1. I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again. The way the DMN has covered the collapse of the Cowboys practice facility demonstrates why a dedicated, professional news-gathering staff can’t be replaced by some free-for-all wiki-tweet model of citizen journalism. Now the DMN has the text messages sent between Irving city officials in the hours after the collapse. They raise some interesting questions about how the football organization operates.
2. Speaking of the Cowboys and what a good newspaper ought to do, here’s architecture critic David Dillon’s take on the new Cowboys Stadium. Dillon notes: “[A] huge portion of the stadium site is parking lots, acres of them. The same is true of Rangers Ballpark next door. Together they account for nearly 30,000 spaces, enough for a medium-size city. On days when the Cowboys and Rangers are playing simultaneously, the landscape between will be solid cars; adventurous fans may be able to clamber from one game to the other on hoods and fenders. Mass transit anyone?” That said, Dillon really digs the place. He used to work at the paper but was a casualty awhile back of one of the many rounds of downsizing. It’s good to see his words where they belong, if only sporadically. (P.S. The Rangers are going to have to get some post-season action going if this parking conflict is to cause anyone grief more than once this year. The two teams will play at home on September 20, though. The Rangers game against the Angels starts at 2, and the Cowboys game against the Giants starts at 7. A long Rangers game and early arrivals for the Cowboys contest could be a real mess.)
3. Dallas will start deleting city e-mails that are older than 90 days. Open-government advocates fret over the lost information. But the city says it simply doesn’t have space to store it all. Couldn’t this all be solved if everyone just got Gmail accounts?
