I should correct one point, though. They don't publicly acknowledge that they appreciate my criticism, but they and dozens of other reporters, editors and publishers in this state know exactly the value of my commentary. Companies pay dearly for this kind of consultancy, and CIM knows it. Maybe one editor at NMI is advocating for the sarcastic Alt-Weekly, insinuation-over-facts tone, but I suspect CIM's leaders and some of the professional reporters (those who ever worked for any news organzation at all other than the partisan Alt-Weekly entertainment press or as political organizers) pray to several gods each day that their effort matures into a real news organization with powers to expose and explain public processes, instead of degrading into a cesspool of partisan mudslinging.

http://www.desertrockenergyeis.com

Why not tell us the basic facts about the company's projected mercury releases? Did pro-advocate and pretend journalist Childress cherry pick “50 percent” as a reference to the proportion of mercury “found” in New Mexico because it's a bigger number than 11 percent or 9 percent, which is the company's estimate of what portion of regulated (11 percent) or unregulated (9 percent) mercury sources identified in the state that the plant operators plan to release?

http://www.desertrockenergyproject.com/mercury.htm

Generally, all of those mystery meat links in the story are okay if we want to find out how advocate Childress might be sourcing her material, but a break out box with links to identified resources would be much more useful than to send us on a scavenger hunt, away from the section of the article we happen to be reading, to discover why she arbitrarily decided to link a particular word. Which is to say, please tell us where the link goes and why you are sending us there as a primary method of linking off page, and use inline links sparingly so we don't need to wait for 17 pages to load to find out why she put all those links in line with her copy.

So we follow the links to information on seven “endangered” species and we find a word not mentioned anywhere in the article — “threatened.” See, it was not convenient to our activist author's goals to tell us such nuances in the law as the difference between an endangered species and a threatened species, much less that some species are listed as endangered federally and threatened in particular states, such as the pikeminnow in Colorado. And that not all of the species listed in her article about endangered species are in fact listed endangered species.

Well, does it matter if they are endangered or threatened? Let's see, if we say some are threatened but not endangered, does that make the plant seem less a threat, so there's no need to report that? Or maybe if we report that some species have returned from endangered to threatened (remember the bald eagle and the buffalo?) readers might learn that environmental protection laws can make a difference? Seems the professional activist doesn't even know the job of activism that well when it comes to educating the public about the value of participating in public processes. Childress' seems to be the kind of activist party leaders are eager to hire – the kind who pounds the drum to the cadence party leaders dictate and who cares none to help citizens learn to beat the drum.