Results tagged “examiner”

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.