March 27, 2006
City Paper Launches Blog
It was just a few weeks back that the Washington City Paper completed a long overdue overhaul to their website, and now they have followed many a mainstream media mainstay before them and jumped on the blogging bandwagon.
It wasn't long ago that the CPers were complaining about the prospect; in a March 17th piece on Washington Post blogging requirements without additional pay, City Paper editor Erik Wemple noted, "Full disclosure: The Washington City Paper is pulling the same shit with its staff reporters." But today the weekly kicked off its blog, City Desk, with typical bombast, writing in their inaugural post:
Expect crack reporting and sharp commentary from a group of journalists that knows our city better than any team out there. In the coming days, look for posts from Trey Graham on theater, Mark Jenkins on architecture and planning, Tim Carman on food, James Jones on D.C. politics, Erik Wemple on local media, and many more.Recently the Post debuted a similar effort, the disappointing local politics blog D.C. Wire, which seems to have been doomed from the start by the pro bono blogging policy. Hopefully the City Paper's new blog can manage to rise above D.C. Wire -- it certainly can't be worse than their own recent venture into the genre, the painful-to-read dating blog About Last Night.
But we'll see how it goes. Of course, we trust that City Desk won't pull what in the blogging world has come to be known as a "Ben Domenech" -- rise and fall in three days flat. Good luck, CP. And hey, link swap?
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Don't mean to start any trouble, but we already have a DC-based blog called City Desk, which is run by the Progressive Review's Sam Smith.
http://prorev.com/freedc.htm
Shouldn't we have kept this new blog under wrap before Rees finds out?
On that note, I am selling tickets to the great slugfest between Rees and Aglue.
Aglue promises to punch Rees in the face if he sees another one of his flyers on his car and supporters of Rees assure us that the EMS will have to scrape Aglue off the sidewalk on Calvert when all is said and done.
All of this is thanks to the blogs.
Tickets are $10 each.
IMO, CP's always been better at covering DC politics than WP. WP ignores DC, except when they decide to swoop in with some big award-winning expose, like the latest one on city contracting. Of course, these mightn't be necessary if they just did the day to day nuts and bolts reporting on washington that one might expect from a hometown paper.
I project CP's Citydesk will crush WP's DC wire among political junkies, who will appreciate having a blog which is updated more than once or twice a week.
IMO, CP's always been better at covering DC politics than WP. WP ignores DC, except when they decide to swoop in with some big award-winning expose, like the latest one on city contracting. Of course, these mightn't be necessary if they just did the day to day nuts and bolts reporting on washington that one might expect from a hometown paper.
I predict CP's Citydesk will crush WP's DC wire among political junkies, who will appreciate having a blog which is updated more than once or twice a week.
So is "Jim Corley" the real Candidate Rees?
http://www.dcmessageboards.com/index.php?showtopic=8307
Nope I am me and I just want to see Aglue punch Rees, Rees punch back and they both go to jail and do not pass go!
I didn't realize that the DC Wire was pro-bono. That explains why its basically useless and why the writers get extremely cranky when called on their own mistakes.
Wow "Jim"...that sounds remarkably similar to this:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/columbia_heights/message/3732
(for anyone interested, the Rees/Stewart/Biddy stuff started in 2001 in the Columbia heights thread cited above)
About Last Night sucks hard.
Not a big surprise, but Sam is not very happy about the name - CITY DESK: CITY PAPER STEALS OUR NAME
Well, that didn't take long to piss off the City Paper.
Does this mean that City Paper has banned Rees from its blog forever? Have they figured out that Rees is mostly a crazy spammer, whose sole mission in life seems to be to make everyone else's life miserable?
I do not know if they have the technical facility to "ban" a poster, but they have been fairly aggressive in deleting off-topic or aggressive posts. Note the Bill Rive thread from yesterday.