Santa Cruz considers a smoking ban

If anti-smoking activists have learned anything in the past few decades, it’s that there’s no need to seek out constitutional prohibition when you can simply make smoking as inconvenient as possible. With smoking bans in several states claiming the previously sacred puffing ground of bars and restaurants, organizations like the American Lung Association (ALA) are starting to hammer municipalities for tougher laws on the great outdoors.

The California ALA chapter’s 2008 State of Local Tobacco Control report gives Santa Cruz County, and all the cities in it, a “D” grade for its efforts to curtail smoking. The city of Santa Cruz, in addition to its overall “D,” received a “D” in “smokefree outdoor air,” a “D” in “smokefree housing,” and a big fat “F” in “reducing sales of tobacco products.”

This report card alarmed Laurie Lang, the senior health educator at the Santa Cruz County Health Services Agency, and she immediately brought it to the attention of the various cities. “We didn’t do so well,” she says, “especially compared to similar places like Berkeley and Davis.”

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2010 MLB Predictions (NL edition) Enough with the Silly League. What’s going to happen in the Real Baseball League this year? (That’s right, where pitchers hit and hitters … also hit.) One thing I’m always annoyed by with preseason rankings is how they invariably follow the previous year’s order. Basically, baseball experts usually expect this year to look like last year. I’m not immune to that, but I think the NL will show more turnover than the AL this year. Also annoying? How they took Opening Day away from the Reds. I remember growing up what a big deal was made out of the fact that the Cincinnati Reds were the oldest and most venerable of all franchises, and thus deserved to have their game start before anyone else’s in the afternoon. Then ESPN moved it to the evening on Sunday. Then they decided the Yankees and Red Sox were more venerable. Gag me. The Yankees used to play in Baltimore. The Reds veritably invented professional baseball. This AL bias is killing me. Anyway, onward: More

The real reason behind Twitter’s mediasplosion Everybody’s typing about tweeting, even though most savvy web users grokked, used, and digested the concept of Twitter a year ago. What’s with the sudden rush? Some of it is Twitter’s own hyping of the race to a million followers, which highlighted the service’s celebrity users, and American media loves it some celebrities. But the other thing the media loves — the one that might really be behind the twitternoia and obsessive “we’re still hip!” coverage from newspapers and TV newscasts clawing at the cliff of extinction — is that the service has reached a tipping point among a very specific class of communicators: PR professionals. I don’t know how the mythical Average Reader would feel if they ‘found out’ what a large percentage of media stories are driven by PR froth. I do know how irked and defensive most reporters get when this is pointed out. I don’t mind admitting that I rely on PR. I get far more interesting story ideas from PR folks than I do from freelance writers, and on today’s editorial budget, I’ve never had a staff to create in-house brainstorming to counteract the tide of PR info. Does this plain fact indicate nefarious forces at work? Or does it point to just how much good, important work PR professionals do? I’ll leave such judgments to people with more active Twitter accounts than mine. However, it does mean that I’m in a position to judge how much Twitter activity is really newfangled PR, and the answer is: LOTS. The service has shifted in recent months from proto-blogging of entirely useless information to professional peddling of mostly useless information. PR presence on Twitter is enormous. If you are a heavy Twitter user, and chasing down follow counts as fast as you can, chances are you’ll fill out your Census profession with PR or Marketing later this year. And why not? It’s a tremendous venue for unfiltered PR (a flavor of marketing that is two ethical slips away from spam). Plus, it adds a nice quantitative number to the size of a PR professional’s reach. Where once a firm might brag about the size and quality of its media contacts, now it only has to point to its Twitter stats. Media dependence on PR + PR user increase on Twitter = media about Twitter. The exact same process led to a sudden surge of “lifestyles” and “humor” columns about e-mail in the ’90s. It doesn’t take much imagination to envision the scenario. Reporter has inbox that is 80% press releases. These press releases start touting the PR person’s Twitter account. Reporter checks out Twitter, and sees mostly PR people on (because, in the increasingly myopic world of journalism, these are the people she knows). Options: a) reporter is annoyed and writes scathing article about uselessness of Twitter; b) reporter is impressed with the efficiency of the service and writes glowing article about revolution of Twitter. And once a few reporters write about something, the herd follows, especially now that the herd is basically a handful of wire services, hundreds of inexperienced interns, and an expanding galaxy of laid-off reporters with blogs. It might be the most predictable phenomenon on the planet, right up there with hyperventilation about scary new diseases that aren’t that dangerous (um) and overwrought dissections of media trends (whoops).