the real reason why I left the 11th Hour

It's exactly as I said in the paper: needed more time with my family and wanted to try something new. When Mike Donila agreed to come aboard, I figured it was a good time, just because I knew they'd have a great guy with tremendous talent.

What I'm doing next?

Don't know exactly. I'll report back when I do. In the meantime, I plan to get my soapbox fix here, just like it was before I got in with the paper, regardless of whether or not anyone is reading. It'll give me something to do until I get busy again.

Sitting at Jittery Joes, I picked up the Telegraph and a familiar feeling swept over me: anger and hopelessness. (That's a wee bit of an exaggeration.) The lead story is a good one about the service delivery strategy, which I firmly believe is an issue with greater importance than most folks would suspect, though the headline itself is stupid. Next to it, a national story--like just about any you can find on Yahoo or Google--about Obama's reversal on stem cell research.

Below the fold, which is a weird no man's land since it is the front page but on the half most folks ignore when they're weighing whether or not to buy it, a story about how the Macon Police Department and Bibb County Sheriff's worked together with several other agencies to crack a meth trafficking ring. THAT IS FUCKING HUGE!

But because it's the (nee' Macon) Telegraph, it goes below the fold. That way, people can keep bitching about how the police don't do anything, going on about how bad crime is here and all that. It goes below the fold, beneath a national story that--while important--has less impact on our daily, local lives.

If the next biggest local story was about the birth of 39 puppies, instead of 39 arrests made in conjunction with the drug ring bust, I could see it below the fold.

Bah.

I said it was familiar, and I mean more like de ja vous. Before I started writing for the 11th Hour, I was upset by an issue of The Telegraph that put a headline about Wesleyan's endowment above a story about the way in which poor folks were gonna get screwed by state tort reform.

But, Chris, one is very local, and the other is a statewide issue. Yeah, but in this case, the tort reform law sort of flew in without much notice--or at least much ruckus from poor folks who would no longer be able to sue doctors beyond a preset limit, etc--and it seems like that would be the story you want to roll with. Wesleyan, which is a fine institution and all that, only has a few hundred students. There are THOUSANDS of broke people in Macon.

Do you see where I'm going?

Well, you will. Because I'm gonna bitch and moan for a while. (Just not all of it today.)

the Commercial Exploitation of Human Sexuality

The title is a line I stole from the Bibb County ordinance prohibiting strip clubs. It goes like this:

"...the board of commissioners take note of the notorious and self-evident conditions and per secondary effects attendant to the commercial exploitation of human sexuality, which do not vary greatly among the various communities within our country, particularly the problems of crime, blight, and deterioration which are brought about by the combination of alcohol and live nudity."

A couple years ago, The 11th Hour ran a series of stories written by Jessica Walden and Brad Evans. They looked into Macon's history with prostitution, and when they got into what the present state was, they discovered the truth about the form and function of Macon's massage parlors. Well, I started wondering what the future of prostitution was in Macon, what would happen with these massage parlors since they've only grown in number since our first story, and something weird hit me: There are no strip clubs in Macon but there's more than 20 of these massage parlors. I had to wonder why.

That's what got us back into this issue after such a long time. Plus we had questions about how this impacted our image among other cities, for tourists, for ourselves, which is really relevant because Macon is at a crossroads. We could be heading towards massive improvement or towards collapse. Though signs point to the former, you have to wonder what effect these seedy little joints might have on the way people see us.

In the end, I had over a hundred pages of notes and figures, a dozen interviews, and many more questions. What I didn't have was first hand experience... so I went into one "undercover", you might say. You can read in the paper or online what happened, but now that the paper is out, what I'm wondering is what you think. What should the city and the county do?

There's a group of folks here who think we should relax the laws against strip clubs and find ways to better regulate the massage parlors so the city and county could make more money off of them. They feel like these places could be good for our future growth.

Of course, there are people who think that it is not only immoral but evil. They cite the damage to relationships and marriages, as well as the growing suspicion that women are being trafficked in from other countries as sex slaves to work in these businesses.

It isn't an easy subject, but I'm sure you have an opinion and I'd like to hear it. If you do, or as you do, or as I feel up to it, I'm going to share here some of the stuff I couldn't get into the article, which was already the longest piece we've ever published.