Today, I wrote up a piece about how Office of Attorney General lawyers were/are furious with fire department brass. What's the reason for their anger? A shoddy investigation into the Georgetown Library fire that has become the subject of a massive lawsuit in D.C. Superior Court. The shoddy investigation means a lot of problems with basics like discovery and evidence requests by plaintiffs attorneys.

In my item (linked above, please read it!), I quote from two OAG lawyers' e-mails to the fire department. The two attorneys call out the department for their potentially damaging stonewalling on the discovery, and question whether fire investigators followed basic national standards when they worked the Georgetown library case.

In my calls to the OAG prior to publishing the piece (linked above, please read it!), I got nowhere. Nothing much beyond no comment, it's pending litigation, the usual.

A few hours after my item ran (linked above, please read it!), OAG's Kimberly Matthews called to say she really, really wanted to see those e-mails. Could I please send them to her?

Read More "OAG Calls. It Wants Its Emails Back." »

Yesterday, the New York Times announced that it would be cutting 100 newsroom jobs via buyouts and layoffs. When the best paper in the country has to cut jobs, that's bad, very bad news. Anyone that's checked out journalismjobs.com lately will tell you that the news industry isn't clamoring for reporters. But the news provoked a surprisingly sympathetic response from Times readers. Some offered to pay money to read the paper's online version!

Will you, dear reader, beg to pay us for our online journalism?

*photo courtesy of mediabistro.

First the merge, now the purge. FishbowlDC has the scoop: CQ-Roll Call is in the process of laying off 44 employees (writers, editors, etc.) today during a series of meetings. These meetings seem less like meetings than a cattle slaughter. These meetings aren't going to be subtle. One staffer told FishbowlDC that it feels like Schindler's List. FishbowlDC has the internal memo from boss Laurie Battaglia.

It reads in part:

"While this reorganization has many positive elements, there is also an unfortunate consequence of this assessment, and that is the elimination of 44 editorial positions, spread across all newsrooms. These decisions, along with our earlier commercial changes, have been extremely difficult to make, and are now made only after a nearly two-month painstaking effort to review our editorial teams and determine our needs going forward. But we are happy to now say that our restructure is complete, and no further personnel reductions of this nature are forthcoming."

We know what these things are like. Our hearts go out to those staffers cut. Politico has a small item on the cuts.

As I selected my senior yearbook photo via the world wide interwebs this week, I took a minute to think about the difference between the presentation of those images today versus previous generations.

Today, photography companies are offering many ways to make yourself look better. There are options for retouching and removing scars, tan lines, moles, tattoos, piercings, and stray hairs (just $40 a pose!). Being a poor college student, I'll take my photo with the flaws, thank you very much.

But it got me thinking about the generations of students before me who probably would have paid that money because those yearbook photos were the defining photo of their collegiate career. The artificially posed snapshot in time was the photo that their college friends would remember them by for all eternity.

Those photos sometimes gave us a peek into what a person was actually like at the time the photo was taken.

Take John Slattery. Sure, now he's the silver-haired, womanizing, suave Roger Sterling of the Sterling Cooper advertising agency.

But before he was a Mad Man, Slattery was a young adult.

Read More "The Evolution of the Yearbook Photo: From Ed Liddy to John Slattery to Now" »

Until a few minutes ago, I didn't know there was such a thing as "The Journalist's Creed." I didn't go to J-school, though---maybe there you have to recite it before classes start? Anyway, now apparently the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism is journaling up whether the venerable creed requires an update. Here it is in its current form:

Read More "Proposed Addition to the Journalist’s Creed" »

The circumstances aren't in dispute: After the Detroit Lions got whupped by the score of 42-7 by New Orleans, Detroit News columnist Rob Parker asked a question of Lions Coach Rod Marinelli: "Do you wish your daughter would have married a better defensive coordinator?" You had to know something about the team to get that one: Marinelli's daughter, indeed, was married to Marinelli's top defensive coach, Joe Barry. And Barry has been stinking it up for some time now, giving the NFL a cellar-dwelling defensive unit.

That all went down on Dec. 21.

Since then, Parker has left his job at the Detroit News. In officialese, he resigned, but his editor, Don Nauss, talked about how to interpret that bit of news: "We said we were taking the matter seriously and we would deal with it. Draw your own conclusions about what transpired. I have to emphasize Rob submitted his resignation and we accepted it. It was a voluntary action.''

How 'bout this for a voluntary action, Nauss: Why don't you get a new job?

Think about it for a second. A columnist--which means, in news terms, a person who's entitled, and indeed encouraged, to push opinions into the public realm--asked a person in authority an edgy question. And a great question. The facts show that the coach hired his son-in-law to be defensive coordinator, and said defensive coordinator ends up stinking up the arena for two seasons straight.

Now, wasn't it time for a question about nepotism from your hard-hitting columnist, Mr. Nauss? Isn't that exactlythe sort of inquiry you want coming out of his mouth? But you, Mr. Nauss, insist that the question was unprofessional, perhaps prompted by Marinelli himself, who took objection to the question, saying, ''Anytime you attack my daughter, I've got a problem with that.'' (Just to set the record straight, coach: No, the columnist wasn't attacking your daughter; he was attacking your hiring acumen. No wonder you've been fired.)

I suppose none of this would have happened if Parker had been more bland with his phrasing: "Sir, you hired a defensive coordinator who's also part of your family. Do you regret that decision, and did that fact that he was part of your family influence your decision to make the hire?"

But the difference between that question and the one that Parker asked is a dash of attitude, of panache--just the stuff, in other words, that we seek from our columnists. Just tick off the negatives here: Parker wasn't being: 1) biased; 2) racist; 3) inaccurate; 4) insensitive; and 5) he wasn't twisting quotes, making up facts, or otherwise misrepresenting himself or failing to disclose a conflict of interest, or any of those other journalistic misdeeds.

This was just plain good journalism.

Washington, D.C. is a complicated place. Journalists in D.C. bureaus are getting laid off in droves. Kids these days like Second Life and other avatar-driven games. Dave Johnson, a professor at American University, is clearly smarter than the rest of us, because he thinks he's figured out a way to reconcile all this by creating a game-like platform that presents a virtual D.C. that dynamically presents information to users by employing an algorithm that---oh, damned if I know. All I know is that he's asking the Knight News Challenge for about $1 million to create the thing. Here's an excerpt from his proposal, linked from Fishbowl NY today:

This project will build a working “SimCity” model of Washington, DC, visualizing the federal buildings and placing avatars of elected and appointed officials in and around them. Based in open source tools such as Blender and the Python language, the environment will be built from the ground up with hooks to work with other open source data-driven projects as well as social networking sites. (The interface and engine can be brokered to model any state's capitol, or any city in any state or nation.) Beyond the platform interface, the goal is to attach vast databases of public information: The effects of federal policies/politics on local policies/politics; the structure of financial relationships and their effects on policies/politics. Strong journalism – print, broadcast and new media – that relates these communities to Washington will be easy to find and new audiences will appreciate the relevance to their communities.

This may be an improvement over hiring a smart reporter in a D.C. bureau. I can't see how, though.