Last year, when my wife and I were thinking about buying a larger home, we visited dozens of weekend real estate “open houses” we found either through classifed ads or by driving around neighborhoods we found attractive and following “Open House” signs. What we learned by talking to Realtors and direct sellers has led us to believe that cash-rich speculators, not people buying homes for themselves, have created the so-called “real estate boom” in Florida’s Manatee County.

Last Thursday afternoon I was sitting at the corner of 17th Avenue West and Tamiani Trail (AKA 14th St. West), waiting in the left turn lane for the light to change. There was a police car sitting in the closed gas station across the street and another one two cars behind me in the left turn lane. An old Chevrolet Celebrity passed me on the right, boom-boom obscenties vibrating from its open windows. Without stopping for the red light, the Celebrity’s driver made a screeching right turn from 17th Avenue onto Tamiami Trail. Neither of the cops did a thing. This in itself is sad, but even worse is that this young driver didn’t bother to moderate his stereo volume or aggressive driving even though he was in full view of two police cars. Bradenton police obviously don’t scare him. They scare me, though, because this level of non-policing is one of the biggest problems keeping my neighborhood from becoming the prosperous, arts-oriented “urban village” Bradenton’s Tamiami Tomorrow program is trying to build.

How I define my job as a reporter and editor: “Gathering and organizing information my readers are perfectly capable of finding on their own but don’t have time to dig up and sort through for themselves.”

Gathering information is the heart of a reporter’s job. Journalism isn’t about pushing a political agenda or turning out stories filled with so many cute figures of speech that they shine in the sun as if they were sprinkled with diamonds. Elegant (or at least clear) writing is nothing but a means of communicating the information you have gathered. To use a construction metaphor, fancy writing is a story’s trim and paint, while its organization — hopefully as a narrative with a beginning and end rather than that inverted pyramid crap many newspapers use to drive readers away — is its structure. And, of course, the information the story presents is the foundation on which everything else rests.