Best. Police Report. Ever.

[Ediacara]

From today's Bozeman Daily Chronicle (or the Daily Comical, the Chronic Bozo, the BozoChron, or quite simply the Worst Daily Paper in America). One thing this paper does right however, is list every police report every day. Which is how we get gems like this:

A man warned twice for riding his bike on the sidewalk was asked for his driver's license. The man told the officer he would provide it with a knuckle sandwich. He was cited.

[Oeditpus Rex]

1. Ever see the cops log in the Arcata (Calif.) Eye?

It's so good, they published a couple of books of it.

• Friday, August 4 11:46 p.m. A gray-bearded bicyclist ripped up painstakingly cultivated flowers from the Plaza’s beds, arranged them fancifully on his head and rode away, erroneously feeling beautiful.

12:43 p.m. A blonde woman in a gray hat alternately pulled and smacked a puppy on Janes Road until a government representative arrived to give her a talking-to on puppy protocol.

http://www.arcataeye.com/index.php?module=pagesetter&tid=2&topic=7

[Ediacara]

2. That's great!

There are far better ones in the Chronicle than what I posted today, but the Chronicle has the worst website on earth and doesn't save the comic gems in the police reports. It's mostly drunk driving and shoplifting, but ocassionally you get reports of pure hilarity.

[Oeditpus Rex]

3. Oh... I forgot

Trust me — the Bozeman Daily Chronicle isn't the worst daily paper in the U.S. That honor goes to the paper here — The Free Lance.

A little over three years ago, I was its city editor. It wasn't real great then, but it's gone severely downhill since. (Not just because of my absence.)

[Ediacara]

4. The reason I say the Chronicle is the worst paper

is because of their policies both editorial and financial. They're editorial board is severely right wing (although they do in fairness allow a large number of liberal letters in). They let a Libertarian anti-environmental think tank write a weekly column, and give a severely deranged wingnut named Tammy Hall (who claims to be a famous international speaker!!) at least one and maybe two weekly columns! I'm not opposed to conservative voices in the opinions page, but Tammy Hall makes Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly look like freakin Rhodes Scolars....

As to their financial policy: they're probably bleeding money, although I can't be certain since they don't report on their own financial situation. They used to have the entire paper avialble in PDF format on the internet, as well as HTML versions of every article and every LTTE. They've since changed this, making these parts of the paper available only to subscribers. And I don't mean people who subscribe to the physical paper, I mean people who subscribe to the internet version which is a different subscribtion fee than the physical paper. I don't know of anyone who does subscribes online. This has caused two things: a huge decline in readership and a huge rightward tilt to their LTTEs.

I can't think of any reason they do this other than to justify their shiny printing presses prominently displayed in picture windows in their offices. Printing the entire paper online was full of ads that they got money from and cost them essentially nothing compared to maintaining and printing the physical paper. Idiots...