In an Examiner column yesterday, writer Harry Jaffe made quite the claim about Mayor Vince Gray's intentions for "One City". more ›

There's little doubt that the District government is large and occupies plenty of space. But what to do with that space isn't as simple as one columnist would have you believe. more ›

Violent flash mobs! What to do about them? more ›

Last December, I took some umbrage to a story in the New York Times about the Washington Examiner's crime-fighting ability. more ›

In the District, it's the owner of the football-team-that-shall-not-be-named that's suing a local publication. But for the District's northern-most urban neighbor, though, it's an elected official that went after a journalist. more ›

Those who unwillingly receive complimentary home delivery of The Examiner have tried lots of different ways to stop the free daily from landing on their doorstep every morning: calling the newspaper, reaching out to the Mayor's Office of Community Relations and Services, threatening to boycott the paper's advertisers, and, of course, the popular minimalist approach of simply putting a laminated "NO EXAMINER" sign on the front gate. (Of course, moving to a different neighborhood would have done the trick, too -- though that's pretty drastic.) Then again, maybe all they needed to do was dig through the paper's website. more ›

The role of the media when it comes to quote-unquote assisting with criminal matters is regularly categorized as not-so-helpful: the vicious pursuit of a bloody headline either leading to temptation to misconstrue the facts of an investigation during the mad rush to be first to report, or, even worse, casting wide stereotypical nets across large groups of people. But the media can play a helpful role; say, for instance, someone opens fire on a group of people and absconds with a vehicle in an attempt to flee. more ›

In his wrapup of yesterday's Clarus poll -- which showed a serious racial disparity in the favorability ratings of Mayor Adrian Fenty and Vince Gray -- the Examiner's Freeman Klopott dropped this little nugget of commentary: "Mayor Adrian Fenty is the white candidate and D.C. Council Chairman Vince Gray is the black candidate." You hear that, American Indian and Alaska Natives, Asians, Hispanics, Latinos, Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islanders, and everyone else? The ball's in your court now. more ›

Mike DeBonis -- who, as the journalist who most recently occupied the position, seems the right person to break the news -- reports that the Washington City Paper has hired a new Loose Lips columnist. A hearty congratulations go to Alan Suderman, who had most recently covered D.C. and Montgomery County politics for the Washington Examiner. Suderman will be the seventh LL in City Paper's 27-year history. Freeman Klopott will move from his crime beat at the Examiner to take over for Suderman. more ›

Michael Neibauer and Bill Myers filed a two-fer today on the racial divide over D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, noting in separate stories that black residents have soured on the guy, while whites are still, for the most part, behind him. That much has been evident since Sunday, though, when the Washington Post released its latest poll. So what's new here? For one, they offer that white support alone could still be enough to see Fenty re-elected. Well sure, but really we're burying the lede here: if you read nothing else in either of these stories, read this quote, on Fenty's personality problem:

"Arrogance" is a common refrain among many of Fenty's critics. Many cite the city's spiraling unemployment and then immediately contrast it with a mayor who squabbled over baseball tickets with the D.C. Council and who had a special heater installed at a public pool so his afternoon workouts could be more comfortable. more ›

The larger Examiner enterprise may be pushing its online platform hot and heavy, but the local D.C. Examiner newspaper's ability to integrate its stories on the web still leaves a whole lot to be desired. Take this story from this morning, with the headline: "Metro builds Web site about faulty track circuits." You might expect to click through to the story and find contained therein the url, and maybe even (don't get too radical now) a hyperlink to the web site that is the entire subject of this story. But no. Nowhere within the version of this story posted online do you find a single hint as to where you might find the actual web site it's talking about. The editorial decision making process here is just bizarre. more ›

Social divisions and fissures make for good headlines. After all, it's much easier to write about group A feuding with group B than it is to have to explain that neither A nor B are neatly recognizable groups. more ›

The Examiner editorial staff is understandably outraged that the D.C. government appears to have blocked access to its web site on all city-owned computers. Given the ongoing tumult at the Office of the Chief Technology Officer, it's certainly plausible that the news site has been blocked by OCTO (hopefully, by employee error—blocking a legit news web site on purpose would be an incredibly stupid policy). more ›

If you didn't catch this Examiner report by Michael Neibauer this morning, make sure to take a look. The story intimates that the reporter himself was responsible for halting, at least temporarily, a Columbia Heights real estate deal that could have ended up costing District taxpayers an additional $2 million for no good reason. The vacant 32-unit building at 1483 Newton St. NW is intended to be rehabilitated into affordable housing, but there is a huge discrepancy between the building's assessed value and how much the city had offered to pay for it. Given that, as Jim Graham points out in the story, it's unclear whether the rundown building even has usable walls, Deputy Mayor Neil Albert put a hold on the deal after receiving questions about it from Neibauer. more ›

We complained in today's morning roundup that the Examiner left out a crucial piece of information in its story about how a veteran Metro mechanic was fired after he told a dirty joke: the joke itself. We can't know either way whether this firing was an overreaction or an appropriate response unless we know what the joke actually was, after all. more ›

Ever been frustrated trying to locate the local news stories on the Examiner web site? OK, maybe that's just us, since it's our job to read them. But if you had ever tried it, you would have discovered that you have to first go to the "News" section, and then make sure to select "Local News" in the drop down menu, as opposed to the tauntingly named "District of Columbia" section, which contained national politics stories. So we were sure glad to get the word from the Examiner newsroom this morning that they've launched a brand new site, dcexaminer.com, which puts the local Examiner news stories right on the home page. The top menu bar has been simplified and made larger, and so far we've found the whole thing considerably easier to navigate. more ›

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There's been a lot more attention placed on the goings on at D.C.'s Child and Family Services Agency since the gruesome discovery of the murdered daughters of Banita Jacks, and rightly so. But two different stories in today's edition of the Examiner paint nearly opposite portraits of what might be going wrong inside the agency. more ›