What we love about this one is imagining the police department meeting that led to this sting. Surely it went something like this: "Dude, I am so totally bored. I haven't arrested anyone in like, three days. Who can we arrest?" "Uhh. Well hey, you know who really likes doing drugs? Jam band fans!" "Perfect. This will be easier than busting a high school party for underage drinking. Let's roll."......

On Monday Express re-launched its web site, dubbing it anew as ExpressNightOut, which will focus exclusively on D.C. area arts and events coverage. The old Read Express url now points to the new site. The Express folks also put up a post formally announcing the end of Free Ride, the local news-focused blog that had been dying a slow, painful death since the departure of former DCist editor and Free Ride founder Mike Grass, who......

The new August issue of Outside magazine ranks the "20 Best Towns in America," and this year, Washington, D.C. was given top honors, coming in as #1 on the list. The District was honored for the turnaround neighborhoods like Adams Morgan, Chinatown and U Street have seen in the last decade -- indeed, the list focuses on communities that have seen "revivals," and also includes places like Chattanooga, TN, Ithaca, NY, and Crested Butte, CO.......

You may have read Eric Weiss's story in Sunday's Washington Post, which described the District's attempts to improve pedestrian safety and encourage walking and mass transit use as a "war against workers who drive into the city." There's not much more to say about it that David Alpert and Ryan Avent haven't already said. This sums it up nicely (from Avent):Essentially, Eric Weiss went around the suburbs asking folks to bitch about the District’s efforts......

At the beginning of June, the Washington Times launched a fancy redesign of their web site to incorporate a lot of overdue Web 2.0 features, like 400,000 specialized news feeds by topic (neat) and a bunch of new video and audio features (sure, OK). They also moved their nearly nonexistent local coverage into the A section, which we hoped might mean a new emphasis on local news, but so far that hasn't been the case.......

The Politico's Michael Calderone says that Leonard Downie, Jr. announced today that he is stepping down as executive editor of the Washington Post. The move had largely been expected, as reports that a search for his replacement was already underway had been circulating through town for several weeks. City Desk rightfully calls the announcement hardly news, but points out that the quick timeframe for his departure is something of a bit of a surprise: Downie......

From today's corrections section in the Washington Post.......

First: Good news from Duke, where Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) underwent what his doctors are calling "successful" surgery today on a malignant brain tumor. While the initial announcement of Kennedy's condition and potential treatment a couple of weeks ago did not include surgery as a likely option for the 76-year-old senator, Kennedy went forward with the aggressive procedure this morning. It has yet to be revealed exactly how much of the tumor surgeons were able......

This is pretty good: Fox 5's Tom Fitzgerald decided to do a report on the ongoing harassment of photographers inside D.C.'s busy Union Station, a topic we've written about and heard about from our own Flickr contributors many times before. While he was there interviewing Amtrak's spokesperson on the subject, who in fact told the reporter that photography is absolutely allowed inside the Amtrak portion of the station, a security guard came up to the......

DCist was pleased to learn today that we've been selected as the official blog to represent the District of Columbia at this year's Democratic National Convention in Denver. DCist will be part of the State Blogger Corps, which is a new cadre of bloggers who cover state and local politics that the Democratic National Committee has invited to sit with their own delegations on the convention floor. You can find a full list of......

A lengthy stream of names, many of them seriously big time folks, keeps rolling out of the Washington Post newsroom today as senior reporters, editors and columnists are coming to final decisions about their buyout offers. The face of the Post is about get a lot younger and a lot less familiar to its readers. The two biggest names to come out of today's round of buyout acceptances are longtime sports columnist Tony Kornheiser and......

Fishbowl DC reports that Jonetta Rose Barras, longtime political analyst for WAMU's Friday program, The Politics Hour With Kojo and Jonetta, is leaving the show. City Desk has more, citing differences between Barras and WAMU Program Director Mark McDonald and calling the move a firing. Barras told the Washington City Paper that she felt there was a large disparity in her salary, especially since the program expanded its coverage in January to include Maryland and......

Not very many media outlets have really mastered the art of producing web video, but Slate's team of online video producers tend to stand out from the pack (see their Larry Craig arrest report reenactment for further evidence). Via Matthew Yglesias, we get this truly funny report on the stupidest bike lines in America (and elsewhere in the world). Slate ended up giving the top honors to a 20-ft. stretch of bike lane they......

Color us honored! When we thumbed through the massive, two-lb. "Best Of D.C." edition of this week's Washington City Paper, we were surprised and delighted to find that publication's readers had awarded us "Best D.C. Web Site." Best locally-focused blog, OK, but best web site? Washingtonpost.com was a runner up? Allow all of us here at DCist HQ to deliver a collective "gee golly." That was just awfully nice of you, City Paper readers. Make......

Michael Calderone over at the Politico broke the news today that D.C.'s original foul-mouthed political blog, Wonkette, is leaving the Gawker media empire. Managing editor Ken Layne will personally take the helm of the newly independent Wonkette, as he confirmed in a post on the site today. There's some pretty thinly veiled subtext in both the letter from Gawker publisher Nick Denton that Calderone posted, and in Layne's announcement, that Layne and Denton disagree about......

The 2008 Pulitzer Prizes were announced today, and the Washington Post racked up an extraordinarily impressive six of them. It's no surprise that the Public Service category went to Dana Priest, Anne Hull and photographer Michel du Cille for their investigative series into the poor conditions at Walter Reed Hospital. The Breaking News award for their coverage of the Virginia Tech shootings was also a good bet. Some of the other awards were slightly more......

No, we're not talking about the popular HBO show that white people seem to love. The Post has brought back to life D.C. Wire, their blog on local politics that suffered a lonely death in late 2006, when the newspaper's beat reporters couldn't figure out what the heck the thing was for. After taking all of 2007 off, the blog was quietly reintroduced last week; so far, it's got eight posts on everything from Michelle......

You've no doubt already read this impossibly horrible column penned by conservative freelance journalist Charlotte Allen that ran in the Washington Post on Sunday, but just in case you haven't gotten the outrage out of your system, consider this comment thread the place to do just that. We hardly know how to begin to wrap our brains around this series of events: Allen, the same woman who wrote the Weekly Standard story dismissing the Jena......

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. First is Bill Myers' story, about how the principal of Latin American Montessori Bilingual School called the city’s abuse hot......

Thanks to the 276 different people who took the time to email us this New York Times blog post from Jennifer "I probably shouldn't make pathetic attempts at insults with a middle name like" 8. Lee. Apparently our reputation for obsessing over a) transit issues and b) people who try to compare D.C. to New York City are well known at this point. So apparently Ms. Lee was recently a visitor in our fair city,......

Major shakeups are afoot at the Washington Post. First, Katharine Weymouth, the granddaughter of late Washington Post Co. chairman Katharine Graham, has been named chief executive of a new division to be called Washington Post Media, which will place both The Washington Post print edition and washingtonpost.com under the same direction. City Desk asks the key question here: Will this mean the end of the 3.4-mile trek between the two operations? For the uninitiated: The......

Forbes has put out a list of what it's calling America's "Most Lustful Cities", but what is in fact just a list of cities that sell a high percentage of contraceptives compared to their populations. D.C. comes in 6th on the list, which doesn't include any of the typically thought of as sexy U.S. cities, like Miami, New York or San Francisco. 1. Denver, Colorado 2. San Antonio, Texas and Portland, Oregon 3. Seattle, Washington......

While the Washington Post is our hometown newspaper, it's also part of a larger corporate behemoth. And like many a corporate behemoth, this one is seeing some turmoil in the ranks. In recent days, large ads have been appearing in Metro stations decrying an ongoing labor dispute between Post production workers -- the folks who actually put the paper together for delivery -- and Post management. The production workers, part of the Communications Workers of......

The AP via Baltimore's WJZ-TV reports the issue of same-sex marriage rights in Maryland will pop up again next week. This time around, it's the state legislature and not the courts who get to rule on the matter. Back in September, the Maryland Court of Appeals ruled that laws banning same-sex marriages did not violate the state constitution. This contradicted a January 2007 ruling in the Baltimore Circuit Court that the laws were discriminatory and......

Just a few days from now, the critically acclaimed HBO series The Wire will kick off its fifth and final season. Considered one of the best and most realistic portrayals of crime and corruption in a struggling city (Baltimore, in this case), the show traces the thin line that divides the good guys from the bad. Whether cops stealing stacks of cash during drug busts or thieving dockworkers pooling together money for a stained-glass window......

Metro fares aren't the only thing going up in price in D.C. If you're in the habit of purchasing a copy of the Washington Post from a vending machine or a sidewalk hawker on your way to work in the morning, take note: the cost of the daily paper is about to go up by 15 cents. The Post's newsstand price will become 50 cents beginning on Dec. 31. The company cited a decline in......

The thinly veiled sexism oozing out of today's Examiner column by veteran local politics observer Harry Jaffe is hard enough to take, but to whomever thought up this gem of a headline, be they copy editor or author, DCist salutes your willingness to go boldly where no human beings in the 21st century were thought to be capable of going anymore. Yes, if the recent Office of Tax and Revenue scandal has taught us......

Last week's comment section was full of goodness (and a technical glitch, sorry). From schools to traffic to illegal second timeouts, there was plenty to go around. The comment of the week comes from G Lover Park (who also narrowly missed the coveted best username of the week award). G Lover had a brilliant theory: Yet more evidence of vast Supermarket Industrial Complex, more casually referred to as the Perishable Triangle. The major brands get......

Good morning, Washington. Are ya ready for some embezzlement scandal news? Of course you are! This morning's update comes not from the embattled Office of Tax and Revenue, but rather from the D.C. Public Schools front office, as the Examiner reports that Eugene Smith, the former director of internal audits for DCPS, entered a guilty plea yesterday to charges of stealing nearly $50,000 from a charter school account. Smith was fired by the school system......

While the name might promise simple sweetness and pleasantries, the exhibit You Catch More Flies with Honey…, now on display at Carroll Square Gallery, is not simple or superficial. Curated by Hemphill Fine Arts, the exhibit features five artists in the first annual OPTIMA exhibition, which showcases artists whose works have natural connections and form dynamic relationships when viewed together. Bright color infuses the gallery as each artist uses a cheerful color palette to hide......