Happy Birthday to the Tattler

Five Years of Kicking Ass and Taking Names

It's our birthday!  Today, the Emeryville Tattler celebrates our fifth year of takin' out the trash and takin' it to The Man.
During that time, we've made a lot of enemies (and a few friends). We've been called every name in the book from a long list of detractors.
So who's not celebrating with us?  The list is as long as it is authoritative: the City Council, the School Board, the Planning Commission, the Chamber of Commerce, the City Manager, the Planning Director, the City Clerk, the School District, City Hall, the developers, the business elite, the Public Works Director, the City Attorney, right wing lobbying groups, various City Committees, trustees, hall monitors, in fact just about anybody running this town along with their cavalcade of obsequious sycophantic minions.

City Hall, the School District, corporate board rooms; why aren't they celebrating our special day?  It's because we're mean. Our stories are condemnatory and relentless. We don't like to run feel good fluff pieces (except for this one).  Emeryville boosterism makes us retch and we refuse to promote Emeryville business; we don't accept advertising, we're not looking for clicks or praise.  We don't want money.

We're not big on stories when the town gets it right...only when they screw it up. We wake up every morning ready to throw a wrench in the gears.  If it's bad or embarrassing to Emeryville, we'll print it.  The worse it gets, the more we like it.  We love expensive boondoggles. We're all over the Peter Principle.  We flip over flagrant flim flam foolery.  Our stock in trade is top-down malfeasance, hubris and incompetence.  Tax cheats among the elite are something we relish.  Dark back rooms, corruption and ideological dogmatism make us giddy.  Politically connected developers getting special attention get special attention from us.  Conceit and abuse from the powerful and the official we'll cover all day long.  We're keeping score of the pegs and cocksure blowhards, be they at City Hall or from the business community, are always made to be taken down by a few.


We're not normally of a mind to be so demonstrably celebratory but today we unabashedly celebrate the Tattler's five year birthday!  Over the next month, we'll re-post some of our faves and some of our reader's faves from the archives and you'll be able to see what they mean when the rich and powerful call the Emeryville Tattler filth.  It is a blasphemously debased and biased piece of offensive and reprehensible trash.  A repellent and untowardly fallacious bastion of yellow journalism; despicable in its nature and ostentatiously godawful in its vile and untruthful characterizations.  It's venal and detestable.  It makes a mockery of all that is good and pure and pious in the world as it plods along its loathsome and purulent five year trajectory, soiling and defiling everything it touches.  It's really icky.