Milwaukee Police Department helps Journal Sentinel reporter stuck on ice, gloats about it online
Since sifting through dull newspapers, hyperbolic blogs, and overflowing RSS feeds for meaningful news can be an arduous process, News Net catches and compiles both the amusing and the significant reports that were overlooked over the weekend. Here are some things to think about as the workweek begins.
• It hasn’t been the best of times for the Milwaukee Police Department and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The paper has been hounding the department over slow response times, officer discipline, and perceived racial profiling. The MPD, in turn, occasionally arrests a Journal Sentinel photographer or two. Even when the two camps set aside their differences and help each other out, the fur tends to fly. Such was the case yesterday, when JS crime reporter Jesse Garza posted a story about a police officer who helped him free his car from an ice bank. The MPD quickly linked to the story on its Facebook and Twitter accounts, and managed to sneak in a sly dig in the process:
Milwaukee Police help reporter stuck in snow; get kudos. Share with your co-workers, Jesse! That’s the majority of the good cops on the MPD.
One of those co-workers the MPD would like to reach would undoubtedly be Gina Barton, who recently won a John Jay College/Harry Frank Guggenheim Excellence In Criminal Justice Reporting Award for her series on lax officer discipline. The Journal Sentinel and Barton’s series have been frequent targets of the MPD’s occasionally snippy and defensive online outlets, with sentences like “Get the REAL facts here!” seemingly popping up on every other post. Because if there’s one thing folks on the Internet hate more than Courtney Stodden, it’s know-nothing journalists who have the gall to suggest that something might not be the bestest and coolest thing in the whole wide world.
• Monday morning concert announcements? We got ’em: Trace Adkins at Riverside Theater March 15; Mike Wolfe from American Pickers at Pabst Theater March 23; Rachel Maddow at Riverside Theater April 21; Florence And The Machine at The Rave April 28; The Moth at Pabst Theater May 17.
