Blog me a river

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

Friday was a personal red-letter day—three bloggers dissed the RN&R.

Kind of funny. The first was Nevadans for Equal Parenting, the fathers’ rights group who recently sent me the nasty e-mails calling Dennis Myers a liar and “suggesting” I give their candidate room in this paper to continue the group’s attacks on Myers. “Yet another bottom-of-the-birdcage editorial from the Reno News & Review.”

The second blogger had sent me an e-mail last week accusing another fathers’ rights group of threatening more murderous attacks like the ones on Charla Mack and Judge Charles Weller, if certain demands weren’t met by the judicial system. I investigated the claim made in the letter to the editor, found it to be false and refused to publish it, although I quoted one small bit from it since it illustrated one of the points of the editorial.

The third was the guy who represents the group trying to get the marijuana initiative passed, who linked to Bruce Van Dyke’s last column and then accused us (me, I guess, although I can only think of one message left) of not returning phone calls.

Can I be blunt for a second here? If you are an individual human being/reader who wants to talk to me about a story idea or has a complaint about the paper or just wants to BS about the state of the world, call me. If you get voicemail, I’ll call you back the instant I can.

But if you are a public-relations representative of a group or candidate, you need to understand that we, the editorial department of the RN&R, decide what goes in the paper when. I’m not being arrogant. You just have to understand that the editorial department of this newspaper has three full- and two part-time employees. And if we don’t return your calls to talk about how you’d like to promote your agenda in this newspaper or whether we received your e-mail, it’s because we’re putting it out.