Photo of a photographer

"A woman watches rising waters of the Snoqualmie River flow over an adjacent road Wednesday, Nov. 12, 2008, in Snoqualmie, Wash. A rain storm has filled Western Washington rivers again and the National Weather Service is warning of flooding, while officials at Mount Rainier National Park have closed the park due to flooding along a main road."

AP photographer Elaine Thompson snapped this shot of me as I video-recorded the swollen Snoqualmie River a block away from the Valley Record HQ Wednesday. Our sandbag fortification of the office proved unnecessary, thankfully, as flood waters receded earlier than expected.
The photo ended up on KOMO's Web site.

Cheers

A JAM band named MARMALADE at a place called TOST makes me wish I could go in to work late every Friday.

Go Ocho and Golden Gardens!

Some my favorite spots get love in this fun NY Times travel article about Ballard and Fremont.

More trimming

Yikes.

Times Inc. Plans About 600 Layoffs

Doom, gloom

P-I, Times keeping staffs slim, belts tight

The "Good news online" subhead two-thirds of the way down looks a little funny: The next line is "The P-I has a hiring freeze," and the reader must trudge through a few more downer paragraphs to find news that could really be considered "good."

VP Debate

From the always-funny Borowitz Report by Andy Borowitz, something to watch out for as I host a VP debate viewing party this evening:

McCain to hide inside podium at debate
Will whisper Supreme Court decisions, names of magazines

In an indication that he is less than confident about his running mate's ability to perform at the vice-presidential debate, Republican presidential nominee John McCain confirmed plans to hide inside Gov. Sarah Palin's podium during the televised face-off.

Sen. McCain had hoped not to resort to such draconian measures, but after reviewing tapes of Gov. Palin's disastrous interviews with CBS' Katie Couric, he reportedly told aides, "Damn it, there's no way I'm letting that doofus take me down."

The Arizona senator plans to crouch inside the podium out of view of the audience, whispering key bits of information to Gov. Palin, such as the names of any Supreme Court decision other than Roe v. Wade, and the names of well-known newspapers and magazines she could pretend to read.On the Democratic side, Sen. Joseph Biden said he hoped to emulate Abraham Lincoln's performance in the Lincoln-Douglas debates: "That was truly one of the greatest moments in television history."

Take note, editors

From salon.com: I ghost-write letters for the McCain campaign

McClatchy cuts more staff

Ouch.

McClatchy to cut 1,150 jobs, 10 percent of workforce

Spinoculars

On the agenda this week: trying out SpinSpotter.com.

Here's a BusinessWeek article on the new application, which is designed to help readers spot media bias.

Digital Intimacy

On my Facebook News Feed, I came upon Clive Thompson's interesting exploration of that social networking site, Twitter and other forms of "ambient awareness."

Greendrinks

Greendrinks was a great new discovery this evening.

A few of my favorite reads

Three cheers for three-day weekends! I got to spend most of yesterday and this morning with The New York Times and The New Yorker. Among the top articles I read:

Bringing Pell Grants to My Eyes by Sarah Vowell

John, Don't Go by Paul Krugman

Letter from Beijing by Anthony Lane

In Denver, a Thousand Little Pieces by David Carr

Mullet denial

Also on the lighter side, from the Seattle Times article "Mullets: Party in the back not over yet":

Port Orchard beautician Julea Penland is still waiting for someone to accept her offer of a free mullet removal. "People with mullets either love them and want to keep them, or they don't know they have them," she says. "They're in mullet denial."

I was instantly reminded of a photo I took in Salamanca, Spain in 2006. Oh! A mullet in progress!

Veepstakes

One of the best things delivered to my e-mail inbox is Urban Dictionary's Word of the Day. Take for example this little gem:

Veepstakes

The process a candidate for president goes through to choose a running mate. It's a portmanteau word combining the colloquial pronunciation of VP as "veep" and sweepstakes.

The winner of the veepstakes is awarded the honor of being trashed in the media for the next 5 months.

A: Who should Obama pick for VP?
B: I sure hope Brian Schweitzer wins the veepstakes!

Fake news you can count on?

From the New York Times' article Is Jon Stewart the Most Trusted Man in America?

"When Americans were asked in a 2007 poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press to name the journalist they most admired, Mr. Stewart, the fake news anchor, came in at No. 4, tied with the real news anchors Brian Willams and Tom Brokaw of NBC, Dan Rather of CBS and Anderson Cooper of CNN."

Roundtable discussion on newspapers

From Democracy Now!:

Newspapers Suffer Spate of Layoffs, Decline in Circulation, Ad Revenue, Stock Price: A Roundtable Discussion on the State of the Industry

Festival at Mount Si

Aleili and her Veils of the Nile crew always make for a pretty picture.

The Soldiers Project

One of the greatest joys of being a small-town journalist is meeting people who truly care about helping their community. I interviewed an anti-war psychologist who donates her time to counsel veterans, soldiers and their families through an all-volunteer organization called The Soldiers Project.

According to the Department of Veterans Affairs Web site, as many as one in 10 Afghanistan war veterans and one in five Iraq war veterans return with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Goodspaceguy Nelson

I was cozied up to my laptop, mail-in ballot in hand, ready to make myself an informed voter, when U.S. Representative candidate Goodspaceguy Nelson jumped off the page. Big distraction. Here are some highlights from his most recent blog entry :

Goodspaceguy likes to refer to our Earth as Spaceship Earth, a spaceship built by the science and by the technology of Mother Nature. (God?)

Goodspaceguy worries about nuclear war and the coming of the next killer asteroid and therefore wants us to spread life from Earth out into our solar system as quickly as possible. Instead of bringing most of the material up from Earth for the colonization, Goodspaceguy wants us to use a lot of material from the near Earth asteroids and comets to help build the coming orbital space colonies. Let's follow the low-cost path to the Fantastic Future.

To glorify the Seattle area, we should try to make it easier to grow the movie-making industry in the Seattle area by cooperating with moviemakers.

Goodspaceguy Nelson is a non-smoker, non-drinker, non-drug user, but as a believer in individual freedom and free will and upward evolution, Goodspaceguy believes that each individual should decide whether or not to engage in habits which are thought to be harmful to oneself. Taxpayers, through their governments, should not incur the wasteful cost of interfering. Goodspaceguy is pro-choice on almost everything.

This fellow has been running for various offices for a while, but this is all new to me.

More news news

Another ray of sunshine for the journalism industry, this time reported by Richard Pérez-Peña of the NY Times: Newspapers Could Be Bargains, but Few Are Buying

"Experts say the lack of interest reflects a sharp shift in the last year toward a more pessimistic long-term view of the industry. The loss of ads has accelerated, and few expect a rebound even when the economy recovers."

Gasworks Park at sunset

Capitol Hill Block Party

One of the best acts I caught on Friday was The Dodos, a San Fran "psychedelic folk rock" duo. I was blown away by how well they'd developed their unique sound since I saw them at the Comet Tavern last summer.

Newsroom cutbacks hurt journalism

Nobody should be too shocked by the gist of this AP article: Study: Cutbacks hurt newspaper quality.

I was a bit surprised, however, by the optimism of many overextended editors: "Still, 56 percent of the editors surveyed said their news product is better than it was three years ago because coverage is more targeted."

Swirl and swing

Contrary to popular belief around my office, my blog's current title isn't a reflection of how much I dig dancing, one of my favorite Saturday night activities. It instead comes from a quote by author James A. Michener: "I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions."

And I loved the cadence and simplicity of his words as they tangled with my need to name this blog.

Close to home

Things got a little too hot at the party my roommate and I threw last night: Our guests had to evacuate when our place filled with smoke from the arson fire just across the alley. Thankfully, it was at an unoccupied duplex that was under construction, and firefighters kept it contained.

Rumors of insurance fraud are flying, and it's hard to stomach the idea of someone putting others' lives at risk for financial gain.

Here's a photo a guest snapped from my parking space after the downpour of flaming ashes on my lawn changed the tone of our shindig.

Betting on David Black

While daily newspapers are cutting staff, many small community weekly papers like the Snoqualmie Valley Record are doing quite well.

In "Betting on David Black," Don Ward writes for the Seattle Weekly about SVR's parent company, Black Press:

The conventional wisdom regarding print journalism is that it is a dying breed, and that online media is the way of the future. Hence, newspapers across the country are axing employees like Paul Bunyan in a tree-chopping competition.

The excuses for such downsizing are legion: competition with blogs, cable news, and online classified-ad sites, readers' short attention spans, rising production costs, overstaffing, understaffing, liberal bias, corporate ownership, the decline of the American educational system, and personal digital assistants. You might as well blame it on the rain while you're at it, because one thing is certain: Traditional "dead tree" editions are a thing of the past.

Or are they?

The supposed decline of print media is not in fact an industry-wide phenomenon. Community newspapers have generally been profitable ventures for some time, and over the past decade have attracted the attention of media giants looking for publications that can positively contribute to the parent corporation's bottom line.

There are plenty of examples in the Puget Sound region of community remoras being attached to media leviathans. In 1996, the Washington Post–owned Everett Herald purchased Enterprise Newspapers, a chain of four community papers with circulations in Lynnwood, Edmonds, Mill Creek, and Shoreline. Similarly, The Seattle Times purchased The Issaquah Press in 1995, and since then has launched papers serving Newcastle, Sammamish, and Snoqualmie. Meanwhile, the McClatchy-owned Tacoma News Tribune operates a pair of weeklies, The Peninsula Gateway in Gig Harbor and The Puyallup Herald.

Yet the newspaper entity in Washington with the highest aggregate circulation is not the Blethen-operated Seattle Times and its affiliates, nor is it McClatchy, with its News Tribune, Tri-City Herald, and Olympian. Rather, it's Sound Publishing, a chain of some three-score community newspapers and shoppers that is a subsidiary of the British Columbia–based Black Press.

Outsourcing journalism

While spending last summer in Spain, I missed the uproar over reporting jobs being outsourced to India, as reported by the LA Times in June 2007.

Ben Frumin of the Columbia Journalism Review recently reported that Express KCS, a back-office Indian company doing much of this outsourcing, has become more successful – and ambitious – since the story first broke:

Express KCS doesn’t propose to report or write stories, but it does offer copy editing (or “subbing,” as it’s known in India), page layout, and the writing of headlines and captions. By year’s end, Husain hopes that 10 to 15 percent of Express KCS’s business will come from outsourced editorial work. He said the company is discussing such work with more than one mainstream U.S. daily, though he wouldn’t name them.