC Political. The Times improving by 8 ranks may — and I’m just spitballing here — be the same change in number of readers as it took for OC Political to improve by 400,000 ranks, as it has done in what in a very successful month. This should probably be represented on some sort of logarithmic scale, but your correspondent would be too lazy to do so even if he had the data, which he does not. So, the small decline in our own readership may not mean much — except that it does suggest that people are not using us as an online alternative to the Register. (In some ways, perhaps that a compliment.)
The first thing that looks clear is that the Register is bleeding online readers — and that that the rate of bleeding is accelerating. When you’re right around being the 6000th most popular website in the world, and you drop 400 places in a couple of weeks, that’s losing a lot of eyeballs. It may still be a good business decision for the Orange Lady given the increase in subscriptions, and it may be that imposing a paywall is morally right as a means of saving the profession of journalism, but still — that’s going to be a lot of eyeballs, even if you divide by two.
The other (and in some ways more interesting) part of the question is: Who’s getting the benefit of the loss of Register online readership? We can’t really show causation here, but some of the results are, as we like to say, “suggestive.”
First, a number of traditional area newspapers have shown a gain in rank. (Since the top rank, #1, is the lowest number, an increase in rank is indicated by a negative number. The more negative the better — much like journalism itself! Har-har-har.) San Diego’s Union-Tribune showed a bit of a bump, but it looks like there may be some random variation at work there. What we should care about is a consistent trend of improvement, suggesting a change in online reading habits. Among our sample, we see that happening with the San Bernardino Sun, the Daily Pilot, and the Huntington Beach Independent — the latter two being very logical traditional journalistic alternatives we might have expected readers to find. (Of course, their consistent improvements could just be a coincidence. I tend to doubt it, though.)
Two website, though, seem clearly to appear to be improving their numbers in the wake of the new paywall. One is the alternative OC Weekly, which has a print edition coming out — well, figure it out for yourself — which started out at a pretty respectable place to begin with (one of the top 40,000 websites in the world) but has been consistently gaining steam. In some ways, this makes sense — the Weekly has enough staff to do basic news coverage, making it an obvious place to go to see what’s just happened in the county.
Let’s take a prurient example from the past couple of days: Driving an Escalade at 60 mph, recently departed County Exec Tom Mauk just rammed into a Prius sitting disabled on the northbound 57 in Diamond Bar killing both people in the car and one of their two dogs. That’s the sort of thing that we might expect to send people scurrying for online news reports. Who’s got it?
The LA Times has it. So does the Register, behind its paywall. So does the Sacramento Bee. Art Pedroza wrote a story on it, which I doubt I’d have done here even had I had the spare time. The local ABC station had it. The Weekly, interestingly, did not. The question is, though: would you have gone there to look for it? I have to admit that, were I looking for a local perspective and had I not searched on Google first, the Weekly is probably the first place I’d have gone. That gets them a click, maybe more, even though they didn’t cover it.
But there’s one website whose readership seems to be skyrocketing since the implementation of the paywall, even taking into account that they were beginning from a fairly modest (although nothing to sneeze at) neighborhood of being around one of the top 500,000 websites in the world. That site looks like the big winner so far among those looking for a local perspective without subscribing to the Register. The one to watch most closely appears to be the Voice of OC.
I don’t know what change in readership it takes to go from about #525,000 to #440,000 in about three weeks, but that does not look like a small gain. It’s also been consistent and accelerating: almost half of it occurred in the past week, although there’s no compelling reason I saw as a reader that suggested that this was the week they should do especially well. (They wrote some good stuff, but they generally do, and there was no high-profile story that suggested “oh my dear, I must go find out what the Voice of OC is saying about this!”) The big and continuing rise in readership suggest that it, along with the Weekly and some of the smaller “traditional journalistic” outlets, are the biggest beneficiaries (in terms of online readership) from the paywall thus far — but VOC’s recent track record suggest that it’s one to watch. How high can they climb?