Counting the reasons to support increase in license fees

Posted on March 28, 2012 by Tom Cherveny

A fishing license remains one of the best bargains ever.

A recent opportunity to take a 12-year old panfishing produced a small stringer for her, and an opportunity for me to reflect.
What a bargain we enjoy when we fish or hunt.
A $17 resident fishing license opens up the outdoors for 365 days.
That fee could rise to $22 if a bill introduced by State Senator Bill Ingebrigtsen, R, Alexandria, musters the support it needs.
Here’s why outdoor and conservation groups from across the state are supporting the measure.
The state’s Fish and Game fund is on its way to the red as early as July, 2013. The state hasn’t raised its license fees in 11 years. It has been doing a lot of cutting as the revenues stay static and the costs of doing business rise.
We see the consequences of the cuts here. There are fewer Department of Natural Resource employees. The Spicer fisheries office once had 12 employees. Now there are six.
The wildlife office once located in Willmar has lost two foresters and a shallow lake specialist.
There are fewer people to take care of and monitor our natural resources. It means a decline in fishing and hunting opportunities.
We need to reverse this trend, and to think about what we are leaving for the future. We’re already overdue. It’s time to raise our license fees.
- Tom Cherveny

Going viral like Marilyn Hagerty

Posted on March 14, 2012 by Ashley White

If you haven’t heard of Marilyn Hagerty, you must be living under a rock.

Marilyn Hagerty. Photo from gfherald.com

The 85-year-old columnist for the Grand Forks Herald (owned by Forum Communications Co., the same company that owns the West Central Tribune) has been making headlines this past week for her sincere, earnest review of the town’s new Olive Garden.

“At length, I asked my server what she would recommend. She suggested chicken Alfredo, and I went with that. Instead of the raspberry lemonade she suggested, I drank water,” she wrote in her review.

“All in all, [Olive Garden] is the largest and most beautiful restaurant now operating in Grand Forks. It attracts visitors from out of town as well as people who live here.”

After it was published in the GFH, several outlets picked it up, including Gawker. In a matter of hours, it went viral on the Internet, being shared on Facebook 21,000 times, tweeted 14,000 times and receiving, to date, nearly 700,000 views on gfherald.com.

Marilyn's in the Big Apple! Photo from marilynhagerty.areavoices.com

At first, people made fun of her, saying that the Olive Garden didn’t merit a review. Some didn’t even know if she was being serious. But now, a week later, she’s so famous that Jane Lynch interviewed her Monday night on “Piers Morgan Tonight,” she’s in NYC doing more restaurant reviews, and there are talks of her making an appearance on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.”

Overnight, she became “America’s newest media darling.” Now, Marilyn Hagerty – who didn’t even know what it meant to “go viral” until her son explained it to her – has her own blog, an e-book and a T-shirt featuring her now-famous quote: “I’ve been a lot of other things, but never viral!”

In the West Central Tribune newsroom, we’ve all been keeping up with Marilyn’s latest adventure or interview. Personally, I’m rooting for her all the way (I happen to love Olive Garden and would be over-the-moon ecstatic to see one come to Willmar).

But Marilyn’s overnight celebrity status also serves a powerful lesson: In this day and age, journalists have the potential to be read by an audience well beyond their immediate area. At the West Central Tribune, what we write isn’t necessarily read only by people in this community (although I’m sure that’s the majority of our audience). Anyone, anywhere can go viral – even a “retired” journalist out in the Middle of Nowhere, North Dakota. Certainly it could happen in Willmar, Minn.

On Monday, an article of mine ran about a curling wedding that took place this weekend. While it didn’t come anywhere close to going viral, it did garner nearly 3,200 page views on wctrib.com. Around 30 people tweeted the article, several people linked to it on Facebook, and it was our most read story of the day. It was even picked up on the AP wire, meaning other papers that subscribe to the AP could use the story on their websites (and yes, I did a search, and a few actually did use it, which was pretty cool).

The curling wedding even made the USA Today!

UPDATE MARCH 14, 2:15 P.M.: I just learned that Willmar’s curling wedding made the USA Today! It was in the “Across the USA: News from every state” section on page 7A. I know it was more because of the originality of the wedding than my actual story, but still, that is pretty neat.

It is a great feeling to know that other people read what you work so hard to write. After all, journalists write to be read. But for me, it’s also a little scary to think about one of my articles having the potential to go viral like Marilyn Hagerty’s. She obviously has a thick enough skin to not let the critics get to her. I’m not sure that, if put in the same situation, I would have the same attitude.

As a young journalist, I also feel pressure trying to find my way in an industry that allows for your words to reach many people and have an immediate, recognizable impact on a community. I’m very cognizant of the fact that what I write goes online for anyone and everyone to read.

You have to be careful. A few weeks ago, a young editor for ESPN wrote a racist headline in reference to NBA player Jeremy Lin. The headline only stayed on ESPN’s website for about 30 minutes – from 2:30 to 3:05 a.m. – before it was taken down, but it was too late. The headline went viral, and the young editor, who said that he simply didn’t know it was a racial slur, was fired.

In writing about the ESPN incident, I think Alex Johnson, an experienced journalist with MSNBC, makes an excellent point about young journalists:

“The trope is that it’s the old-timers like me who are scared of today’s technology. But I have less to be scared of than do the far smarter young writers and editors I work with…I got to learn the craft of journalism during an age when a single mistake — even a bad one — wouldn’t necessarily mean the end of my career…all of today’s rising young journalists have every right to be petrified.”

Yeah, that’s pressure. And it makes me a little nervous to think about.

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t lie in bed at night in a cold sweat, mentally going over everything I did that day to make sure I didn’t make a mistake. I know that mistakes happen. Journalists are human (although we try our absolute hardest to write mistake-free articles and have an editing process for this very reason). I just hope that A) I never make a mistake that would jeopardize my integrity as a journalist, and B) I never make a mistake that causes my name to go viral.

It is much better to go viral the Marilyn Hagerty way: For being a nice person who happens to be from a small town, where a new Olive Garden is big news.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to go review the new Qdoba in Willmar. Instead of a soda, I will drink water. Marilyn taught me that.

Have you been following the Marilyn Mania? What do you think of going viral? Most importantly, what are your thoughts on Olive Garden? Let me know what you think in the comments below!

-Ashley White, community content coordinator

Record warmth may hurt maple syrup season

Posted on March 14, 2012 by Tom Cherveny

Sibley State Park Naturalist Dick Clayton gathers maple sap in this file photo from a couple of years ago.

SPICER — It’s fast approaching maple syrup making time, but this burst of record-breaking warmth may make the season a short one.
Dick Clayton, park naturalist at Sibley State Park, is preparing to his host annual programs on collecting maple sap and making syrup. He has programs scheduled for March 24 and 31 at the park.
Asked about this year’s prospects, Clayton expressed concerns about the early and unprecedented warm up we are experiencing. The sap in maple trees runs best when the days warm up but temperatures drop below freezing at night.
The daily warm up starts moving the sap, but the night-time freeze halts it and allows pressure to build for the day, he explained.
A sudden warm up can cause the sap to run fast. If the trees also bud early, the sap may still run but it will not be good for maple syrup.
It’s too early to know how things will go, but it is not too early to call the park and reserve a spot in one of maple syrup programs he will be offering. The park office can be reached at 320-354-2055.
- Tom Cherveny

Asian carp are at our doorstep, and there’s no stopping them on Minnesota River

Posted on March 6, 2012 by Tom Cherveny

Silver carp

WILLMAR — News this week that Asian carp have now been netted in the Mississippi River near Winona rings the alarm bells all the louder.
It will bring renewed calls for stopping their upward migration in the Mississippi River beyond the Twin Cities.
No one is offering any defensive measures for the Minnesota River, meaning it’s only a matter of time before the invasive carp arrive here.
What that means to our waters is far from known. As we explained in an article published earlier this year, the Asian carp are sure to hold their own in the Minnesota River. It offers the habitat they need.
There’s no stopping them in the Minnesota River, either. Recent flood events have shown that fish readily migrate upstream of the dams at Minnesota Falls and Granite Falls. Asian carp instinctively migrate upstream during flood events, and so it is a sure bet they will find their way above the two dams when the waters are high.
Even before they reach the dams, the fish will be swimming up tributaries such as Hawk Creek. They will easily reach the lakes of Kandiyohi County that are part of the Minnesota River watershed. How they do in these lakes is anybody’s guess at this time.
It’s fair to say that once here, the odds that they could inadvertently reach waters in the Mississippi River watershed such as Green Lake are increased. The Minnesota and Mississippi River watersheds meet each other in the middle of the Ringo-Nest Wildlife Management Area northeast of Ringo Lake. The “dividing line’’ is a slight high point in the middle of a sea of cattails. It’s not hard to imagine minnows crossing this divide during high water periods.
Once the carp are in lakes like Ringo and Foot, there is also some possibility of transport to lakes like Green by pelicans and other winged predators.

By Tom Cherveny

Kubly’s compassion came from seeing, helping those less fortunate

Posted on March 6, 2012 by Tom Cherveny

Gary and Pat Kubly at their home.

GRANITE FALLS — A lot of kind words, all of them deserving are being offered as we eulogize Gary Kubly.
I’d like to add one because it will always define him for me.
Compassion.
I believe it motivated much of what he did.
I also believe some of his compassion came from the fact that he saw what many never see. He responded to what he saw exactly as a Lutheran minister should. He helped those less fortunate.
Kubly saw the poverty that exists in our rural areas.
Through his role as a rural life coordinator during the farm crisis, Kubly made many visits to farm families. He spoke of many different cases where he found bare cupboards and empty refrigerators and young children at home.
The families he helped were victims of circumstances or well-intended mistakes of their own, like trying to expand the farm at the worst of times.
He mentioned too that the poverty he saw on some farms in the 1980’s has not disappeared. He had continued to see it in rural communities through his work as a rural minister.
I have had the opportunity to see him at work as a legislator. All kinds of issues were directed his way, both large and small. Through it all he always maintained the perspective that comes from seeing and understanding the hardships of those less fortunate. For Kubly, compassion always meant a responsibility to those less fortunate.

— Tom Cherveny