Johnston sings the praises of beats, beats on press

David Cay Johnston, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting at the New York Times, has penned an homage to the beat - and has encased it in a criticism of the way newspapers practice journalism. Here's a snippet:

Beats are fundamental to journalism, but our foundation is crumbling. Whole huge agencies of the federal government and, for many news organizations, the entirety of state government go uncovered. There are school boards and city councils and planning commissions that have not seen a reporter in years. The outrageous salaries that were paid to Bell, California city officials—close to $800,000 to the city manager, for example—would not have happened if just one competent reporter had been covering that city hall in Southern California. But no one was, and it took an accidental set of circumstances for two reporters from the Los Angeles Times to reveal this scandal.

The full article is here.

She knows how to sell

An interesting item from reporter Janette Williams tucked into Sunday's City Beats column in the Pasadena Star-News:

Imagine our surprise at the Star-News office when the quiet, charming advertising account executive of six months we knew as Maria turned out to be our very own Bernie Madoff.

As Jeanetta M. Standefor of Altadena, she was sentenced last week to more than 12 years in federal prison for running a $17.8 million Ponzi scheme from 2005 to 2007. About $1.9 million of that was spent on herself, according to the case brought by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

She spent $76,000 on her wedding, not to mention shelling out $17,000 for the honeymoon, $170,000 for jewelry, $270,000 for cars and car-related expenses, $180,000 for entertainment and $650,000 for improvements "one of her homes."

Not quite up to Madoff standards, but enough to defraud nearly 600 investors in California, Georgia and Nevada through her Accelerated Funding Group that mostly targeted middle-class African-American investors.

Apparently Standefor/Maria was tops in sales at the paper.