Will James

Bluesky would be a lot better if people on here were more self-conscious about being unintentional parodies of Bluesky users.

I just found out!

My Bloody Valentine took away their major albums.

I agree with you, and yet this is an extremely Bluesky comment.

Anyone else simultaneously grieve and rejoice when a band you love pulls its music from Spotify? You suffer, but at least Spotify suffers too.

A huge bookstore with a tiny/nonexistent horror section is a shitty, incomplete bookstore. I said what I said.

Shame is probably the variable. Or at least *a* variable.

The system creates the incentive. Some participants see a path to money/fame/success and follow it. Others are cowed by shame. Or maybe pride.

An absence of shame is a superpower in a lot of systems at the moment.

Journalism prizes incentivize reporters and editors to tailor stories for judges (who are other journalists) rather than regular people. I've seen this gamesmanship have a distorting effect on coverage.

But at least this provides an incentive other than "find a way to be popular on social media."

I was getting to it!

I am not a fan of either. Each path offers incentives that are different from "do right by the audience."

But the "attention play" is especially dangerous. It incentivizes toxic attention-getting behavior, audience capture, and many attendant forms of rot that distort the information ecosystem.

This is the sharpest analysis of the Olivia Nuzzi saga.

As institutional journalism has collapsed, individual journalists have basically had two paths for scraping by: a "prestige play" (hounding for prizes) or an "attention play" (social media celebrity).

Both are corrupt in different ways.

One of my favorite things I learned while talking with students at @famu1887.bsky.social this week: At its founding, this historically black university was relegated to a former plantation infested with rattlesnakes. So they embraced the rattlesnake as their mascot.

Moral rot in elite journalism is killing the whole field The Nuzzi/RFK Jr. mess and the revelation of Epstein’s journo pals lay bare a profound moral absence at the heart of our free press.

"Some people in the industry don't think ethics and rules apply to them—due to their desire for power and influence, pursuit of ‘friendship’ with sources, or a combination of some or all of those things." - @karenho.bsky.social.

www.thehandbasket.co/p/moral-rot-...

This may seem like a subtle distinction, but it points to different causes and different solutions.

This election season, a common perception has reasserted itself: that homelessness and public disorder are problems of big, progressive cities.

There's another way to view it: These are *American* problems that tend to pool in certain spots, and end up being disproportionately borne by big cities.

She spent her wedding day in Tacoma’s ICE detention center, as policy changes swept through "Inside ICE Detention: A Documentary" investigates Tacoma's immigration detention center during a time of swift policy changes under the Trump administration.

During your walk, run, chores, or commute today, pop in your earbuds and listen to this piece from my colleague @lizamelia.bsky.social (who edited Lost Patients).

It's the most intimate look at immigrant detention I've heard. It takes place at Tacoma's ICE facility.

Yeah, it's too bad the "mainstream media" has not reported any negative stories about Bruce Harrell.

www.kuow.org/stories/moni...

www.kuow.org/stories/seat...

www.kuow.org/stories/seat...

www.kuow.org/stories/woma...

Didn’t Katie Wilson tell KUOW the checks arrive every couple of months?

To me, that would suggest it started sooner than September.

I think The Stranger should be careful about accusing a fellow journalist of making a factual error — a really serious thing — when they’re actually making a more subtle point about context and framing.

Is there a difference? Sure. In the first case, a reader might assume the parental support has gone on for ~ two years. Now we know it’s closer to one year.

Helpful to know. Does this justify The Stranger calling another journalist’s reporting inaccurate?

The new context is useful, but let’s just be clear about what this is about.

The criticism is that “Her parents supplemented childcare for her toddler (age 2?)” is substantially different from “Her parents supplemented childcare for her toddler for the past year.”

Katie Campbell’s original reporting of this fact was not at all inflammatory and the debate around it struck me as pretty nuanced!

Almost as if the story enriched the public’s understanding and sparked meaningful debate — something journalism is never supposed to do.

I agree: The Stranger's context was valuable! Just like @katiecampbell.bsky.social's original reporting was valuable.

New Seattle CHOP videos contradict city’s narratives on teen death A father’s civil suit reveals videos that could change how the public views the unsolved, highly politicized death of his son. A trial set for next week could be the public’s last chance for answers.

5 yrs after a Black teen was killed at CHOP, city officials + some protesters say he was firing a gun before he was shot.

There’s no evidence of that in videos we’ve reviewed, including those filed by city to defend itself in a lawsuit from the boy’s father.

www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...

We dug through many hundreds of pages of court documents to find some new clues in the unsolved fatal shooting of Antonio Mays Jr. at CHOP, an unhealed wound from the protests of 2020 in Seattle.

And I’m excited to start this one by @johnlangan.bsky.social, after @talkscaredpod.bsky.social’s enthusiastic recommendation.

Just finished (very belatedly) The Hellbound Heart… and I’m still searching for a Clive Barker book that really clicks with me.

When I started covering homelessness in Washington State almost a decade ago, it was jarring at first to meet so many people on the streets who had such similar stories of aging out of foster care.

I'm really glad this book exists and I'm looking forward to checking it out.

Every few days I think about a 22-year-old I met last year at Seattle's open-air drug market at 12th and Jackson.

As our interview wrapped up, he urged me to dig into the foster care system and what it does to people like him.

It is comforting to know that @claudiarowe.bsky.social did just that.

Did the attention economy make us weird? Or did it just expose us to how weird so many of us already were?