Alpert's Truth

By Denise Tessier Journal letter writer Richard Cook on Nov. 17 urged New Mexicans to read “The Truth About Fracking,” an article that ran in the October issue of Scientific American, “before issuing any permits or rights to this type of drilling/exploration. Please!” Two days later, New Mexico regulators ruled that drillers must disclose what they inject [...]

By Denise Tessier How’s this for serendipity? Having just read Bloomberg Business’s account of Google’s estimated 7 million signers to its petition protesting anti-Internet piracy legislation, I decided a post about the role of petitions in today’s democracy was overdue. Then, refreshing my email to get the Bloomberg link I’d sent myself, in came the serendipity: a mass-mailed [...]

By Denise Tessier It’s pretty safe to predict that the Albuquerque Journal will respond to President Obama’s rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline with editorial criticism. The editorial did not run this morning (Jan. 20). Perhaps it will be saved for Sunday — the Journal’s highest circulation day — because it seems opining in favor of the pipeline [...]

By Arthur Alpert When as a kid I argued with my father, he’d often reply to my challenging “Why?” with a smile and refer me to “general principles.” While that didn’t satisfy, I have come to recognize the virtue of revisiting general (or first) principles. Editorials, for example, are arguments intended to persuade the reader to a [...]

By Arthur Alpert Decisions. Decisions. They’re the essence of reporting and writing a story. Many decisions are relatively unimportant, but not so the reporter’s choice of an “expert” or “experts” to add information, context or opinion. So when Dan Boyd enlisted the aid of Paul Gessing of the Rio Grande Foundation for his solid piece on public employee [...]

By Denise Tessier Old-school journalism taught the “inverted pyramid” style – in which the most important aspect of a story was in the lead sentence, followed by facts that fleshed out the narrative in descending order of importance. The inverted pyramid was designed to leave less important details, no matter how colorful, toward the end. This way, [...]

By Arthur Alpert Why does Albuquerque Journal management run E.J. Dionne Jr.’s syndicated essays? Surely, the editors don’t believe that publishing the soft-spoken liberal fools anybody into thinking the Journal is fair. Not when there are umpteen columns by Cal Thomas and Jonah Goldberg and Charles Krauthammer and George Will to every Dionne piece. And not when Journal [...]

By Arthur Alpert Who knew that John Fleck had a sense of humor? Perhaps his friends and family, but not me, not until I read his Upfront column headlined “The Locksley Factor, Plus Tasty Bratwurst” Tuesday, Jan. 3. A riff on the presumed correlation between losing football teams and high student GPAs, it was slyly funny, as well [...]

By Denise Tessier “Mexico: Failed State?” is one of the cover stories in the January 2012 issue of American Legion – a magazine that goes out to 2.5 million American war veterans. At the dawn of 2012, the American public is informed enough about Mexico’s chilling violence, shocking death numbers and narco-corruption to consider the term “failed state” [...]