Results tagged “seattletimes”

The Seattle City Council gave the green light for a new streetcar line.

She's Zofia Smardz, deputy travel editor of the Washington Post, whosearticle on indifferent meals in Paris was featured in Sunday's Seattle Times. He's Michael Steinberger, wine columnist for Slate, whose recent book, Au Revoir to All That, argues that French gastronomy is in fatal decline. Between them, you'd think France was knee-deep in crummy croissants and plastic cheese.

• The big news in local blogs today is the Seattle Times "collaboration" with hyperlocal blogstars such as West Seattle Blog, MyBallard, Capitol Hill Seattle, and Rainier Valley Post. Sure, there's warranted kicking and screaming about anything to do with the Times and online media, but is this the beginning of a beautiful friendship?
• Speaking of hyperlocal news, belltownpeople (giddy about being the densest neighborhood in Seattle) and CHS broke out mayoral race votes by 'hood.

There's a feature in the Seattle Times today about the #7 bus that seems to be celebrating it as a "colorful" part of Seattle history, but also makes the claim that "most" and "many" #7 riders prefer it to the light rail. Try as we might, we can't find any numbers in the story to back up that assertion. We emailed reporter Phillip Lucas, but it bounced back undeliverable, user unknown. We've also called Metro's community relations line three times this morning, but no one's picking up. We'll update if it's the rapture and no one else is at work this morning. UPDATE: It's not the rapture. But here's Publicola's ECB, an actual #7 rider, going off on exactly how colorful the route is.

The front page of the Seattle Times this morning had a picture of a man in his 50s with amnesia, who woke up in Discovery Park three weeks ago. He was well dressed, and fluent in French, English, and German.

We often say that the Times comment section specializes in crazy, but this weekend's post on the P-I.com heralding their site redesign has prompted a whole bunch of commentating goodness. The complaints vary, from "too much white space" to "too much focus on blogs" to "too many ads." As always, readers like the previous incarnation better, with some faux-threatening legal action ("I want to sue the Seattle P-I and get an injunction forcing them to bring back their old look."), while others claim they will no longer use the P-I, in favor of the Times. Now that's crazy.

When we first read the headline "1 in 3 Americans likes to nap" in the Seattle Times, we initially thought, Sweet, we can do an Times Op-Ed board joke! But then fate--well, Publicola--provided us with better napping evidence.

Earlier today, we were smiling over the Seattle Times trying to use the first day of light rail ridership as a benchmark. "What was the Times headline on February 4, 1965?" we asked, thinking of the opening of I-5. Then we really wanted to know, so we looked it up.

From the Times: "On the first day of regular light-rail service, ridership on Sound Transit's new Link train system is rather light. Midway through the morning commute, trains were arriving at Tukwila from downtown Seattle with fewer than 10 passengers aboard." And: "Normal use is projected at 26,600 per weekday next year—far more than today's trend." One morning is a trend? This makes us curious. What was the Times headline on February 4, 1965? "I-5 Looks Awfully Open"? Times commenters are through waiting for ridership to increase--they sound about ready to rush out and pull up the tracks.

Both the print edition of the Seattle Times and its online headline stack yield some curious juxtapositions this morning--at least at first glance. Were the moon landings faked, or was it the mission to mars? (PS: To our knowledge, this story about an unemployed blogger--but we repeat ourselves!--marks the first usage of the expression "ass-clown" in Fairview Fanny's pages.)

In today's edition of "count on the Seattle Times comment section for the crazy," we take a look at this simple story about a Spokane couple and their pet baby giraffe. Somehow, the motley commenting crew manages to touch on Bernie Madoff, Michael Jackson, the Times' lack of real news, giraffes' weaning schedule, Spokane's weather, and the selfishness of the giraffe's owners. It is a thing of internet beauty. Our favorite: "Stop this insanity! Giraffes are meant to wander the savannas of Africa, not to be gawked at in enclosed spaces thousands of miles from their natural habitat."

Though we're upset at the demise of the Pee Eye and the loss of all those google hits for "pee porn," there's a deeper and more troubling story in local journalism: Frank Blethen's pissing away about $750 million worth of the Seattle Times. That's what the paper was worth a few years ago, when Blethen refused to sell his family's share to Knight Ridder, which then allowed itself to be bought out by McClatchy, which wrote down the value of its Times stock to zero. Complicated? That's only part of the sordid tale, told in detail over at Seattle Business Monthly. Can't help thinking: whadda jerk.

Yesterday Sound Transit invited "news media" to take a preview of the 14-mile light rail trip to Tukwila and back--the last segment to the airport won't open until next January. We weren't invited, so we're poaching the Seattle Times video of the big moment.

Seattle Bubble directed us to this Bloomberg article the Seattle Times picked up suggesting there might be a "lost generation" of U.S. home values. Baby boomers are downsizing and it's "unlikely that Generation X, born between 1965 and 1976 (or more derisively called 'baby busters'), will bid up home prices. They are only 44 million strong, not as wealthy and even more in debt from college loans." On the bright side, there's probably never been an easier time to buy an apartment near Green Lake.

"Pending sales of single family homes in King County surged in April," reports the Seattle Times. "Pending sales...were up 25 percent from March." But what's this in the bottom half of the story: "But the number of closed single-family home sales in King County in April--1,004--represented just 60 percent of the pending sales reported in March, an unusually low share." Seattle Bubble breaks it down for you (with charts): "[P]ending sales are rapidly becoming a totally useless measure of actual market activity." Meanwhile, Aubrey Cohen notes that about 21 percent of Seattle homeowners are underwater.

It's heartening to discover we weren't the only ones who found it possible to envision cost overruns in building Seattle's deep-bore tunnel. Sightline's Clark Williams-Derry: "It's a potentially enormous financial burden, since even the best planning process can't anticipate things that can go wrong with such a massive undertaking." The Seattle Times' Danny Westneat: "I do think it's suspicious that this same tunnel was rejected in December by a stakeholder advisory committee on account of it being way too expensive. Only to have the costs then shrink (!) by $400 million, arriving at a size that happily fits the state's pre-existing budget." Westneat does everything but call those involved bald-faced liars. Since the alternative is that they're delusional, we're not sure which option is preferable.

We've been complaining a lot about the local press lately, so here's a kudo. Congrats to Seattle Times reporters Ken Armstrong and Nick Perry for their prestigious Michael Kelly Award, bestowed for their series exposing the criminal histories of members of the Rose Bowl-winning U-Dub football team. The judges were impressed by the reporters' "commitment to truth" despite the obvious risk that dinging the Huskies would piss off readers, alienate advertisers and, yea, besmirch the Times' reputation. For its gutsy stand in support of the series, the Times gets a boost to its cred at a precarious time.

Should you choose to believe the baseball reportage of the Seattle Times' Geoff Baker--and you don't really have a choice, since he's the only Seattle reporter covering the team full-time--you'll accept that "team chemistry" is a critical facet of baseball success.

Yesterday, we spoke up early against closed city council budget-cut discussions. Later that afternoon, the Times published an editorial agreeing with us--and this morning, they've published opposition to the meetings from the Seattle city attorney and the Washington state attorney general's office. The Times also tried to send a reporter into one of the closed meetings, and has this to report: "A Seattle Times reporter was denied entrance to a budget briefing on Thursday afternoon. Tom Von Bronkhorst, a legislative aide to Councilmember Jean Godden, physically dragged the reporter away from it by the strap of her bag." Holy crap.

So we've been reading in the Seattle Times that Governor Gregoire thinks a 28 percent tuition hike over two years is firm but fair, the editorial board seconds the motion (Ryan Blethen is a Cougar, we note in passing), and the UW's Mark Emmert praises this kind of "flexibility" on tuition because the UW is currently "one of the best bargains in the country." The actual tuition price would shoot up between $1,300-$2,000 over two years, though there's the usual promise of financial aid to defray, etc. We want to point out two things: 1) student loans don't make things less expensive, they make them more expensive, and 2) it's awesome that the primary stakeholders here, the students, are being circumvented in this discussion.

The Seattle Times discusses how the planned Senate budget cuts "roll back much of the party's agenda." Publicola has four "angry press releases" on behalf of service workers, NARAL, low income housing, and childen's health. And Schmudget lays out the cuts in the areas of education and health, pointing out that some cuts are so deep, they effectively cut twice, by losing access to federal recovery funds.

So the developers of Thornton Place are stealing a page from Hyundai and offering to pay your mortgage for six months if you lose your job in the year after buying one of their condos.

We keep rubbing our eyes but it still reads the same: "For its first 30 days, the revamped Seattlepi.com will receive 'consulting and transition services' from The Times as part of an accord terminating the joint-operating agreement (JOA) that had linked the two newspapers for 26 years." What's next? VHS consulting on Blu-Ray?

In a grim, darkly hilarious special report, the Times has confirmed that the guys in charge of dealing with Snowmageddon in December didn't know what they were doing--as in, they had no experience dealing with a major snowstorm and they made "questionable calls" right and left. From the report:

"Mr. Jackson had no idea of what was going on," said Sione Kongaika, a plow driver who recently retired after 31 years with the Seattle Department of Transportation. Two or three days into the first major snowfall, "all he was doing is yelling, 'We have to get more plows downtown. The mayor can't get to the office.' "

• Giganticasscity has photos and reflections on a rectangular brown house in the Central that may or may not be doing a great job of fitting into the neighborhood.
• Orphan Road is discussing the possibility of distance-based Metro fares ($0.10 for 4 blocks sounds pretty good!).
• White Center Now has a juicy account of yesterday's turn of events, involving public intoxication and the Seattle Police Department.

• Oh no! That horrible flu everyone seems to have been getting lately has hit the schools, KOMO reports.
• In the most unsurprising news item of the day, West Seattle Blog reports that a high school has been vandalized.
• Lake City finally got its day in the sun when the Stranger wrote about the neighborhood's effort to clean up and fight crime. Lake City Live has the details.

• Hella Bus is back with the rap from unexpected sources, this time flowing from the verbally gifted mind of Mark Trahant, the editorial page editor of the P-I ("until tomorrow," Hella Bus sadly notes).
• Seattle Transit Blog has an opinionated piece on solving Metro's budget gap, with two suggestions that have elicited dozens of comments.
• Seattle 911 is talking about the case of the untaxed cigarettes in Stilliguamish.

On the same day the Seattle Weekly was prognosticating about the Seattle Times' survival odds, and the Times was filling us in on the P-I's, sometime-Seattlester Seth Kolloen sent us this enigmatic screenshot. Are they trying to tell us something from inside the Fairview compound?

There's been a lot of talk about the possible closure of the P-I lately, but this Thursday there's going to be a panel discussion of Seattle as a "no-newspaper town." The cold truth is that neither the P-I nor the Seattle Times may emerge from this recession--and if one or both do, it is likely that massive restructuring will be called for. So "No News Is Bad News" asks what we rely on professional journalism for, and what we need to do to guide it through the end of the print mass media bottleneck.

Now that the bridge at the Center of the Universe has reopened, things seem to be moving more freely. We'll be able to make it to the T.C. Boyle reading tonight at Barnes and Noble, and thanks to the Magnolia Voice, we know where to score pizza at late 1970s prices. It is an abundant universe, and in that spirit perhaps, the Seattle Times' Porsche-driving Frank Blethen is asking lawmakers to give newspapers a tax break.