Way to go Mainstream Media

As I said yesterday, I read several news websites every day. As I looked at CNN.com and saw that for the 2nd day one of their top stories is how a girl got kicked off her cheerleading team for working at Hooters, I wondered how things become national stories. Aside from the questions of how the national media decides to focus on particular missing child cases but not others, I want to know how they pick their random human interest stories. I have had friends from Arizona tell me that they saw various Dwyer and Michaels stunts on their local news, so maybe the Quad Cities do get some attention in this way.

What I would really like is for CNN to do a "5 Years Later" special about Davenport's downtown. From the reporting in 2001 of how we were "the largest city on the upper Mississippi without a floodwall, you'd think that the city was going to be swept clean and all of us silly Iowans would never be seen again. I know that when telling people from out of the area that I was from here, they pretty much always asked me if my house got flooded. I always tried to explain to them that if the area where I grew up near Garfield Park gets flooded by the Mississippi, the whole country would be in need of an ark. I'm sure many people saw the TV coverage and assumed Davenport's downtown was pretty much done for.

Instead its 2006 now and we have a new art museum, a Roots music museum, a baseball stadium, a skybridge, loft apartments, Bucktown Center for the Arts, the Mississippi Plaza office building, a renovated Federal Building and the New Ventures Center. In the next few years we'll add to that a new police station, a new hotel, a renovated hotel, a renovated and expanded jail, more loft apartments, a skatepark, and hopefully a new market district, chiropractic museum, another renovated hotel, and even more downtown housing.

And we still have a view of the river.