In which we mandate that you immediately watch this incredible piece of journalism by some of our journalistic heroes. more ›

After former Seattle-area reporter Dorothy Parvaz spent several harrowing weeks in detainment by the Syrian and Iranian government, she's finally returned home safely. And like any good journalist, she's already written the story into a clear, education and horrifying account. more ›

We received some exceptionally sad news regarding one of our local journalists today. more ›

We're one of the few remaining American cities with two alternative newsweeklies, and they're both on the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies' Top 25. The Pew Research Center examines the state of the American alt-weekly; we take a look at the state of our own. more ›

Live Girls' world premiere of Victoria Stewart's Hardball takes the personal approach. Instead of a detached, clinical analysis of "opinion journalism," Ms. Stewart has written about the personal transformation of a female journalist as she moves from the world of newspapers, sources and facts into the brave new world of opinion blogs, hearsay and rumors. more ›

• A 63-year-old Marysville woman and foster mother was shot in her home, at point blank range, by her 70-year-old boyfriend--in front of her three teenagers and two family friends. It's reported the couple was in the process of separating and he was moving out.
• Seattle waters are being been taken over by ridiculously large sea creatures--first an 8-foot long, 100-lb. man-eating Humboldt Squid was caught off West Seattle shores. Now a 3-foot-in-diameter Lion’s Mane Jellyfish--the largest known species of jellyfish in the world--has been reported to have washed ashore at Three Tree Point.
• Belltown's newest coffee crusader, Bedlam Coffee has decided to scale back on their 24-hour coffee-making hours on Friday and Saturday nights, adopting a more fitting closing time of 3 a.m. instead.

• Jobs are difficult to find, but not so scarce that P-I staffers aren't feeling free to turn down Hearst's online operations job offers. "Bottom line: An online-only P-I is not a done deal. At least not yet," says Publicola's Sandeep Kaushik.
• Southlake reports on a man shot in the butt, and Queen Anne View has a kickass firefighter who won a stair-climbing competition.
• Over at Schmudget (caution: policy wonkstrosity ahead), they're talking about sub-prime lending in Washington state all week long. Today, their angle has to do with the depressing racial disparity in the mortgage market. Best of all, the post includes an infographic!

We've now "observed" two future of news media via Twitter (the City Club and ONA events) and watched the Seattle City Council and "No News Is Bad News" events go down via their live stream (while eyeing the #nnbn Twitter channel). One caveat before we recap: what we've learned is mostly useless in practical terms. more ›

LIVING LEGENDS: No, not Twiggy. We're talking about the hiphop crew out of Cali, two members of which will be performing at Neumos tonight. The Grouch and Eligh are touring for the holidays (official tour title: "How The Grouch Stole Christmas"), sharing the evening's bill with Bayliens and 206 Zulu cornerstones Alpha P. The duo will release an album called Say G&E in the spring, so attendees tonight should be getting a sneak peek at the new material; we've also heard The Grouch's solo album Show You The World, which fans of underground and indie hiphop (a la Atmosphere) are encouraged to check out. more ›

After The City Collegian's adviser resigned on short notice from her position during the last school year, leaving the paper leaderless amidst a flurry of controversy about alleged restrictions of freedom of students' speech from the administration, things did not look good for Seattle Central's school newspaper. Yesterday the Seattle Times reported that the paper has officially stopped press, and if the Times says it, it must be for real. Our best wishes to the staff, and we hope the paper's up and running again soon. more ›

Kingzmen came out in matching striped jumpers, which was cute. They certainly have charm, Nphared's beats were beautiful again, and if the Kingzmen tighten up their presence just one notch further, they'll make our list of groups to be excited about. Here's who we ARE excited about: GMK. Bright, bursting energy, hustling like a pro. This guy is flying, he's got the spark, and everything about his act works really well. He only had fifteen minutes on stage, but after the Parker Brothaz (not bad, just... flat), it was clear GMK deserves to headline. The Parker Brothaz were formulaic, packaged, commercial ("Where's your iPhones? Where's your Sidekicks?" is the refrain in their latest single), but admittedly smooth. Smooth, but not inspiring. GMK, on the other hand, got the crowd swooping and bouncing right along with him. Good man, good man. "Baby wanna drop that? Go ahead, drop that." Encore! more ›

Running text ads on your blog never really struck us as the Get-Richest-Quickest path; we used to have Amazon ads on a book review blog and after a year or two and no checks, we decided we could better use the real estate and quit the program. A few months later we got our first and final check for...$6ish? But Seattle's Furious Seasons blog has just discovered firsthand the pain of algorithmic rejection. The email... more ›

Conventional wisdom says these days ain't happy ones for pulp-and-print publications. Circulation's down. Ad revenues are down. Everyone wants to read online. So nearly every newspaper, magazine and television news program has a host of blogs these days, to compete with the millions of self-described experts, autodidacts, conspiracy theorists and Chuck Norris-aficionados who propagate the blogosphere with their own brand of citizen journalism (read: poor spelling and poorer grammar). more ›

At the moment, Seattlest is an Enemy of Slog, due in part to this critical post on Seattle's aging weeklies. (In retrospect, we should not have implied that Dan Savage was getting older. He's evergreen, like many of our trees.) more ›

So we'll begin, the guy at the podium said, the huge black blast door in the Microsoft Auditorium at the Downtown Library eased down its track, slowly cutting off our view of the lobby, and we shivered. more ›

Yesterday the CDC released the news that one of the smallest subsets of people who kill themselves saw an 8% increase from 2003 to 2004.

For all young people between ages 10 to 24, the suicide rate rose 8 percent from 2003 to 2004 -- the biggest single-year bump in 15 years -- in what one official called "a dramatic and huge increase." ... The biggest increase -- about 76 percent -- was in the suicide rate for 10- to 14-year-old girls.

The Columbia Journalism Review has our number. It's not actually true that Baby Einstein videos "suck the vocabulary out of your kid's brain." Wea culpa. more ›

You probably don't read ex-Seattle Weekly reporter Philip Dawdy's blog Furious Seasons. That's ok. That's why we're here: to read every blog in existence and let you know when something interesting happens (which turns out to be rarely). Philip writes about clinical depression and the little cottage industry of humongous corporations that have grown up around that illness. It's a well-written and well-researched blog by a guy who's been working that beat for several years, so it's pretty popular in some circles. Mixed in with the reporting on anti-depression drugs is the occasional post on Dawdy's current state of affairs. That he's not currently fully-employed as a reporter, for example, is something that you might learn from his blog. That he has some concerns about the current state of the web and its effects on print journalism (and its effects on his current employment status) from time to time, is another thing you might learn. more ›

Permit us to bloviate some on the death of David Halberstam today in a car crash, which is utter bullshit considering that the guy reported from fricking Vietnam and he dies in a traffic accident in San Mateo (the car that hit him driven by, in a terrible irony, a Berkeley journalism student) (actually, I'm an idiot, his driver was a Berkeley student, so there's no irony, just terribleness). more ›

Real Change executive director Tim Harris says on his blog that the Seattle Weekly wants to exposé his street newspaper back to the Gutenberg age. more ›

We don't really have to look any farther afield than the Stranger to get more than our fill of Seattle Weekly bashing in any given week, but right now there's an article in a Phoenix daily about the New Times Media vs. Village Voice Media culture war that jettisoned Weekly longtimers out the Weekly's door (and into something yet to be seen). The gist of the article is that across the country the left-leaning, axe-grinding, political alt-weekly veterans have been replaced with ass-kicking, name-taking whipper-snapper upstarts who don't much care for politics or other traditional alt-weekly stomping grounds. more ›

[Brewster] has enlisted two other Seattle Weekly veterans to work on the venture. more ›

Activist journalism is a shifting target -- yesterday's activism doesn't always apply. (You'd hope because it's been assimilated by the mainstream.) Here's the classic face of mental illness local media usually provides. But regular, conscientious reporting has got to focus more on the wealth of treatment modalities and medications "made available" to people who may or may not be able to judge between them. And how even doctors are snowed under by pharmaceutical data. more ›

Blog called DallasFood is making big, brown waves with a ten-part (ten part!!) series about a small, Plano, Tex., chocolate-maker called NoKa. Point being, for starters, that NoKa's not a chocolate-maker per se but a chocolatier who purchases commercially packaged chocolate bars from a third party and uses them to make, or confect, a chocolate couverture. In installments of Dickensian intensity, DallasFood ferrets out the source of NoKa's chocolate: Bonnat, a respected firm based in the French Alps that actually processes beans from chocolate plantations in Africa, Asia and South America. more ›

He's not raking muck for any paper publications currently, but ex-Seattle Weekly all-star Philip Dawdy is still managing to rouse the rabble on the internet. He got noticed by Reddit.com this week after making the jump from reporting to editorializing and dissing Google, MySpace, "Web 2.0" and blogs from, uh, his blog. more ›

The Seattle Public Library hosted 'A Salute to Tim Egan' last night at the inconvenient hour of 5:30 PM. more ›

In the old days, when men were men and trees fit in the ground, newspapers were no less biased than the average KVI caller. Most were organs of one political party or the other, and as a result were very entertaining. more ›

Ever get the feeling that food is no longer your friend? That while you used to have some laughs with Stouffer’s lasagne and chill out with your best friend Diet Coke, secretly food has been going behind your back, stealing your boyfriend, gunning for your job, and making you fat? more ›

What's wrong with Seattle journalism? Look no further than the front page of today's Seattle Times and its pathetic story, headlined "They Needed a Six-Bedroom House". more ›

Knight Ridder, minority owner of the Seattle Times, got picked up by an outfit called McClatchy Co. this week which is unfortunate because McClatchy, while having a generally good reputation as far as journalism goes, also owns the Tacoma News Tribune and the Times and the News Tribune compete for readers who happen to live somewhere between the two cities. We realize that you may be comatose after reading that last sentence, if in fact you haven't moved on to reading something else by now. We can probably say anything right here and no one would be conscious enough to register what their eyes are telling them. Seattlest is wearing news print thong underwear and high heels as we write this and we're about to apply a second coat of gloss to our lips. Additionally, we have a thing for independent reporters. Not a sexual thing, despite the thong, but a thing. more ›