The reasons for voting yes on Proposition A to expand the San Diego Convention Center are clear:
    Out-of-towners will pay for it through the hotel bed tax, not local taxpayers, and the visitors will leave behind hundreds of millions of dollars more each year in hard cash used to pay for everything. Mostly this will cover the salaries of 4,000 new jobs and better salaries for existing job-holders.
The reasons a few vocal opponents want to further stall the project are not perfectly clear, but still transparent. Some suggestions:
        The easiest, cheapest free-publicity ride for Rich Rider to be elected county treasurer and Bruce Henderson to be elected city councilman — they are candidates, you know — would be a boisterous attack on improvements to an icon, Qualcomm Stadium, followed by a similar attack on another popular civic building, the San Diego Convention Center. Master the sound-bite, distort enough to come off like the altruistic protector of the public purse and manipulate the media's insatiable appetite for a political fight. If a politician doesn’t have a lot of money to pay for advertising, Rider's and Henderson's approach is almost guaranteed to garner free publicity and a tenuous claim to 15 or 20 percent of the electorate that already is disaffected or gullible. On that foundation, build a traditional campaign and hope for missteps from opposing candidates.
    Not clear at all is the motivation of the weekly Reader to oppose the convention center expansion, labeling its relatively risk-free financing a "fraud" while supporting Rider's and Henderson's activity. The owner of the Reader had contributed about 80 percent of the funds opposed to convention center expansion, as of the March 17 campaign disclosure statement.
    A cruel irony is apparent.
    The hospitality industry that will benefit most from the convention center's expansion is the very industry that most heavily finances the Reader. Restaurant, bar, tobacco and liquor advertisers contribute millions of dollars annually to the Reader.
    Yet the Reader opposes the convention center expansion. It accepts ads promoting the use of tobacco, a proven carcinogen that is more likely to kill a user the younger he or she gets hooked, and the Reader knows its audience is youthful. But it wraps itself in a cover story that purports the expansion of the convention center is too risky for the public good. Did you see the April 16 edition? (Many people didn’t and many civic leaders refuse to read the Reader.)
    The owner of the Reader, Jim Holman, once reportedly said that many people don’t read the Reader for its editorial content, but pick it up for its ads, especially its cheap classified, risque personals and clutter of entertainment. Indeed, it’s obvious big media buyers don’t read the Reader much and have become adept at buying ads in the largest "alternative" media in city after city with little or no regard to content. Otherwise, you couldn’t have such oxymoronic juxtapositions as GTE, Pacific Bell and Sprint advertising in what reads like an anti-business/anti-government publication, or Metropolis furniture supporting a paper that apparently opposes most housing construction. But the Reader does have aggressive ad sales people who tell ad buyers what they want to hear.
    For all those advertisers who don’t read the Reader, let's get it straight. The Reader is popular among high school and college kids who don’t read much and don’t have the discretionary income to buy most of what is advertised in the Reader.
    More often than not, the Reader appears anti-business, anti-government, anti-work, anti-Union-Tribune, anti-structure and, overall, antisocial. It has a lengthy record of being anti-Downtown redevelopment and anti-suburbs, which is tantamount to being anti-San Diego. It reads like it hates San Diego’s leaders and hates new buildings, especially ones built after Alonzo Horton. It seems to hate economic growth, success and people who try to achieve it, which makes the irony all the more peculiar because the Reader's owner, Jim Holman, has ridden the population growth of San Diego since the 1970s to become a reclusive middle-aged millionaire living in Coronado.
    While not especially courageous, it does take some nerve to pee on so many people and institutions every week while hoping ad buyers will never feel soaked.
    David Cohn, who owns the popular Corvette Diner, Kemo Sabe, Dakota's, Blue Point, Tupelo, Hang Ten Brewing Co., Galaxy Grill and Club 66, is aghast since he began reading the Reader more carefully lately. He's pulled his advertising and is encouraging others to do likewise, which seems like a reasonably responsible exercise of free speech. Was it a sign of defiance or complacence that the Reader published Cohn's letter to the editor, titled "Angry Advertisers Boycott Reader"?
    "I think the Reader is nihilistic," says Cohn. "It’s so negative."
    To all those in the hospitality industry and others who are financing the Reader's opposition to the San Diego Convention Center, rewarding Holman's longstanding promotion of Rider and Henderson, and encouraging the Reader's usual flow of anti-San Diego content, we offer these cost-effective, more responsible and more appreciative alternatives:
    To reach the youth audience, choose among the campus newspapers at:

• San Diego State University, The Daily Aztec, (619) 594-6975
• UC San Diego, The Guardian, (619) 534-3466
• University of San Diego, The Vista, (619) 260-4714
• CSU San Marcos, The Pride, (760) 750-4998
• Palomar College, The Telescope, (760) 744-1150 ex 2450
• Mira Costa College, The Chariot, (760) 757-2121 ex 6254
• Miramar College, The Sage, (619) 536-7872
• San Diego City College, The City Times, (619) 230-2437
• Southwestern College, The Sun, (619) 482-6368
• US International University, The Envoy, (619) 635-4540

    To reach a wide audience in the literate workforce, including young professionals, established Baby Boomers and mature consumers with plenty of discretionary income, contact:

• The San Diego Union-Tribune, (619) 299-3131
• San Diego Magazine, (619) 230-9292
• The North County Times, (760) 739-6614

    We could strongly recommend one other publication, but we don’t want to come off as self-serving.
    So what were the worst things about the April 16 Reader story attacking the convention center expansion?
    Aside from numerous cheap shots, the story didn’t attribute to the Reader and its cohorts any of the responsibility for the $697 million of lost convention business due to the delay, nor did it identify itself and cohorts as contributing to construction cost inflation caused by the delay. (The story did attack public officials and private builders for construction cost escalation.)
    And the story deceived readers by exaggerating the risk of paying $15 million in annual debt service to finance the project. The Reader did not acknowledge the city's excellent credit rating and did not put the annual payments in the context of the annual revenue of the responsible parties, the port and the city, with about $1.5 billion to spend annually. Only dummies couldn’t identify 1 percent of revenue to pledge to the project, and that’s what the Reader thinks of San Diego’s public officials.