First step for the Post Metro section - report local election results

This weekend, Patrick B. Pexton, the Washington Post's ombudsman, wrote an article lamenting his paper's coverage of local news [The Post forgets to be local]. In it, he states that the complaint he hears most is that "The paper is so thin" and that the Metro section could use some more heft.

Map of Ward 5 from ancdc.us

I recommend the following as a start: actually report the election results for the representatives most closely tied to the people in the city that the paper calls its home: the Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners.

To the best of my knowledge, these results have not been published by a single print medium in DC (to this point). If you want them, you need to go to the Board of Election's results page. This is fantastic if you have internet access, but much of the city's population does not, and gets its news from the daily paper and evening television news, just like we all did two decades ago. Elderly neighbors and people who don't obsessively check local blogs need a place to find this information that's accessible to them.

This wouldn't need to be a flashy story, and it certainly wouldn't need a novel infographic. Just a simple map for each ward, like the one above, along with a list of each candidate and the results.

Simple. Informative. Necessary (information is the lifeblood of a functioning democracy). And the best part: NO ONE ELSE HAS DONE IT. The Post can take the lead here.

To be certain, it would be a week late, so perhaps it doesn't qualify as news anymore, but it would be a service to residents whom the Washington Post and its ombudsman yearn to serve. The new commissioners don't take office until after the first of the year, so this would still give residents time to familiarize themselves with their new representatives.

What do you say, Mr. Pexton? See what you can do about getting this feature in the paper. It might add two pages to a thin Metro section.

Pretty signage at Florida Avenue's 24-hour Tire Service Center

There is a beautiful, classically-designed neon sign in front of Mac's Tire Service at 423 Florida Avenue NE. It's been there for a couple months, but I thought it deserved a little special attention.

Last summer, the Washington Post ran a great story on Mac's Tire Service, which touts itself as the only 24-hour tire service center in the metropolitan region. The story included a video and photo gallery with Dennis Parker, a mechanic at the shop.

Consider this a reminder that there are people worth knowing, respecting, and appreciating in the gritty parts of DC that the world doesn't pay attention to every day.

Do we really need to describe neighborhoods negatively?

Photo by Thomas Hawk on Flickr.

On Sunday, the Washington Post ran an article about Industry Gallery, a design gallery here in DC. The Post mentioned that the gallery is located in Trinidad, which was a positive point in my mind, because many write-ups of the galleries along Florida Avenue NE at the southern edge of the neighborhood fail to mention the neighborhood, and instead take the somewhat lazy route and say they're located "near H Street."

Interestingly, the author chose to include a descriptor for Trinidad, calling it "the hardscrabble neighborhood in Northeast Washington" (emphasis mine). "Hardscrabble" is defined by Google thusly:

–adjective 

1. Returning little in exchange for great effort
2. Characterized by poverty and hardship

Monday, Matt Ashburn (owner of the Capital City Diner and a Trinidad resident) found an advertisement for a new restaurant coming to the H Street NE corridor. An excerpt:

We want to give the idea of a nice restaurant, but we are in a dive neighborhood.

What do they mean by "dive neighborhood?"

Why call Trinidad a place characterized by poverty and hardship?

The history of H Street NE, and why it includes so much disinvestment is important and shouldn't be glossed over. The long shadow of segregation and the 1968 DC riots are extremely important reasons why H Street is what it is today. It's not just a "dive."

Trinidad, by my personal experience, wouldn't qualify as "hardscrabble." It's a traditionally middle-class neighborhood that is being viewed in a new light given its proximity to the activity centers of DC, and is struggling to come to terms with what that will mean as the population of the neighborhood rapidly changes because of economic and social pressures.

We've been deeply involved with the Ivy City and Trinidad Neighborhood Stabilization Initiative, a process that is diligently working through a process to attempt to increase homeownership access while maintaining affordability in the neighborhood. We believe there will be a significant return from this "great effort," and the experience has shown that there is much more than "poverty and hardship" in our neighborhood.

Glib descriptions of these neighborhood are lazy. It's disappointing to see them applied to Trinidad and the H Street corridor.

Someone's not a Washington Post fan

There's a working Washington Post box among the other newspaper boxes at this D8 bus stop on 9th Street NE, in front of the McDonalds. It looks like it gained two friends this weekend. You can see them lying ahead on the sidewalk in the photo to the right. A closer view is below. What did they do to deserve this cruel fate? 

One Washington Post error fixed, an even worse one discovered

This morning, I pointed out how the Washington Post missed out on some basic DC geography. They fixed the misnamed "Oak Street," properly replacing it with "Oates Street." (Not everyone agreed with my assertion regarding the quadrants and Ward 5, but there's both opinion and fact in addressing that.)

But this evening, I found something even worse. The Islamic month of Ramadan is upon us, and the Washington Post has an article discussing the calculation of when the month actually beings begins (in short, it depends on the mosque, the branch of the religion, or raw politics). The article is accompanied by the graphic above.

Arabic is written from right to left, unlike English, which flows from left to right. If you can read Arabic, you'll immediately recognize that the word 'Ramadan' in that graphic is backwards! It would be as if i typed it as 'nadamaR' in English.

It should look like this:

رمضان

Again, edit these things before you publish them, Washington Post! This is basic journalism!

-------------------------------------------------------------

UPDATE: Within a half-hour of the publication of this post, the Washington Post pulled the graphic offline. We'll update again if/when they post a replacement graphic.

UPDATE II: The graphic is actually still there. There are two links from the article to get to it. One is bad, one still works.

Washington Post writers need to spend more time with maps

Map from Google Maps

(This post has been updated. See below the jump.)

There is no Oak Street in Trinidad. There is an Oates Street. A simple glance at a map of the neighborhood proves that in less than a minute. Why can't our city's largest newspaper invest that time and effort when writing stories about DC?

Over the last couple days, I've complained to many friends and acquaintances that there has been very little coverage of the Ward 5 race in DC's influential newspapers and TV stations. All the oxygen has been sucked out of the room, so to speak, by the mayoral race, and to a much lesser extent, the council chairman's race.

Even the smaller newspapers have dedicated little to this important political scramble. Capital Community News used to publish a paper called DC North which covered news across Ward 5. In March of this year, they rebranded the paper MidCity DC, pulling back coverage of Ward 5 to the Bloomingdale neighborhood, no longer covering the rest of the ward.

The Washington Post published a story about the Ward 5 race on their website last night, and it's in the print version of today's Metro section. But they didn't take the time to do some basic geographic fact-checking. Ann E. Marimow wrote the story, with contributions from Nikita Stewart, but the two apparently didn't run the story by a fact-checking staff member to make sure they got the details right.

The story paints a picture of the incumbent, Harry Thomas Jr., by mentioning parts of the ward where he grew up. One of those places was his grandmother's house in Trinidad, which they claim was on "Oak Street." Click on the Trinidad map above—there is no Oak Street, there is an Oates Street. Sure, it's a little detail, but little details are the things we expect professional journalists to get right. Otherwise, us crazy bloggers might as well be your only source of news, with our supposed lack of fact-checking, lack of editors, and Cheeto-stained fingers.

It's not the first time the paper has expressed a lack of geographic knowledge about DC. Last month, I wrote about the Post's tendency to make broad generalizations regarding the city's quadrants. A lack of understanding regarding Northeast and Northwest, and how Ward 5 relates to the two, is on display in today's story as well.

Here's the article's first sentence:

Ask residents of the District's Northeast neighborhoods about city government, and many are quick to say that they feel neglected, that Ward 5 has too often been a dumping ground for stinky trash transfer stations and unseemly X-rated clubs.

This makes it appear that Ward 5 and the Northeast quadrant of the city are co-extant. Northeast is much bigger than Ward 5 (it includes parts of wards 4, 6, and 7 as well) and Ward 5 isn't just in Northeast (Ward 5's Bloomingdale and Truxton Circle neighborhoods are both in Northwest).

These are simple things that could have been caught if run by someone familiar with the geography of the city. Find that person on your staff and make sure they get to weigh in on these things, Washington Post writers, because your natural advantage over us bloggers (a bigger audience and better news gathering infrastructure) doesn't mean much if you can't get your facts right.

Is it in Northeast, or Northwest?

Photo: 23am.com

This month, the Washington Post ran a couple stories about a homeless man who had formed a basketball league for children. Those stories were followed by a feel-good editorial in last Saturday's edition.

The articles state that the basketball league is located in and serves youth in "Northeast," even when all the photos that accompany the story show that league games are played in the park across the street from Big Bear Cafe at the corner of 1st Street and Florida Avenue NW.

One question I have is this: In which quadrant of the city does the Washington Post believe this story takes place? I realize this is a very pedantic question (many of the questions I ask are!), but there is a serious point behind this. While North and East Capitol Streets may be artificial lines placed on the landscape years ago, our society and media imbue those lines with enormous psychological meaning and power.

Mention "Northwest" or "Southeast" when talking about DC, and you'll often conjure images of rich versus poor, black versus white, and advantage versus disadvantage. A story about the poor in Northwest, or about a fancy restaurant in Northeast, is often framed as a juxtaposition, or an oddity, for those who are not intimately familiar with the city. Media outlets (especially the local television stations) often give only the city quadrant, instead of more specific neighborhood names, when reporting a story in the city.

So which is it, Northeast or Northwest? The Washington Post should publish a clarification.

Epilogue: Where does your (DC) Water come from?

Last month, we covered a blogger roundtable with DC Water, discussing about a wide range of issues related to the DC utility that supplies our drinking water and treats the sewage of DC and surrounding municipalities.

Our website reported on an interesting map that showed the location of reservoirs in the city, and how each one serves areas at a common elevation, regardless of the reservoir's proximity. Unfortunately, the map had to be redacted due to "security concerns" regarding the ability to glean information regarding the water system from the map.

Interestingly enough, the Washington Post ran an article ten days ago regarding a broken water main in Montgomery County. That article included a link (PDF) to a map that shows the water main network for the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission (WSSC) in Prince Georges and Montgomery counties.

To the best of our knowledge, no one has requested that map be redacted, since it has been online longer and hosted on a website that gets viewed my many more people than the DC map we posted. Perhaps it's because the map is not very sharp, thus making it difficult to ascertain the location of information depicted on the map.

Distances in the District—What's "nearby" in Southeast DC?

Washington Post reporter Hamil Harris reported today that the Obama family attended Easter church services at Allen Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, which is located in Ward 8 and near the Skyland Shopping Center.

The headline, "Obama celebrates Easter service near site of D.C. shootings," makes it sound like the church is very close to the site of the shootings that happened March 30. I don't want to delve too deeply into what is considered "near" and what isn't within the context of Washington, DC, but let's take the headline and story for their word and assume that we can define the distance between these two happenings as "nearby."


View Easter service in a larger map

Look at the map above. The straight-line distance between the church on Alabama Avenue SE and the site of the shootings on South Capitol Street is approximately 2.7 miles. Anyone who's familiar with the District knows that's a long distance to consider close. DC is not a suburban or rural area. For comparison, I noted the distance from my block to the White House. It also happens to be 2.7 miles. So, if anything happens at the White House, should I assume that the events are meant to be symbolically tied to Trinidad? Of course not.

The point here I believe is one of familiarity. If one lives in Cleveland Park, they likely think of the National Cathedral as "nearby," but not Petworth. Yet the two neighborhoods are just as close as Allen Chapel AME and South Capitol Street running through Bellevue and Washington Highlands.

In a great guest post at Congress Heights on the Rise, author Ambergris writes about the problem that comes from unfamiliarity with the neighborhoods in Southeast DC. I would recommend that all local news organizations read this open letter. While the Washington Post appears to be doing a better job of identifying neighborhoods around the city instead of simply falling into the lazy trap of only identifying a city quadrant, there is still a long way to go.