Other newspapers choose the New Year as a time to look back, to recap events of the year just passed. Bah, we say. It’s a lame excuse to give lazy reporters a day off every Jan 1. “Hope,” after all, is the watchword for 2009. (Or was it “change?”) Either way, it’s about moving forward. And if there was ever a year to put quickly in the rear-view mirror, it was 2008—a long, excruciatingly slow perp-walk of the unindicted in Washington, D.C., the Utah Legislature and on Wall Street. We cast it aside and look boldly to the future with our “Year in Preview” issue.
nCity Weekly’s crack(pot) team of prognosticators—editor Holly Mullen, assistant managing editor Brandon Burt and Assistant to the Regional Swami Bill Frost—are joined by guest-guessers Angela Brown, editor of SLUG magazine, and Troy Williams, public-affairs director for KRCL 90.9 FM. They have gazed into a crystal ball or at their navels to give you a heads-up on what’s in store for Utah in 2009 (or Obama 1—as future citizens of Obamanation will call it—but that’s getting ahead of ourselves.) Prepare yourself to read next year’s headlines before they happen. (Cue eerie music.)
nBut first, an apology and explanation: City Weekly’s last “Year in Preview,” published Jan. 3, 2008, included predictions such as, “the downtown market will continue to go condo crazy” and “hang on to your home for a while.” One of our guest guessers suggested the then-just-emerging signs of a housing recession were overblown and, “likely to be quaint history in 2009.”
nThese and similar phrases may have led a few of our more easily excitable readers to run out and sink their life savings into high-priced condos just in time to see the bottom fall out of the housing market. If so, we apologize.
nHowever, had those same rash, cocksure individuals read “Year in Preview” with their inner eye—as clearly intended—they would have been inexplicably drawn to ignore the above advice and concentrate instead on the astute prediction of Bill Frost, who wrote, “When they start converting the All Star Travel Inn into $300,000 units, it’s time to sell.”
nPrescient indeed.
nNow, on with the future. Will 2009 be the year that Salt Lakers start driving around in Mayor Ralph Becker’s flying cars that run on love? Read on. Remember, you are holding the newspaper that called an Obama victory 10 months and one day before it happened.
n n
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