Trying to Make the Gumball More Orange
03.28.25 The Friday Footnote: A Publishing Screw-Up and the Ethics of Local Journalism. Legislative manpower, and real estate affordability is rising, if you can find a house!
Brakes on the Left:
A Publishing Screw-Up and the Ethics of Local Journalism
I think the most difficult part of this whole situation (if you’ve been following me closely this week, I’m not by the way going to rehash—but if you haven’t been keeping up, it’ll be fine, you’ll figure it out along the read here)… Anyway, I think the most difficult part of this whole situation is that the last time I made a fubar like this was back in my early twenties, writing for a few suburban newspapers floating around Dayton, Ohio.
That’s a pretty good track record—one serious misstep in my early twenties, and now another in my early fifties. This time, the impact wasn’t just on me. That’s the difference. An error on my end can carry real-world consequences for someone else. And the gap between what I thought I knew and how it showed up in my writing was wide enough to swallow the whole story—costing trust, time, and peace of mind.
It was no small mistake. But, thank goodness, not Jayson Blair level.
In 2003, The New York Times got gutted from the inside out when one of their rising stars, Jayson Blair, was caught faking entire stories. Not just embellishing—fabricating scenes, inventing people, stealing other reporters’ work line-for-line. He’d expense meals in Brooklyn while claiming he was on assignment in D.C. He ignored corrections, rewrote edits, and just kept getting published. It wasn’t one bad article—it was dozens. The kind of deception so bold it makes you wince. And when it all blew open, it didn’t just cost him his job—it took down the two top editors, lit the newsroom on fire, and left the Times scrambling to prove it still deserved the credibility it had just watched go up in smoke.
In Journalism’s ‘Normal Accidents’, William Woo took a hard look at the Blair scandal and said: yeah, this wasn’t just one guy going rogue—this was a normal accident. He pulled the idea from airline disasters and nuclear meltdowns: once a system gets complex enough and tightly wired enough, small failures start stacking into big explosions. You miss one red flag here, skip a gut-check there, dismiss a memo, and boom—front page scandal. Woo’s core point? It’s not that journalists don’t care about the truth. It’s that we build newsrooms like they’ll never fail, and then act stunned when they do. A way of seeing, he quotes sociologist Barry A. Turner, is always also a way of not seeing.
Woo points out how, under pressure to feed the web beast, editors can get rushed into posting stuff that hasn’t been fully verified. Once it’s out there, it’s out there—instant, viral, damn near impossible to pull back. He calls out The Dallas Morning News and The Wall Street Journal for blasting bad info during the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, and the fallout was brutal. Doesn’t matter how fast you fix it—the damage is already done, and millions have seen the mistake.
Luckily, I’m not at millions. My numbers hover around the few hundred and are way more local, but when you are in a town of roughly 30,000, even at 1% of the population, that’s enough to stir the pot, clog your inbox, and make you think twice before hitting “publish” again.
Even though I pulled the piece and published an apology—because yes, I was wrong—the original Facebook links won’t die. And I’m stuck in Facebook jail till late Saturday, which means I can’t take the posts down. And in some groups, moderators are just now approving the post, which makes it look like I’m still out there, doubling down.
The best option here is for me to republish the fixed and revised piece with a huge meaculpa at the front end and to just wait; otherwise, the facebook links are going to continue to spread misinformation because without the correction, ppl will click on the link and it will go nowhere with no explanation with no context.
I’m in the Facebook phantom zone—72 hours of algorithmic purgatory while the wrong version of the story keeps surfacing.
This is a hell of a position—because now we’re not just talking about truth and harm. We’re talking about visibility that I didn’t consent to either, because even my corrected integrity is being delayed.
So yeah. I want to take it all down. I will take it all down. But I can’t—not until the 72-hour loop ends and I can get my hands back on the wheel.
Until then, the internet ghosts keep dragging this story back into daylight, and all I have is a damn broom.
When I was sixteen, right before I had my driver’s license, my parents bought a blue Chevette. My dad had a thing for coffee on Main Street, and to log some practice driving time, he’d have me take the wheel.
One morning, I confused the brake and the accelerator and rammed that blue Chevette into a parked Buick. Just flat-out hit it.
My dad took a long breath, lit a cigar, let the smoke curl around his head like a dragon. Then he got out. Ignored the Buick. Stared down at the Chevette’s bumper.
“Come on,” he said, and we walked into the coffee shop.
In a voice half-casual half half-Wrestlemania announcer, he said, “Who owns the Buick?”
An old man raised his hand.
“Virgil,” my dad said. “My son just hit your car. You wanna come out and take a look?”
Every man in that coffee shop was an old German, and Virgil was no exception. He followed us out. Took one look at the cars. And then laughed. “Well,” he said, “I’d be more worried about the Chevette’s bumper falling off.”
The two men laughed. I was still scared shitless.
Dad got his coffee, sat down in the passenger seat, took one sip, and said, “Let’s go.” The last thing I wanted to do was get behind that wheel again. I’d just hit a car. But all he said was, “Brake’s on the left. Accelerator’s on the right.”
Everything is scaling up right now. The newsletter. The real estate. The writing (want to hear about the novels?). And yeah—it’s exciting. Surreal, even. But the systems I had in place? They’ve started to crack. Some have outright broken. And it’s revealing pressure points I didn’t even know were there.
Wicked Moxie is my civic heartbeat in essay form. At its core, it’s a local storytelling project with national-level teeth—a series of sharply written, fiercely human portraits of the people, places, and tensions shaping the Seacoast. Think small-town journalism meets personal essay meets cultural commentary, with a voice that doesn’t flinch and a moral compass tuned to truth over politeness.
It’s about visibility for the overlooked: barbers, tattoo shop owners, punk rockers-turned-entrepreneurs—the ones keeping downtown alive while the rents climb and the soul thins out. It’s about accountability with candor: if something’s broken—business, community, system—I name it with clarity, not cruelty. And it’s about local texture with national resonance: gentrification, burnout, third-space culture, queer visibility, the fight for public joy.
More than that, Wicked Moxie is my way of showing what it means to actually care about the place I call home—not with slogans, but with stories. It’s how I build civic capital: one real profile, one raw essay, one public fuck-up owned with grace. And yeah—it's how I shift the lens from “realtor with a newsletter” to trusted voice, problem-solver, and local lightning rod.
It’s part memoir, part movement.
A little punk. A little priest.
And absolutely no bullshit.
Listen, there’s no Wicked Moxie dropping tonight like I’d hoped. I need to slow down a beat and put in some new pre-publishing checks.
The goal is still to publish Wicked Moxie three times a week—Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings. But as I work out this next system—threading together a better fact-checking process, a tighter editorial rhythm, and a publishing runway that doesn’t burn me out or burn down the people I’m telling stories about—expect the schedule to be a little sporadic for a bit.
The good news? The rest of the newsletter rhythm is solid:
Monday’s Blueprint
#GratiTuesday
Friday Footnote
Saturday Rundown
Those are still coming at you right on time.
But Wicked Moxie? It deserves to be done right. And that means a small pause while I retool the gears.
Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of The New York Times, speaking after the Blair fallout, said, "We will learn from them [the mistakes], and we will grow from them... And we will return to doing journalism at this newspaper because that’s what we’re here for." Sulzberger meant to steady the ship, but the quote lands rather with a kind of bruised hope. A battered faith in the mission after the institution failed.
Listen, I’m no Arthur Sulzberger, no New York Times, but we still read the Times (or rather, at least I do), and I’d bet money you all forgot about Blair.
So. Honestly. Seriously. Thank you for reading. Thank you for sticking with me while I build the thing I know this can become.
💬 Have a specific idea for what you'd love to see in the Coffee with Steve Newsletter?
In the Real Estate Market
🧱 The Game Is Rigged and the State Just Picked Up a Crowbar
In a rare show of bipartisan muscle, the New Hampshire Senate just did what it’s avoided for years: it took a hammer to local zoning laws. Senate Bill 84, the headline act, sets strict limits on how big a lot can be—no more than two acres if there’s no town sewer, and no more than half an acre if there is. That’s a direct challenge to towns that have used sprawling lot size requirements to quietly block new housing. The Senate also passed bills that loosen fire code requirements to allow single-stairwell mid-rise buildings, cut mandatory parking minimums for small developments, and doubled the state’s affordable housing fund. Meanwhile, over in the House, lawmakers passed a bill requiring towns to allow multi-family housing in commercial zones. It’s not just talk anymore—Concord is pulling zoning power away from the towns. Whether this unleashes a wave of new housing or sparks a war over local control is the question every planning board in the state is about to face.
I have written about zoning before. You can read my take way back in August 2024 on the original website, reviewing Lisa Prevost’s Snob Zones. Or when I “yelled” at Dover City Manager Michael Joyal’s remarks in the press. Or how I called out what single-family zoning really is: the polished face of classism, racism, and segregation
. Dover’s real estate market is tight, brutal, and wildly imbalanced. With median prices hovering near $900k and no inventory below $400K, buyers—especially locals—are getting squeezed out by limited options and rising costs. And while 1,380 new units are in the pipeline across projects like the Cochecho Waterfront and Littleworth Business Park, it's unclear if that will be enough to meet demand or merely serve the upper end of the market. The real culprit isn’t just construction costs—it’s decades of exclusionary zoning laws that prioritize large lots, single-family homes, and outdated ideas of who “belongs” in a community. State-level efforts like HB 577, HB 459, and HB 631 and SB 84 aim to change that by legalizing ADUs, limiting excessive lot size requirements, and allowing housing in commercial zones by right. But local resistance, red tape, and political hand-wringing threaten to stall real reform.
Lisa Prevost’s Snob Zones may have been published in 2013, but her critique of how zoning laws function as tools of socioeconomic exclusion still hits hard in 2025. These laws don’t just shape neighborhoods—they shape lives. They dictate who gets access to housing and who’s left scrambling for shelter, and they directly feed the rising tide of homelessness and housing instability across the state. In places like Dover, where nearly 40% of the land is locked in R-40 zoning, even progressive planning boards are only starting to consider increasing density in rural zones. Meanwhile, working families are being priced out of the communities they helped build, with fewer options every month and a shrinking margin for survival.
The housing market isn’t just a spreadsheet problem—it’s a moral one. It’s not enough to “preserve neighborhood character” if that character comes at the cost of pushing teachers, nurses, service workers, and young families out. If we want vibrant, sustainable communities, we need more than just development—we need zoning reform, legislative backbone, and the political will to say: everyone deserves a place to live. The game is rigged.
These bills? They’re a start. And even though I said in earlier posts that I thought there was no way any of them would pass, hopefully, with the finger on the pulse beat, I am wrong and they will make real substantial change. They, of course, won’t solve the crisis overnight, but they represent a step toward unrigging a game that’s been fixed for far too long.
So what can we do?
1. Email Your Rep—Today
Let your local and state reps know you support zoning reform and housing equity. Especially if you live in a town that’s resistant to change, your voice can counterbalance the fear-based opposition. Don’t assume they know where you stand.
2. Show Up to Planning Board Meetings
Whether you're a renter, homeowner, or just a concerned neighbor, public comment matters. Ask why your town still mandates large lots or excludes multi-family housing. Ask what they’re doing to support working families, not just developers.
3. Map Your Town’s Zoning
Visit the NH Zoning Atlas or your town’s GIS portal and look at how land is zoned. How much is locked into single-family, large-lot restrictions? How much allows for mixed-use or multi-family? Knowing the map is how we un-rig it.
4. Support Local Housing Projects—Loudly
When new developments get proposed—especially ones with ADUs, workforce housing, or mixed-use design—speak in favor of them. Comment online. Attend hearings. Don’t let NIMBY voices be the only ones in the room.
💥 5. Stop Calling It a Housing Market Problem
Call it what it is: a justice issue. Talk to friends, coworkers, and neighbors about zoning like you would talk about healthcare or education. Because who gets to live here? That is the conversation.
The Bare Bones Numbers 💀📉
The New Hampshire housing market is starting to feel like a ghost story—houses appear, then vanish before you can say pre-approval letter. Inventory ticked up to 2.82 months and affordability crept up to 79.5%, thanks to a $35K drop in the median price. But don’t mistake that for mercy—homes are still disappearing in just 7 days. On the Seacoast, buyer and seller expectations have finally made peace, with median list and sold prices locking eyes. Tri-City and Durham-area towns? They're not just low on listings—they're straight-up ghost-town haunted by the absence. If you’re hunting, bring a Scooby-doo flashlight and maybe a meddling Realtor or two.
📍 Statewide New Hampshire Housing Market
Active Listings: 1,231
Closed Sales (Last 6 Months): 2615
Pending Sales: 571
Median Sales Price: 489,000
Median Days on Market (DOM): 7
Inventory: 2.82%
Affordability Index: 79.56%
📍 Seacoast Area
Active Listings: 212
Closed Transactions (Last 6 Months): 498
Pending Transactions: 133
Days on Market (DOM):
Highest: 137
Average: 16
Median: 7
Pricing Trends:
Lowest List Price: 72,900
Lowest Sold Price: 73,000
Average List Price: 741,323
Average Sold Price: 741,416
Median List Price: 597,000
Median Sold Price: 597,450
📍 Tri-City Area (Dover, Somersworth, Rochester)
Active Listings: 36
📍 Durham, Newmarket, Madbury & Lee
Active Listings: 7
📍 Portsmouth & Newington
Active Listings: 28
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