- Cape Rolling Out Bloomfield Road Art Trail (8/21/19)1
- Donors Pledge Almost Two Grand To Replace SEMO's Possibly Sentient ‘Gum Tree' (8/16/18)
- SEMO and The Will To (Become A Consultant) – Part 2 (6/14/18)
- SEMO and The Will To Do (You Really Want To See That Legal Notice?) – Part 1 (6/4/18)
- Judge, Jury... Trashman (6/1/18)
- Diary of Cape Girardeau Road Deconstruction (5/11/18)
- Trying To Save A Tree From City “Improvements” (4/30/18)2
What did Morley Swingle's Web Page
"Advertising" Really Cost the County?
Two of the three County Commissioners voted to allow Prosecuting Attorney Morley Swingle to continue posting images and descriptions of his novels on the Cape County website last week.
Commissioner Jay Purcell -- who initiated the complaint -- cast the dissenting vote.
Purcell says it's advertising which has value.
I was curious about the whole matter, so I looked at the website to actually see what the ruckus was about. The link in question is pretty discreet. After going to www.capecounty.us you then have to click on the Departments link and then the Prosecuting Attorney link. On that page are a dozen other links including one labeled Swingle Publications.
It's apparently the one that created all the brouhaha.
When I clicked on that link, I wasn't sure what to expect. I figured a dozen of those highly annoying pop-up ads would appear touting "Morley this" and "Swingle that" and "Buy my book now from Amazon or I will track you down and prosecute you!"
But there was nothing like that.
An article that ran in the Southeast Missourian last week stated that Swingle originally had links on this page to Amazon.com, but he removed them last March. What now exists is a pretty simple self-promotion web page with pictures and descriptions of his publications. It's a basic brag page.
I'd have brag page of all my publications if I could. But it would only have one item and that would be a letter to advice columnist Ann Landers from 1987 using my pseudonym "Margie from Minnesota." Honestly, there's not much to brag about.
I was initially floored by how much stuff Swingle had written. I knew he had published three fiction books, but who knew he had generated ten pages of publications.
Yes, ten pages. I was impressed.
It made me wonder when he found the time to do any actual prosecuting. Perhaps, he never sleeps or he dashes off chapters during trials whenever the defense is arguing their case.
But then I took a closer look at the list. While it was pretty extensive -- 50 publications in all -- I also noticed that a lot of the items were chapters for Missouri law reference books. Not the whole book, but just a single chapter in a specific reference book or set of reference books.
Now, I'm not being dismissive of the fact that it was just a chapter. I'm sure Morley put a lot of effort into writing those book entries. Without a doubt he had to do a bunch of research to write them and unlike myself he can't just make stuff up.
"If the arrest happens to occur on a Friday the thirteenth and the defendant is driving a cool car as defined by Missouri Revised Statutes Chapter 972, Cool Cars Section 807.178 then the arresting officer may seize the aforementioned car and use if for riding joyfully the entire weekend until 8am on Monday the sixteenth when it must be returned to the defendant from which it was seized with a full tank of gas."
See, he can't write stuff like that. I just made that up and tried to sound as lawyerly as possible in about two minutes. The chapters he's written for the law reference books have to actually be true since people's lives and property are on the line. That requires research and quite a bit of investment in time.
As a taxpaying citizen, did I find anything offensive about his list of publications on the Cape County website? Not the list I saw. I didn't even mind him listing the novels he wrote in his free time. And frankly the amount of money it costs the county to host the images and descriptions of these books is so negligible that I'm not even sure it can be calculated.
If the controversy over Morley's "advertising" cost the county anything, it was the 52-minute presentation he gave on January 26 to the County Commissioners arguing why his publications web page should stay on the County site.
Let's do the math.
If each commissioner averages a 40 hour work week -- and some cynical citizens might say that's a mighty big IF -- then their hourly rates would be about $31 since they each make approximately $65,000 a year.
Swingle's hourly rate is a little higher, since his position actually requires some "book learnin'." His salary is around $100,000 which -- based on the same assumed criteria as the commissioners -- is an hourly rate of $48.
Since this presentation ate up an hour of these four officials time, and I'm sure Morley spent at least a couple more hours preparing for this meeting, then this little portion of the entire brouhaha cost the county at least $237.
All over advertising, or what is perceived as advertising.
And the ironic thing is that while Swingle was promoting his novels from one page of what I presume are several hundred web pages that make up the entire county website, there is -- in fact -- a business advertisement that appears on every single page of the county site.
It's a website link to Element 74, the company which created the County website and hosts it.
Has anyone complained about them?
Respond to this blog
Posting a comment requires a subscription.