Newsroom Stuff

A nice caller dialed in to our newsroom just seconds after I said goodnight on the 10 p.m. newscast last week. The lady on the other end of the phone began giving our Executive Producer, Chris Hyser, a big piece of her mind about the Michael Vick story. She was completely offended by the story she'd just seen on Vick and felt the media was being way too lenient on a dog killer. Chris could barely get a word in because she was talking so fast. Eventually, she took just enough of a breathe that Chris was able to tell her, "ma'am ... we didn't have a story on Michael Vick in tonight's newscast .. you must have been watching another station." After a few seconds of silence, the woman said "Oh!" and hung up. Believe it or not, that happens all the time.

Relatives of a man arrested for allegedly emailing a bomb threat to the University of Akron last week came by our front door on Friday. They were going on and on about how there's no way their relative could have done those things because "he's just not like that." They said he doesn't even have a computer at home. However, they did tell me that their loved one often used the computers at the downtown Main Library. If true, I'll be interested to see how police were able to trace the threat to this man.

Representatives for Mayor Plusquellic and Joe Finley have reached out to tell me that each man wrote his own opening remarks for last Monday's debate. In my blog blow-by-blow (see below), I shared impressions of their deliveries .. specifically that I felt Finley was reading someone else's writing while Plusquellic was more comfortable and polished. By the way, for those who voted in my blog poll about whether the debate would affect your vote for mayor, the final results were 22 "no" votes to five "yes" votes. Five others said they aren't sure yet.

I've shared multiple emails with an Akron mother whose daughter and son have attended Cuyahoga Falls schools via open enrollment for the last five years. The woman tells me that 10 days before classes were set to begin, she received a letter stating that while there is room for her son to keep coming to Falls HS, her daughter can no longer attend Bolich Middle School because there is no longer open enrollment space. As you can imagine, this mother is very, very upset. She still has a letter from June in which the district informed her that her daughter would be attending Bolich in the fall. Since I haven't heard back from the district yet, I really don't have all sides of the story .. but I have to wonder .. with districts fighting for every student (and the $$ that follow them) I'm shocked that any open enrollment student is turned away these days. For now, this mother is home schooling her daughter.

I had the opportunity to sit in on roll call last week at APD. The two evening shifts are each sporting about a dozen new officers from a recent class of academy graduates. There's so many new (and at times "baby") faces in those uniforms that I kidded one sergeant that he might as well be running a day care. I did see the one female officer in this new class. Her supervisor tells me that she was once a teacher in the Akron schools before deciding to be a police officer. While a great many members of this class are prior-military, I doubt there's very many who came from the classroom. Her classmates tell me that bad guys better not take her lightly or they're likely to get thumped.