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  • Mom, I’m on a podcast

    I’ve finally been putting my audio equipment to professional use lately. As part of my work with the AICPA’s CGMA Magazine, I recorded this interview about financial communication.

  • Ma, I’m back in newsprint

    Walt Disney started an American race to build theme parks when he opened Disneyland. In fact, some of Disney’s top former staffers attempted a sequel-in-spirit just a few years later. They built it on Colorado’s Front Range and named it Magic Mountain. Things didn’t go quite like they planned, but their failure produced one of Colorado’s oddest artifacts: A history-themed town that became historic itself.

    The place, now called Heritage Square, is most likely going to be demolished. I followed along for a few months, and finally had the chance to land a story in Westword about its imminent closure.

  • Could President Chris Christie kill cannabis with a pen stroke?

    DENVER One of this city’s most popular marijuana shops sits nonchalantly beside a Starbucks and a Maggiano’s Little Italy restaurant on a pedestrian mall. Marijuana massages can be had on the other side of downtown. There’s a cadre of polo-shirted, well-branded cannabis consultants sprinkled in between.

    And much of the state’s $700 million industry rests on a memo from the federal government, as Colorado was reminded this week.

    Republican presidential hopeful Chris Christie on July 28 and 29 said that he would effectively terminate the legal marijuana industry if he wins the top office.

    “If you’re getting high in Colorado today, enjoy it,” Christie said on “Fox and Friends.”

    It might not be the most popular promise – national polling has found majority support for recreational pot legalization – but it would only take a presidential pen-stroke to set the end in motion.

    “This could all go away in an instant, if the feds decide they want to shut it down,” said Karen Boxx, a law professor with the University of Washington’s Cannabis Law and Policy Project.

    Cannabis’ conflict with federal law has been one of the few brakes on its growth. It’s illegal for banks to operate accounts for marijuana businesses. Result: You often can’t buy marijuana with a credit card. Many cannabis businesses need armored cars for all the cash they collect instead. One Colorado mountain-town shop even runs its finances under a restaurant’s name, according to its staff.

    Meanwhile, the federal government has been gathering up hundreds upon hundreds of reports on bank accounts linked to the cannabis industry, Rocky Mountain PBS iNews reported. Those would come in handy if President Christie loosed the Drug Enforcement Agency on the Eufloras, Grass Stations and Mile High Dispensaries of the world.

    An enforcement campaign could include stricter auditing by the Internal Revenue Service, civil forfeiture or even geared-up DEA task forces tearing down grow operations and shops, according to John Arsenault, a Denver-based attorney who follows the industry.

    Besides bankers, a change in federal policy also would also scare some business lawyers from the industry, according to Boxx, making it more difficult to run a shop.

    Christie’s threat wouldn’t even require an act of Congress to enact, since federal laws on marijuana still enforce prohibition. In fact, individual federal attorneys still can crack down on state-legal businesses. U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag has tried for years to shut down Berkeley Patient Group, the California city’s patron saint of pot shops, on the grounds that it sells federally forbidden products.

    “There is a sense that these laws are starting to progress, and public opinion has drastically shifted on the issues. So I think that there is a sense of relative safety, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t open still to criminal prosecution,” said Morgan Fox, communications manager for the Marijuana Policy Project.

    Fat chance?

    A newly elected president bent on a crackdown would likely start by repealing the 2013 “Cole” memo, which shifted the federal government’s ire away from state-sanctioned marijuana businesses.

    “I think he could hypothetically do it pretty quickly,” Boxx said.

    But the new president also would need to scrounge up the money to reverse a years-long decline in federal enforcement.

    The DEA’s haul of confiscated pot is down to roughly 4 million plants per year from a high of more than 10 million in 2009. The agency claims this is because previous efforts drove growers to hide their weed better, but it also coincides with President Barack Obama’s softening stance.

    Paul Armentano, deputy director of the marijuana advocacy group NORML, said that votes in Congress hold sway over law-enforcement priorities, providing another layer of protection for cannabis businesses.

    Who else would kill pot?

    So far, Christie’s pot views have proved conservative among presidential candidates, according to an analysis by Marijuana Policy Project.

    Gov. Jeb Bush thinks Colorado’s legalization “was a bad idea,” but said in February that the right should go to the states. Hillary Clinton said that Colorado is “experimenting,” calling the states “laboratories of democracy,” as have Ted Cruz and George Pataki.

    However, candidate and Republican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has said that federal law “still needs to be enforced. John Kasich, Rick Santorum and Marco Rubio have said much the same.

    Gov. Scott Walker split the difference: “There are currently federal laws on the books that must be enforced, but ultimately he believes the best place to handle this issue is in the states,” a spokeswoman told The Washington Times.

    So, depending how the primaries play out, the cannabis business could find itself on a trial in the 2016 election. But with several legalization campaigns under its belt, and more coming, the industry may be better prepared than ever for that test.

    “I’ve got people from Big Tobacco … It used to be millionaires. Now it’s billionaires,” said Ellis Smith, chief development officer for American Cannabis Consulting Company, referring to the investors supporting new marijuana ventures.

    “I cut my hair. I had to,” he said. “I’m still tie-dyed and dreadlocked on the inside.”

  • It should be illegal to put stupid little messages in hold music

    I don’t mind hold music. Having recently purchased health insurance, transferred my driver’s license, and attempted to fix a printer, I have heard quite a lot of it lately. I even have some favorite tunes.

    The trouble is that hold music is slowly being corrupted by a greedy, customer-hating force: Those stupid little spoken messages. The music stops, and some possibly robotic person starts asking if I have tried checking the support website (Why else would I be on hold?) or, worse yet, whether I have heard about the rest of the company’s exciting products, presumably so that I may wait on hold, one day, for help fixing them too.

    Each spoken intrusion shatters the muzak. It shatters the personal muzak of my zen. “There is someone in my phone!” I think. “Are they here to help me? Do they need help?” No. They are not real.

    See, hold music was perfect before.  It said, “We’re sorry your stuff is broken and you have to wait, but at least you can jam on this.”It mildly amused and, more importantly, it let you know you were still waiting. Maybe you might even hear some Bill Withers.

    This is what hold music should be

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6g4dkBF5anU

    But now those two hours are torture, because a voice is preparing at any minute to jump out of my telephone to scare me. And for what? Ostensibly, it’s a chance for companies to deliver valuable information. More often, it’s a way for a business to capitalize on my time. These messages are like television advertising, except they’re not wedged between chunks of something all that enjoyable. They’re wedged between hold music, and hold music doesn’t have all that much going for it to begin with.

    If I’m on hold, I’m already mildly annoyed. Interrupting messages bring out true, impotent rage. (Hang on – customer support actually just picked up.)

    Back to it. (My printer is fixed.) I will concede there is some use to messages on hold lines. They genuinely might show the customer an alternate solution, or provide other useful information. But even then, I think messages should be limited to the first few minutes of a call. I don’t want to be interrupted by some overly extroverted robot; I definitely don’t want to hear the same messages twice; and I most certainly don’t want to be an advertising target when I’m sitting on hold.

    Addendum: I just realized this is one big argument for call-back services. It seems simple enough to just call the customer back when someone is available. I suspect some companies don’t want to give up their new advertising space.

  • Colorado

    I have just completed a big move to Colorado. I’m living in downtown Denver with my girlfriend, Elisa. It was quite sad to leave The News & Observer after six years, but I am excited to get things spinning into gear here.

    For the time being, I will be doing freelancing writing, research and photography. Contact me anytime for work in Colorado or the West.

    Things are certainly happening here.

    denver union station exp

     

  • Iceland

    I added our music video from Iceland. It’s kind of cutesy, and I hate to look like I’m showing off our vacation footage, which is precisely what I’m doing… but I’m proud of how it came together, so here we are.

  • Chatham Park is a go

    This portfolio includes a story called Chatham Park is Huge, which includes some of my better reporting on development and change in rural areas. Well, after about a year of discussion, the town of Pittsboro has approved this absolutely huge development. By now, my friends know all about this: 60,000 people, more than 20,000 homes, huge corporate offices, all planned for a town that only has 4,000 people living in it now.

    You can find my story here. This story has been almost intimidating, with the sheer scope of the project and the fact that I’m an outsider trying to sum up the feelings of an entire town. I’ll document this plan, this theoretical city, as it emerges into reality over the next few years. I’m nearly done with a related project in a medium that’s totally new to me. I’ll tell you when it’s finished.

  • Almost ready

    Well, I’ve taken way too long to get this thing ready to launch, but it’s just about here. This site has two purposes: I wanted more control over how my stories appeared, and I wanted to assemble my work from a few different outlets into one place. Again, Randy Skidmore has done a great job of bringing my requests into reality. He doesn’t appear to be taking commissions right now, but you’ll be very lucky if you convince him to do a website for you.

    I have stocked the site with my favorite published and unpublished work from the last year or so, and I’ll keep it updated as new stuff rolls out. I’m looking for freelance writing, photography and research gigs, so do pass this site or my email address – andrewjonkenney@gmail.com – to anyone you like.

  • The infamous first post

    I worry as I type these words: Years from now, will this very post still sit atop this blog? That’s the danger in having your friend Randy build you a fancy website. More particularly, that’s the danger in building a website that pretends it will be updated. I’ve seen too many blogs frozen in time, forever pointing at their creators as someone who once had a bright idea for a blog.

    This is a problem unique to the digital age. A copy of a newspaper is complete unto itself. You would never know, picking it up, whether it was aborted mere weeks later because its authors just didn’t have the time. An abandoned website, however, shows the sum efforts of its creator to every reader. It’s obvious exactly when things ground to a halt. Even worse, it can always be revived. It is waiting in cruel stasis.

    I’m reminded of the “Under Construction” signs that mark the graveyards of Geocities, MySpace AngelFire, which someone helpfully archived. These were an early acknowledgement that nothing on the internet is ever done. Maybe they were apologies for the fact that we no longer had paper costs and space limits to excuse the limits of our scope. And, like this blog post, they were a possibly empty promise that the author would return.

    I almost had Randy exclude this section of the website altogether. But, hell, maybe the shame of this lonely post will bring me back here to write.