Recent Stories with tag blog

The "he said/she said" in my Twitter feed

The Seattle Times has a habit of reporting on accidents involving the light rail thusly: "Car hit by light-rail train in Seattle." (For more instances, go here.)

In reading the story, you learn that the car "attempted to make a turn onto Othello Street against the light" and collided with the train. Seattle Transit Blog writes it up that way: "Car Collides with Link."

For contrast, try to imagine if the Times reported on car accidents in ways that gave no indication who caused the accident: "Car hit by other car in Seattle this morning." Doesn't seem newsworthy does it?

But in the Times headlines, light rail is always implicitly the agent of destruction: light rail "injures two" (who tried to make an illegal left turn in front of a sign marked No Left Turn), a woman "sustain[ed] injury" when she ran into the light rail, and a girl talking on her cellphone who stepped into the trackway was "struck by light-rail train." In none of these cases did the illegality, incompetence, or obliviousness of the person who caused the accident make it into the headline.

"Light-rail train hits pickup"--making an illegal turn, as it happens. From the Times headline (not even in the passive voice this time), you'd have to assume the light rail was at fault. Otherwise you might have read an investigative story about how Seattle drivers' illegal left turns are costing a cash-strapped Sound Transit a bundle further damaging light rail's reputation for reliability.

Of course, not everyone is Bumbershooting this Labor Day weekend. But that doesn't mean you can't enjoy a personal music festival. Abbey from The Sound on the Sound emailed me about the Doe Bay Sessions, and I would be greedy indeed to keep the news from you. Every Tuesday, from now through October, they're posting a new live session from bands like The Head and the Heart, Hey Marseilles, Ravenna Woods, Drew Grow and the Pastors' Wives, and Fences.

It's a new project from SOTS, which begins with music videos of The Maldives somewhere in the woods, filmed during this year's Doe Bay Fest. The initial idea was to invite a few bands to the SOTS yurt for a Vincent-Moon-style "takeaway" shoot...but these things have a way of getting away from you, and now:

Over the next 10 weeks we will be releasing videos featuring a candlelit session from Fences, The Head and the Heart (and the Doe Bay All-Stars) singing down the sun, Ravenna Woods using trees for percussion, a mid-trail serenade from Drew Grow and the Pastors’ Wives, The Maldives on a mossy knoll, picnic table perching with Hey Marseilles and many more.... (more)

Nice! A TSB network partner just won a Seattle Weekly Best of the Web 2010 award. For "Seattle’s Best Online Presence - News," it was Seattle Crime. "It's innovative and focused, and the iPhone app is cool," says judge Ethan Lowry. (The SunBreak's Flickr pool was nominated--an honor!--but we did not win.)

The Seattle Crime iPhone app is indeed cool. Besides the site feed, it shows you a map of Seattle with all 911 calls in progress, and lets you create your own crime reports on the fly. It's free, so there's really no excuse for not having it.

One of our Instivate network partners is Seattle Crime, the work of the indefatigable Jonah Spangenthal-Lee. Besides his reporting on crime around Seattle (Ex. A: "The Worst Jack in the Box in the Country"), another arresting feature the site offers is a Google map view of the city's 911 log.

This, not coincidentally, is what greets you when you open the new free Seattle Crime iPhone app. When you want to find out what the flashing lights down the street are about, this is the app for you. Version 1.1 lets you zoom in on your location, and also remembers where you were. Three tabs in total let you view the map, peruse the live 911 log feed, and skim crime headlines.

And yes, it looks like The SunBreak will be joining the iPhone app revolution soon enough. Now, in fact, is a good time for you to hit us up with features you'd like to see. We're kicking around events maps and listings, but if you have bright ideas, we, like President Obama, are listening.

There just ain't enough hyperlocal room in this town for unsourced copy 'n' paste reporting. After warning KOMO of a similar uncredited incident back in August, CHS editor Justin Carder was dismayed yesterday to see that, 10 minutes after a KOMO employee visited his post about a Capitol Hill design charette and downloaded a pdf, a post went up on KOMO Capitol Hill about...the Capitol Hill design charette. Carder looked in vain for a link to CHS. (We don't think KOMO's site editor is an old hand at the internet--so far links are few and far between on her stories.) Anyway, not murder in broad daylight, but hardly the impression that KOMO can be hoping for. Nobody has asked me, but for heaven's sake, launching 43 neighborhood blogs simultaneously seems to be asking for issues with oversight.