Pass the Kool-Aid

The OC Register announced new staff assignments last week. For more than a year, reporter Lindsey Baguio covered Mission Viejo for the Register and Saddleback Valley News. She has been reassigned to Laguna Niguel.

In April 2008, Baguio exposed the city staff’s wasteful spending on 500 custom-built easels. She followed the city’s 20th anniversary spend-a-thon, which ended with easels thrown in a heap on a hillside. A city contractor took up to 200 of the easels to a county dump while city employees claimed the trashed easels were being “stored for future use.” City administrator Keith Rattay lied to Baguio – she quoted him – about costs and volunteer participation, and activists combed city records to expose the true figures. For a brief time, residents saw the real city hall through SVN coverage.

Baguio at first reported both sides – activists’ statements alongside city hall’s spin. But before the dust settled on Easelgate, City Manager Dennis Wilberg invited Baguio to his office. Baguio’s investigative reporting ended, and SVN published almost no letters about city hall after July 2008. Requests for public records revealed an email trail in which Wilberg pressured Baguio for favorable reporting. Records show he directed her to solicit community comments from a list of people he identified as supportive of his staff and how city hall spent taxpayer funds.

As newspapers worldwide are diminishing, OCR is hanging on. When a group of city activists met with the OCR/SVN staff in late 2008, the meeting included three newspaper people – Baguio, her editor and her editor’s boss. Baguio and her editor seemed to be the whole SVN team, and her editor was putting together six other tab-size weekly papers for South County cities. While the three newspaper employees listened to the activists and said little, the rows of vacant cubicles in the newsroom conveyed the message.

City hall is a major client of SVN. Nowhere in Wilberg’s emails did he write any threat to Baguio or her editor about pulling city ads, but his words implied that SVN should do as he suggested. After July, articles with Baguio’s byline were increasingly fluff about city hall activities and little else. Despite the economic downturn, Mission Viejo news is happy news: new businesses, happy people at city events and good times at city hall.

Recently, Baguio surprised readers with one story about the city’s abandoned homes and another about a city commissioner’s home going to auction. Was it Baguio’s not-so-fond farewell to Wilberg? News of Baguio’s transfer broke days later.

According to an activist’s email to this blog, Baguio’s replacement, Niyaz Pirani, formerly worked as a photographer until he started writing stories about food. One of his first Mission Viejo articles appears in the June 12 edition of SVN, “Is new Sonic drive-in worth wait?” The article isn’t about business or people or a new restaurant revitalizing a retail center on Los Alisos. It’s about food.

Just in case anyone wonders how city hall feels about Pirani, here’s a copy of an email the city clerk wrote to fellow employees:

“Please note that effective this week, the OC Register has assigned a new reporter to Mission Viejo.  Niyaz Pirani can be reached at: npirani@ocregister.com (949) 698-2498

Niyaz said he is looking forward to meeting city staff and the Council Members and he has expressed an interest in working closely with the City to report and promote its events and activities.”