We Also Read the Weeklies: Ignoring Fashion Edition
We aren’t over the fact that Portland’s Willamette Weekly won a Pulitzer Prize last week. It’s just so damn impressive, we have to take a moment to dwell on it just a little bit more. The WW is putting on a very good show of playing the whole thing down--it takes a magnifying glass or Google to find any mention of it on their site. Seattlest hopes that somewhere in the background Nigel Jaquiss and company are whooping it up, though.
In the pages of this week’s Seattle Weekly, editor Chuck Taylor congratulates the WW and Jaquiss and blows a few notes in honor of his own Phillip Dawdy’s involvement with the award-winning article while he's at it. Kudos Dawdy. However, when you publish seemingly similar article in The Seattle Weekly we are going to be on you like Jaquiss on Goldschmidt.
The "Jukebox Jury" interview format reappeared this week with Maktub as the subject. We love this interview style, but aren't a lot of opportunities for it on the web being missed? At the very least a few iTunes links to the songs being played would be nice. On the high side how about an edited audio podcast of the entire session? We know, that would require putting some resources and effort into your website and as an alt weekly that's expressly forbidden somewhere in your charter, but the opportunity's there.
We, of course, have to mention Seattlest's big appearance in A. Birch Steen's column in The Stranger. We hate to harp on crap websites, but there's just no way around pointing out that The Stranger's website sucks and A. Birch's column is either unavailable or unfindable online. To read the ombudsman's comments you're going to have to settle for an offline experience and crack open the paper yourself, which is very convenient for us as it spares us linking directly to Steen's opinions of our name ("in no way an actual word"), conclusions ("myopic") and credentials ("dubious"). However, we have nowhere found a more accurate portrayal of our website as a whole or this column singularly, and are overjoyed to find that our small part in the chorus that sang for the return of A. has been completely overlooked.
We were surprised and delighted to find that Last Days absolutely nailed the Grokster case. It's like David Schmader has been reading the EFF on the case or something. He finishes by getting all Last Days on it, though: "But any time a former Eagle and a former backup singer for Michael Jackson square off against two irreplaceable architects of modern pop music, you know whom to root for." Well said.
Erica C. Barnett's "Station Agent" feature starts to bring the monorail into focus, but the website offers nothing in the way of the video promised in the print edition. Seattlest was all set to excitedly link you to that. "Ta da!" we were going to say. We read the first page and no video. Second page, still no video. They must be saving it for the finale. Third page, not only is there no video, but there's the same "To see the SMP's video of the monorail moving through Seattle Center, go to www.thestranger.com" bullshit as in the printed version. We clicked on the link hoping dumbly it was somehow mislabled, but it did in fact take us back to the Stranger homepage. We feel like we're looking at the card that reads "turn card over to learn how to keep Seattlest occupied" on both sides. Alright, the video wasn't avaialabe at the issue deadline. You thought that by the time you finally got around to getting the stuff up on the web you'd have it. It didn't work out that way. But who puts the link at the bottom of the article just like it reads in the paper? And actually makes it a link? See www.thestranger.com for the video? We're on www.thestranger.com now where's the video!?
