Busy weekend

The newsroom is generally down to a skeleton crew on Sundays, typically a pretty slow news day - so reporter Megan Cooley and photographer Liz Kishimoto had their hands full covering a shooting and near-drowning . It’s rare to have two breaking news stories on a Monday front page.

Rave reviews for Tom Lutey’s Exit 289 piece on the supposed California invasion, as well as Paul Turner’s Sunday story on the changing face of family road trips .

City Editor Carla Savalli and reporter Bill Morlin were at an Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in Denver this weekend for a panel discussion on our coverage of Mayor West . Carla reports the reaction was “almost universally positive,” though some reporters were still not convinced we exhausted all alternatives before turning to a forensic computer expert to verify West’s online activity.

Speaking of West, why didn’t we post video of the entire press conference on our site? In short, we don’t have the technology to stream such a large video file (yet), and the end product would have taken users forever to download. Videographer/photographer Colin Mulvany and I ultimately decided to use a judicious selection of highlights instead.

In watching those clips, you may notice a sneezed expletive from one of the “reporters” (it’s actually a guy who used fake credentials to get in). This situation always prompts a lot of discussion - do we print the expletive in the story, or do we write around it? Newspapers almost always opt for the latter, avoiding turning a story about the mayor into a debate over the use of profanity in print.

Coming up for today:

A Chelan County judge upheld Gregoire’s election as governor, saying the Republicans failed to prove that errors in the process caused Dino Rossi to lose.

A north Spokane church is in transition between the Norwegian immigrant community that founded it and the Russian-speaking congregation that recently bought the building.

Reporter Jim Camden is in Clarkston today to cover a congressional panel on salmon recovery.