Be a match-maker
Golf Things Considered column by John Rogers
JSpencerRogers@msn.com
Good golf and good golf instruction are like all these new on-line dating services – they try to bring together things that are compatible. Golfers tend to think that there is a perfect swing, and they spend their days trying to dig it out of the dirt, as Ben Hogan put it. In my mind, a swing is good if most of its components fit together. A swing is less functional if one part is plaid and another part is polka dots. In other words (so I can use three different metaphors in one paragraph), there are a lot of ways to skin the cat when it comes to hitting a golf ball; the trick is to make sure you’re using only one way. Read more
Should Virginia try to land the Nats?
Story by Chris Graham
The uncertainty over the latest twist in the ongoing saga involving the Washington Nationals and their quest to land a new stadium in the District might result in bringing Virginia back into the Major League Baseball picture.
Published reports regarding the D.C. City Council’s move earlier this month to put a cap on the amount of money that it would commit to a new stadium for the Nationals had Gov. Tim Kaine’s office expressing interest in the team on behalf of the Commonwealth.
Kaine spokesman Kevin Hall appeared to reiterate that interest in response to a query from The Augusta Free Press on the subject.
“The governor welcomes the return of Major League Baseball to the Capital region, and we’re supportive of the District’s effort to maintain their franchise,” Hall said last week.
“If, for some reason, the D.C. deal falls through, and Major League Baseball wants to talk, they know where to find us,” Hall told the AFP.
Whether or not the Democratic governor would find support among Virginia political leaders for pitching a publicly-financed-stadium plan is another question.
“I’ve not been supportive of this effort – because I don’t think we ought to use taxpayer dollars to promote basically a private-sector business that makes lots of money to encourage them to come into the state,” said Steve Landes, a Weyers Cave Republican who is the chair of the Republican caucus in the Virginia House of Delegates.
“I don’t think we need to use public funds for these kinds of purposes,” Landes said. “Virginia citizens would be forced to pay twice for this stadium – once if we use these special funds or special authority, and then they’ll be paying again for years through ticket sales.
“I think it’s ridiculous that we’ve set up a separate authority and a stream of separate, dedicated funding and given them the bonding authority and these kinds of things – because basically the taxpayers shouldn’t be responsible for funding a private-sector entity like that, especially in professional sports, where they make tons of money,” Landes said.
“It seems to me that they ought to have enough money to build a new stadium and to locate or relocate wherever they want to,” Landes told the AFP.
Public financing for pro-sports stadiums is touted by supporters as being a win-win for taxpayers – who get sports franchises in their backyards and the economic growth that is said to come with the attention given the games that are played.
Whether or not the economic impact is sufficient to justify the expenditures is a question on the mind of Scott Wallsten, a resident scholar at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute.
“There’s no real justification for public financing of stadiums,” Wallsten said. “They don’t generate economic benefits. They don’t help revitalize neighborhoods. The economic research on this is pretty solid. The only studies that show positive effects are the ones commissioned by baseball and people who want a stadium built.”
Washington city officials are projecting the addition of 3,500 jobs and $15 million in local tax revenues from the stadium. What is left unsaid there is that a shopping-mall development can generate a similar amount of economic activity at a much reduced taxpayer price tag.
Wallsten cited the development of a $150 million shopping complex in the District that is expected to add 1,000 jobs to the local economy and $12 million a year in tax revenues – with relatively limited public involvement in the project.
“Even if you assume that they were right about the revenues that baseball would be expected to generate, and I don’t think that they are, it’s pretty much exactly the same amount. And the developers of this project didn’t get any public funds. And that’s going to be a bigger benefit for the city,” Wallsten said.
“If someone would have suggested giving them $600 million to build a shopping complex in the city, you can imagine the outrage. And in fact, the economic benefit is bigger,” Wallsten told the AFP.
A key reason for that is that a retail development has impact on an economy 365 days a year, notes Dennis Coates, an economics professor at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County.
“Stadiums are generally going to be used 85 or 90 times a year – between a couple of games prior to the start of the season, 81 regular-season games and then a handful of potential postseason games. It’s hard to imagine that that kind of use of the facility could compare with the shopping center that’s used every day,” Coates told the AFP.
A drawback for each is that in the case of both new retail developments and sports-stadium developments, “the kind of spending that they can bring to an economy is probably not new spending,” Coates said.
“It’s spending that would have happened otherwise – just in a different location,” Coates said. “By and large, if you think about as people have a fixed budget, and they’re going to spend a certain proportion of that budget, generally speaking, on entertainment activities, and that could mean movies, dinner out, bowling, going camping, whatever, now you throw attending baseball games into the mix.
“OK, so what are they going to do? Save less? Borrow against their other assets so they can increase their spending on entertainment? Or are they going to reduce their spending on other things – generally entertainment kinds of things – to be able to finance attending baseball games?
“If you think they’re going to substitute between different kinds of spending, then there’s no new spending created – it’s just substitution. Different people are getting the benefits of the spending, but there isn’t any new kind of benefit generated,” Coates said.
That realization hasn’t stopped cities and states across the country from getting themselves involved in stadium-construction projects.
“A stupendous amount of money goes into public stadiums and arenas – probably somewhere upwards of $2 billion a year, when you count all the local, state and federal money that goes into it. And the public does not get back any sort of benefit close to what it’s putting into it,” said Neil deMause, the coauthor of Field of Schemes: How the Great Stadium Swindle Turns Public Money Into Private Profit.
“The bulk of the funds comes from taxpayer money – whether it’s direct subsidies, whether it’s property-tax breaks, whether it’s requiring the teams to only have to pay a dollar a year in rent – and the vast majority of the benefits goes to the teams. They’re the ones who get all the luxury-suite money, they’re the ones who get all the naming-rights money, they’re the ones who get all the money from the huge concessions concourses that are built,” deMause said.
“It’s an inequitable deal, but teams continue to use the leverage of, if you want a team, well, you’ve got to play by our rules to extract money from the public,” deMause told the AFP.
The question as to why elected leaders play along is “the $64,000 Question,” deMause said.
“Building stadiums is something that appeals to local politicians and mayors, especially, because it’s something that you can show off,” deMause said. “You can put a plaque on a stadium, but you can’t put a plaque on reduced first-grade class sizes. You can’t go sit in the front row on opening day at the new grade school and wave at the crowd, but you can at a baseball stadium.”
Wallsten said he would have no problem with the political efforts to this end if those presenting the case for public financing of sports stadiums were up front with the facts.
“If politicians went to the voters and said, look, this isn’t going to bring any economic development, but we’re going to spend this much money, and have a team here, is it worth that much to you, and then put it to a vote, and the citizens said yes, well, then I think everything would be just fine,” Wallsten said.
“The problem is that they sell it on a lie – which is economic development. And it doesn’t bring economic development,” Wallsten said.
“And so if instead you were to ask people – this started out as $500 million, and now it’s pushing toward $700 million – and say, this is going to run about $1,000 a person, are you willing to commit that to have baseball come here to Washington? They’re going to look at you and say, are you kidding me?” Wallsten said.
(Published 02-27-06)
First ladies: Women taking increasingly active role in politics
Jean Donovan had to make sure that she had a babysitter lined up.
That’s what she remembers about her early years on Staunton City Council.
“I don’t think anybody else on council had to do that. That was partly a function of being a woman – and in particular a single woman,” said Donovan, who is finishing up her second term on the city council.
Having to line up a babysitter in advance of attending public meetings is just one of the challenges that women in politics face. But more and more women are facing up to the challenges – which include the overt sexism of peers and the more subtle decisions of voters who cast their lots against female candidates based on prejudice.
“There are some preconceived stereotypes that exist that can serve as an obstacle. But I think it’s getting better,” said Lorie Smith, the current chair of the Waynesboro School Board, who is readying for her first campaign for Waynesboro City Council this spring.
“We’ve seen a dramatic shift in the ’80s and ’90s and into this century with more political involvement by women, and I think that’s a good thing,” Smith told The Augusta Free Press.
Indeed, the talk about the role of women in contemporary politics is getting serious with the expectation that New York Sen. Hillary Clinton and Secretary of State Condolezza Rice will be among the top contenders for the White House in 2008.
“Having several women receiving serious attention as presidential contenders is going to have an impact on the number of women who want to get involved at every level,” said Marie Wilson, the founder of the New York-based White House Project and the author of Closing the Leadership Gap: Why Women Can and Must Help Run the World.
“That’s where things really have to start,” Wilson told the AFP. “It can be difficult for organizations to go out and recruit and train women for involvement in politics because many women who have the skill-set to be effective political leaders don’t see themselves that way. So the attention being placed on women like Hillary Clinton and Condolezza Rice can serve to help more women see themselves as being potential political leaders.”
“Every time a high-profile woman runs for office, it breaks down the barriers,” said Laura van Assendelft, a Mary Baldwin College political-science professor and author of Women, Politics and American Society, which examines issues related to the increasing presence of women in modern political life.
“Even if she is not successful, she paves the way for the next attempt, and the novelty of a woman running for elite office wears off,” van Assendelft told the AFP.
“Little girls see women run for the presidency, and they might dream of doing it, too. Women at the local level may become inspired by the high-profile women and the issues they draw attention to. It’s all good,” Assendelft said.
That women running for political office draw attention to issues that their male counterparts often overlook was evident in Virginia Democratic Party lieutenant-governor candidate Leslie Byrne’s 2005 campaign – which focused on matters related to family health care, primary and secondary education and jobs.
“What I like to pose to my students is, what if the delegates and senators representing this area in Richmond were young, black females? How would policy differ?” said Donovan, herself a political-science professor at Mary Baldwin College.
Donovan’s first campaign for public office eight years ago came after she spoke out about an issue near and dear to her heart – her children’s education – at a city-council budget hearing.
“I felt that my kids’ education should be more well funded in the city of Staunton than it was. For example, when I went into the classrooms, I was really shocked at how old the materials were, the books, the play materials, the toys, and I thought, my goodness, this is a surprise. And plus the physical facility not having air conditioning and being such a dingy old building,” Donovan told the AFP.
When the council voted against a proposal to increase funding for the school system, “I was angry,” Donovan said.
“And then I looked at who was on council, and I saw a very monolithic group – mostly older white men, none of whom had children in our school system. And I thought, this is not really an appropriate situation in a representative democracy. How can retired white men represent the interests of young families today?” Donovan said.
Still, Donovan recalls having to be talked into running for one of the open city-council seats in the next year’s election.
“Some people who were school advocates asked me to run. I thought about it for six or eight months. They volunteered to help, and I took them up on it and decided to run,” Donovan said.
Men “don’t have this problem” as far as needing encouragement to run for public office, Wilson said.
“Men who run for office don’t have a problem identifying themselves as leaders. But women tend to need a push from somebody who says, ‘The way you worked through that problem with the school was great. You should run for the school board,’ ” Wilson said.
The University of Virginia Center for Politics is working to bring attention to these issues involving women and politics. Its National Symposium on Women and Politics kicks off this week with an event focusing on the activity involving Clinton, Rice and others for the 2008 Democratic Party and Republican Party presidential nominations.
“We at the center want to get people from all walks of life to be more involved in politics. This series, in particular, we hope will generate more interest among young women in politics. We hope that young women will see that they can be more involved in politics themselves,” said Holly Hatcher, the assistant director of programs at the Charlottesville-based Center for Politics.
The effort will begin at home, so to speak.
“Virginia has an interesting history. We didn’t ratify the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote until 1952 – well after the amendment was ratified at the federal level giving women the right to vote,” Hatcher told the AFP.
“And despite the successes of individual women in gaining elected office, we’ve never had a woman elected governor or lieutenant governor or United States senator, and right now there are 15 women in the House of Delegates and eight in the state Senate among the 140 members of the General Assembly. So while strides have been made, there is plenty of work still to be done in that respect,” Hatcher said.
Smith sees the light at the end of that tunnel – and it’s not far down the tunnel, either.
“I think there’s a little less sensitivity today to gender bias, and I think that has to do with the way that we’re raising our young children,” Smith said. “I think that parents are trying to raise children that are highly competent, that are self-confident, that are critical thinkers and are decision-makers. And I think in particular women are trying to ingrain these characteristics in their daughters.
“When women grow up surrounded by these values and surrounded by the thought that they can achieve, I think we will continue to be producing more and more female leaders in our country because of that,” Smith said.
(Published 02-20-06)
A cartoon controversy – or something like it
Story by Chris Graham
It has been described as a cartoon controversy. But the issue involving the drawings depicting the Prophet Muhammad published in a Danish newspaper last fall is a lot more than that.
“I liken this to a stovetop, and the pots are at a rolling boil right now in Afghanistan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Libya, Iran, Syria, the UK and in lots of other places. Well, those pots were already simmering on the stovetop long before the cartoons appeared, and so it is somewhat deceiving to depict the demonstrations and riots as purely responses to a cartoon,” said Timothy Gianotti, a professor of Islamic philosophy and theology at the University of Virginia.
The boiling reaction of Muslims to the publication of the cartoons – which have appeared in newspapers worldwide in recent weeks since their first appearance in September – has led to 19 deaths in the past month in demonstrations in Europe and the Middle East.
That the protests have taken on a more generally anti-Western and even specifically an anti-American tone is perhaps a sign of the times that we live in.
“This is not just about a cartoon. This is not just a cartoon controversy,” Gianotti told The Augusta Free Press. “This is part of a much larger historical evolution – at least to Muslims a continuation of the colonial period. This is not just about a cartoon. This is about the whole conglomeration of issues that are coming to a head with the publication of this cartoon and then the defiant republication of the cartoon in France and other places.”
The violence associated with demonstrations overseas has yet to appear in the United States – where Muslim leaders have been urging restraint on the part of the faithful.
“We do not condone the violence which has erupted in many Muslim countries,” said Ehsan Ahmed, the secretary general of the Harrisonburg-based Islamic Association of the Shenandoah Valley.
“We believe that Muslims around the world must follow the example of Prophet Muhammad, who was compassionate and man of mercy,” Ahmed said.
“During his lifetime, when he was insulted or encountered offensive behavior, he did not respond with rage or violence. Instead he taught his followers to respond with mercy and best behavior,” Ahmed told the AFP.
That isn’t to say that the American Islamic community hasn’t been impacted at all by the images that have stirred up passions across the globe.
“The global community should not allow people to humiliate the sacred and religious values and dignity of any people in the name of freedom of expression, and should assure respect for the beliefs and religions for all, even if they are of other religions or ideologies,” said Amer A. Al-Zubaidi, a minister at the Roanoke-based Kufa Center of Islamic Knowledge.
“There is no place in this world for racism and prejudice. Unity and avoidance of sectarian and ethnic differences should be strongest goal of Muslims, so that they might prevent people from indulging into extravagance and immoderation, and bring the human-self under the control of reason and the law,” Al-Zubaidi told the AFP.
The more peaceful reaction to the controversy in the States could be due in part at least to the decisions of editorial leaders at all but a few major American newspapers against republishing the cartoons.
That approach has not exactly been met with universal praise by media watchers – whose criticisms have ranged from concerns about the implications on press freedoms to others that question whether the news media has allowed itself to be backed into a corner out of fear.
“I think that they’re just scared. They’re intimidated,” said Cliff Kincaid, the editor of the conservative Accuracy in Media Report.
“They feel that if they publish these cartoons, they will offend Muslims, causing more demonstrations, perhaps even riots. And that some of their own journalists may be targeted. I think that is, frankly, what explains it,” Kincaid told the AFP.
Robert O’Neil, the director of the Charlottesville-based Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, focuses less on the fear factor and more on the relative wisdom of showing voluntary restraint.
“Some may have assumed that there could have been some potential liability. I think that is most unlikely. My assumption is that they were acting voluntarily and chose not to run them on two separate grounds – one, the fact that you have a free-speech or free-press right to say or to print something doesn’t mean that you need to exercise it, and two, that there is a sense that it may actually be undermined if you exercise it in a way that creates consequences and makes it harder to exercise it in the future,” O’Neil said.
“There may even be a kind of perverse argument that as a matter of policy your free-press interests are stronger if you don’t push it to the limit,” O’Neil said.
“There almost certainly would have been consequences if that had been the more common action on the part of editors. For that reason, I think the policy of not pushing it to the limit has some considerable value,” O’Neil told the AFP.
And that is true even outside the bounds of journalistic standards and practices.
“Although we as Muslims hold freedom of speech as one of the unalienable rights of human beings, we believe that press has the utmost responsibility to exercise restraint when it comes to the basic beliefs of human beings,” Ahmed said.
“We also believe that Muslims must use restraints in reacting to these cartoons and use educational methods to teach fellow human beings about Islam,” Ahmed said.
“We must lead by example of mercy and forgiveness, a trait every Muslim must have by very definition of being a follower of Islam,” Ahmed said.
(Published 02-20-06)
Fit to a tee
Golf Things Considered column by John Rogers
JSpencerRogers@msn.com
It’s a slap in the face, the way CBS broadcasts these images into our homes.
Less than 24 hours after a foot of snow fell here in the East, we are taunted by the footage from the Monterey Peninsula where the Tour players and a bunch of lucky amateurs are playing at Pebble Beach.
Sunshine, sailboats, short-sleeve shirts, all kinds of exotic wildlife, that magnificent coastline where the Pacific pounds away – and here we are laid out in our egg chairs and lazy-boys after shoveling the driveway, two portable heaters breathing hot air towards a set of toes still unthawed. Read more
At what price security?
Story by Chris Graham
They ask you to open your coat, to let them look inside your bag, to examine your rolled-up stadium blanket, just to be safe.
It’s a nuisance, sure, but after 9/11, who’s going to complain, right?
“I think since 9/11 we’ve become more tolerant of intrusions on our property and person – that we recognize that times have changed, and that we have to give up some of our personal freedoms to ensure security,” said Michael McCann, a professor at the Mississippi College School of Law and a regular contributor to The Sports Law Blog.
That has generally been the case in sports venues across the country in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But there has been something of a blowback that has gotten going in recent months – with suits filed against stadium authorities in Tampa Bay and San Francisco related to patdown searches of fans attending NFL games in those two cities.
“The immediate legal issue is our Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures,” said Rebecca Steele, the director of the ACLU of Florida’s Tampa office, which is acting on behalf of a Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ season-ticket holder to challenge the patdown-search policy at Raymond James Stadium.
“The law is really pretty clear – that a suspicionless patdown search is presumed unconstitutional unless certain exceptions exist. What we said, and the court agreed, is that those exceptions just don’t exist here,” Steele told The Augusta Free Press.
A state judge issued a preliminary injunction prohibiting Raymond James Stadium officials from conducting the searches. The case is now being heard in federal court – opening up the question of the future of searches at stadiums and arenas nationwide, which have been ramped up with the threat from international terrorists in the forefront of facility managers’ minds.
“There is a fear of there being violence in any kind of a venue that has large numbers of people. And sports has always been one of the areas with the visibility and media attention that’s given that it’s always a logical and potential place for terrorist violence,” said Lynn Jamieson, the chair of the Department of Recreation and Park Administration at Indiana University.
Fans attending sporting events have gotten accustomed to being asked to open their coats and backpacks and purses and the rest – and don’t view the requests as being an inconvenience or of an intrusive nature, Jamieson said.
“I think about the Indianapolis 500 in this context. When you go to that event, people are bringing in cartloads of coolers and different kinds of things. And it does take a while,” Jamieson said. “They’re permitting it, but the surveillance is greater, and people have adjusted by coming earlier, and the facility has adjusted by increasing the number of people checking, and the checking has become more efficient.
“We’ve adapted to having this as a part of the way that we attend events. It hasn’t really deterred people from wanting to continue to attend events. It’s not something that people object to. They tolerate it because they prefer to be safe,” Jamieson told the AFP.
Facility managers, for their part, are constantly trying to tweak their approach to security to make sure that the twin objectives of a positive fan experience and a positive security experience are met, said Colby Jubenville, a sports-management professor at Middle Tennessee State University.
“It starts with looking at what ultimately is the objective from a fan experience, from a safety experience, from a security experience, of our risk-management plan, of our facility-security plan,” Jubenville said.
“We can throw our hands up in the air and say that this is just impossible, that if somebody really wanted to do this, they could park their car close to the stadium, they could smuggle a bomb into the stadium. All of those things are certainly possibilities. But all that being said, the role of management is to set up a system that looks at continuous improvement, that looks at what a quality experience is for the fan, and also looks at how they provide a safe and secure environment,” Jubenville told the AFP.
That said, Jubenville feels that the increased focus on security could still be nothing more than a “dog-and-pony show” in terms of its effectiveness.
“Essentially what the research that is being done right now on this is saying is that there is not a statistically significant difference in how facilities managers prepare in large markets and small markets for potential security issues. What that tells me is we’ve either got one of two problems – either everybody is doing a really bad job, or security is not being taken very seriously,” Jubenville said.
Agreeing with that assessment is security-technology expert Bruce Schneier.
“We all think of the movie scenarios – the kinds of things that we would expect to see in a movie plot. Terrorists sneaking a bomb into the Super Bowl, for example. The problem is, terrorists don’t care. They don’t care whether it’s a football game or an airport or a restaurant or a movie theater. It doesn’t matter to them,” said Schneier, the founder and chief technical officer of the Mountain View, Calif.,-based Counterpane Internet Security and the author of Beyond Fear, an analysis of security measures in the post-9/11 era.
“At best, you’re going to slow them down – if you’re lucky. Because what you see at stadiums is completely ineffective,” Schneier said.
“What they’re doing by stopping you for a couple of seconds and doing a cursory patdown of your upper body doesn’t make any sense as an actual, effective security measure. It’s a feel-good measure, basically. It’s what we call security theater. So what we’re dealing with here is we’re basing our security on movie scenarios and security theater,” Schneier told the AFP.
The danger there, as Steele pointed out, “is that this could potentially make people less safe.”
“If you have a group of people standing in line waiting to be patted down, for example, that creates a more target-rich environment,” Steele said.
“If you look at what happens in the Mideast, typically what they’re worried about is people with suicide bomb vests. And often they explode those in crowded marketplaces, bus-stop lines, places where people are crowded around and waiting on something. It seems like these measures could be counterproductive,” Steele said.
The bigger issue, from a civil-liberties perspective, “is whether or not we’re going to just blindly trade off our freedoms in the name of security on account of fear without any showing that it makes us any safer or that it’s necessary,” Steele said.
Jamieson approaches this issue from a different angle.
“The question that we have to ask is – are we safer?” Jamieson said. “We’re more alert and more aware. The safety mechanisms, I think, have probably reduced the potential of using venues for things other than playing. So I think yes, we are. But I don’t know if we’ve gotten the upper hand on terrorist activity that we can’t quite predict. The unpredictability is probably the whole issue.
“At least we know that these surveillance mechanisms are deterring the potential of it being more escalated than it was. We’re secure in that fact, I think,” Jamieson said.
McCann, for his part, agrees with Steele that “there’s a limit that we don’t want to cross where it gets too invasive.”
“But I think there’s a general consensus that times have changed, and we’ve been more fortunate than anything else that we’ve only had 9/11,” McCann told the AFP.
“Sporting events, perhaps more than any other venue, would appear to be a prime target for a terrorist strike. And one terrorist strike in a stadium could change everything – be it a bomb, be it any type of attack,” McCann said.
“The fact that we haven’t had that type of event is a tribute to the security,” McCann said.
(Published 02-20-06)
Fox station coming to Harrisonburg lineup
Story by Chris Graham
The Harrisonburg television market is starting to get crowded.
“This is a big step forward for us,” said Tracey Jones, the general manager of the Harrisonburg-based WHSV-TV3 and a regional vice president for the Atlanta-based Gray Television, which announced earlier this month that it is adding a Fox affiliate to the local station lineup.
The station will be broadcast digitally and will be available at the outset to Adelphia Cable customers who subscribe to the service provider’s digital tier, Jones said.
The affiliate is scheduled to be up and running by the first of September, Jones told The Augusta Free Press.
The addition of the local Fox channel will bring the total of commercial stations in the Harrisonburg market – ranked 181st among the 210 television markets tracked by Nielsen Media Research with 86,000 TV homes – to two.
The nearby Charlottesville market – ranked 186th by Nielsen with 70,000 TV homes – has been a relative hotbed of activity with the addition of three stations to mainstay WVIR-TV29 in the past 18 months.
“It would be surprising to see this growth in the Harrisonburg market if the population of the region was not growing like it is. Frankly, I’m a bit surprised that we hadn’t seen something like this happen sooner,” said Rustin Greene, a professor in School of Media Arts and Design at James Madison University.
“What this says is that they see the potential in the local market for revenues to grow – enough to justify the investment that they’re making in the technological upgrades needed to make this possible,” Greene told the AFP.
Gray is investing $2 million in upgrades to its Harrisonburg facility related to the addition of the Fox station, Jones said.
“Obviously, we would not try to do something like this if we didn’t feel that there wouldn’t be an advantage to having a locally branded, local-feel Fox station in this market,” Jones said.
“Fox programming reaches out to a different demographic. We’re going to be reaching out more and more to that demographic with companion programming and our local news product as well,” Jones said.
The station will initially use news programming originating on WHSV, Jones said. Down the road, Jones envisions the development of an independent news operation for the Fox channel.
“I can certainly see us taking advantage of the ability to offer a 10 o’clock prime-time newscast at some point in the future,” Jones said.
(Published 02-13-06)
