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.