I woke up this morning to the news that a local Democratic Central Committee slate has scheduled a meeting on the Muslim holiday of Eid al Adha. There are only two major Muslim religious holidays. They happen every year. Anyone who is regularly scheduling meetings in our community should already have them marked out on their calendar. Acting in ignorance when you are a member of a party that claims to be inclusive of all is not acceptable. Inflexibility in the face of input when you have made such an error is appalling. This is not an innocent mistake or a scheduling conflict. It’s a choice. ***** Yesterday was interesting. I thought I’d be doing a lot more comment section intervention than I ended up needing to do. This is largely because the support for Erika Strauss Chavarria and Columbia Community Care is both broad and deep in the community. For this I am grateful. My daily life right now is not conducive to blog policing. I will be writing a follow-up post. I’ll need a da...
What makes good journalism? What makes a local blog valuable? What makes a social media post trustworthy? Sources. High quality sources, reliable sources, and a variety of sources that provide perspective and depth. Here is the one source at the heart of a story about The Source. Here she is: active in the community, and not hard to find. Erika Strauss Chavarria, founder and Executive Director of Columbia Community Care. Now I’m going to tell you something that will blow your mind: The Sun didn’t interview her for their original article.* The Merriweather Post didn’t reach out to her, either. Why would anyone write a piece about the most aspirational project of Columbia Community Care and not want to talk to the founder and director? Did they think she’s not intelligent enough to know what’s going on with her own project? Did they assume she’s dishonest? A scammer? Did they just decide that she was…irrelevant? Who does that? Could it possibly be someone who has alrea...