NEWS24/680: “We Deal In Now…”

One of our small but merry staff gave us the title for today’s effort, explaining our model to a call-in subscriber convinced we were robots and AI-generated minions of some giant super-corporation.

“Nope, all human,” our man told the suspicious caller. “Call anytime. We deal in now.”

We liked that so, we’re using it today. We’ve been dealing in now since 2012 in our current iteration, but a string of recent and not-so-recent events appears to have captured public attention and fired up their imagination – leading to the AI/Android correlation.

Our small, woefully understaffed staff works hard to bring our subscribers local news when it happens, in real time, and that has led to both confusion and some suspicion. Some folks, newbies mostly, can’t seem to wrap their head around what we do. Others, on the other hand, wished some of our practices and technologies were more widely adopted. At least, that’s what they tell us.

We pretty much just put our heads down and do what we do, serving a growing number of users and working for them. The work is rewarding and fun, it makes us look at things differently and see things we – perhaps most people – may normally choose not to see.

Case in point is our chosen photo for today’s screed, made by a very talented local photographer whose images have graced our site often in recent weeks. An engrossing image presented in the manner of an Edward Hopper painting it captures a moment in a bitterly harsh life on the street, its maker telling us the photo and others he has taken has given him insight into the crisis and the people caught up in it.

Along with breaking news we’ve been legging out (reporter talk) a series of lesser stories – including the overturned conviction of a prolific local stalker; a woman with a cemetery fetish; college pranksters; ongoing skirmishes outside the Walnut Creek Planned Parenthood offices; and someone experimenting with pyrotechnics or a few household chemicals in the proper proportions.

At this hour we’re working an incident involving multiple stabbings at a Concord restaurant and a recently reported residential fire, alerting folks in those areas of developments.

We continue to be encouraged by the generous support of readers – many of whom have been with us more than a decade now – and buoyed by their trust, friendship, and occasional coffee donations.

As for the others, the doubters who still wonder why we’re the only ones reporting a given story, be prepared to be beaten down as we continue to Deal In The Now.