Today is a really hard day here at NPR. We're losing some good people, including people I'm very close to. The reasons for the layoff are complicated. We lost a lot of federal money, gained a lot of donations, but NPR isn’t sure how sustainable those donations will be in the future.

Late to this, but @kuow.org's podcast "Adults in the Room" is outstanding. Congrats to @isolde.bsky.social @willjames.bsky.social Jeannie Yandel @podcastalec.bsky.social and the whole team. www.kuow.org/podcasts/focus

I just finished listening to this podcast and it's an exemple of excellent journalism. Sexual abuse in high schools is extremely difficult to investigate. The journalists here started their quest for the truth about their teachers when they were still students. They were punished for it.

Meanwhile, in Seattle, our county assessor is turning into the Joker

Another story that makes one wonder what Seattle has gained from a decade-plus of wealthy newcomers flooding in for tech Costs skyrocketing, institutions struggling, arts shrinking Could we look back and realize all this money, rather than an infusion, was like an antibiotic hitting the gut biome

Dragged my 8-months-pregnant wife to the Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington show. She’s thrilled!

Anyone know why several dozen people started following me in the past few hours? Disconcerting.

They put us in the newspaper.

If you're not listening to Adults in the Room, you're missing a lot. 4 episodes in, it explores a Seattle SD crisis 25+ years ago over abuse by a respected HS teacher and how fiercely communities and institutions attack those seeking accountability from the powerful www.kuow.org/podcasts/focus

Really enjoying this so far! Basically, what if you went back 20 years later and re-investigated "the incident" from your high school. www.kuow.org/podcasts/focus

Sometimes it feels like it's getting less and less fun to make things, and I wonder if an underappreciated factor is that the audience is just getting worse and worse.

As usual from this team, KUOW Focus's new podcast is excellent. If you were an AP kid or went to a high-performing high school around Y2K I think you'll find it particularly engaging.

I'm on episode three and damn. This is an incredible piece of journalism, reflection, and examination of things we take for granted.

KUOW is coming for you, Joe.

I’m utterly uninterested in “debates” about whether AI can do things well. I wouldn’t care if it could. 1. It stole from me. 2. I prefer me having my job to a computer having it. 3. I don’t teach “with” Lockheed or Raytheon; why wld I teach with Anthropic or OpenAI?

Hey look, a podcast made by a local public radio station is at the top of Apple Podcasts. Obey Apple and listen to "Adults in the Room" by @kuow.org.

I'm really proud to have helped produce this. It's the start of a new era of investigative, documentary storytelling at @kuow.org. "Adults in the Room" launches our new Focus podcast channel, where we'll drop more deeply-reported series — some of which are already in production. Subscribe!

Thought experiment: A regulation requires creators of content to disclose their use of AI. Say it's a tiered system: (1) AI-made, (2) AI-assisted, (3) AI-informed, (4) AI-free/Human-made...

If you use AI to make journalism, other writing, film, music, or visual art, you should have to label it, clearly and plainly. Consumers should be able to make informed choices about what they put into their brains and what they support.

To “remove writing from reporters’ workloads” is to remove reporters’ critical engagement with a topic. The writing is an inextricable part of the process. It’s hard. It takes time. That’s the point! There are no shortcuts for writing and reporting, and AI can hardly approximate it. Stop doing this.

I cannot stress this enough: writing is thinking.

New: One week ago, a jury ordered Seattle to pay more than $30 million to the family of a teen killed at CHOP. Today, a survivor of the same shooting filed his own lawsuit against the city. Robert West was shot in the head at age 14 and survived. www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...

My colleagues had me on the @kuow.org arts show Meet Me Here to talk about Infinite Jest lol www.kuow.org/stories/30-y...

I'm very excited to announce a new investigative podcast I've been a part of. "Adults in the Room" looks into a 25-year-old scandal at Seattle's elite Garfield High School that went unresolved... until my colleague Isolde Raftery revisited her high school years. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/c...

There's a verdict in the Antonio Mays Jr. case, after nearly three weeks of jury deliberations and a month-long trial. Attorneys are assembling in the downtown Seattle courtroom. I'll thread the verdict below.

More and more, I feel incredibly lucky to have fallen into a media career that does not require me to post on social media all the time. It just seems bad. For the journalist, for the journalism, for the audience, who are tricked into believing they're consuming something more than empty calories.

Having interviewed lots of people and then, lately, having been booked on or almost booked on some podcasts myself has been eye-opening. The takeaway is that I've been way too concerned with being polite and possibly inconveniencing people for my entire career.

We have successfully moved all of our crappy millennial LEGO set furniture and are now tending to the emotional needs of our cats.

If there's no verdict today, the jury in the Antonio Mays Jr. civil trial will have been deliberating for seven full days.

Moving is bittersweet. Then there's the ecstasy of knowing that, soon, I will no longer have to shop at the Safeway on 15th, which is without a doubt the worst grocery store in America.

I'm sitting in the King County courthouse, where a jury is deliberating in Antonio Mays Sr. vs the city of Seattle. Antonio Mays Jr., 16, was killed at CHOP in 2020; His death led the city to disband the protest zone. If there's a verdict, I'll post here. www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...

Co-sign

This is the way. For anyone who creates anything, for anyone who values works of creativity at all. As I get older, I find fewer and fewer things worth getting militant about. But this is one exception. Human creativity is a miracle and we’re at risk of snuffing it out.

Latest in the civil trial over the death of Antonio Mays Jr., the 16-year-old who was killed in Seattle's CHOP zone: Today, the lead detective in the homicide case unveiled evidence that was previously not public, as lawyers debated whether Mays committed a felony in the minutes before he was shot.

Omari Salisbury and I were on @kuow.org’s Soundside today to talk about newly unearthed footage of Antonio Mays Jr. from 2020. The footage, shot by Omari, shows Mays talking to a small crowd three days before he was shot and killed in Seattle’s CHOP. The case is unsolved. omny.fm/shows/sounds...

My colleagues and I have interviewed dozens of people about the death of 16-year-old Antonio Mays Jr., reportedly shot by CHOP security. Themes we often hear: He was up to no good. Security was protecting us. Here’s a video of Mays 3 days before his death. www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...

New from The Seattle Times and KUOW: Antonio Mays Jr. was capturing on video, speaking about police reform to a crowd of protesters, just three days before he was shot and killed at CHOP in 2020. This is a new data point in the 5-year-old question of who Mays was and what he was doing at CHOP.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

...Nah.

One of my main issues with Bluesky is that 50% of the accounts on here are extraterrestrials.

Genuine question: Why haven't we seen more organized and widespread opposition to the attention economy and what it's wrought in so many aspects of our lives: political polarization and radicalization, attention spans, childhood development, losing loved ones to conspiracies, screen addiction?

I shudder to imagine what a panicked, scrambling AI industry is about to inflict on human civilization in an attempt to make the math work on this.

Several of the conservative influencers meeting with Trump, including Choe, are from Seattle. Mining Seattle and other blue cities for shock content has been a reliable formula for success and power among conservative influencers for years. Some reporting that keeps being relevant: