Sports copy editor/designer, Tacoma News Tribune

sure. i guess all they have left in tacoma are high-ranking cops who snuff their ex-wives in mall parking lots, only after the department ignores cries from the now-dead wife that he beat the shit out of her and stalked her ... btw - the paper did a hell of a nice job AFTER all that happened, even though they had the info before the murder the cop was a freak. ... what about cops walking into homes and shooting people who posed no threat dead while issuing a "knock and enter' warrent without ever knocking? sure dude, tacoma's a nice, nice town. would love to raise my kids somewhere up on hilltop. and, if you live there long enough, i'm sure it doesn't stink nearly as bad as it did the first day you moved there.

 

Maybe if you would change your underwear, then it wouldn't smell so bad.

 

Whoa buddy whoa. Tacoma is no where near the murder-and-mayhem town you lay it out to be. Someone must have lived there in the 90s/early 2000s....

 

whoa, whoa what? what role did the trib play when police chief david brame shot and killed his wife in front of their kids in a gig harbor mall parking lot in 2003? how many letters of apology did the trib's editors write after that poor woman died? why did the seattle papers have to kick the trib in the balls to break the fact the woman had cried to the police department to help her, only to have them shine her on? where was the trib even though it had the same info and even more before her heart stopped beating?

how many innocent folks did brame's posse kill while serving warrents before he snuffed his wife in 2003 and how much other shit happened on brame's watch? ... we'll never know if you read the trib.  

as far as change in the area goes, did you guys call jesus person-to-person and ask for a miracle in the past three years, because as far as city hall is concerned, three years isn't much.

btw - i've been inside tacoma city limits in the '70s, '80s, '90s and '00s, thousands of times, although i am in no way proud of that fact. and guess what? it still smells like shit and people still lock their doors when they pull into town and unlock them when they drive up the hill into lacey.

 

Not true. Tacoma is much, much, much, MUCH nicer than it was 10-15 years ago. Crime isn't nearly the problem it was, and tons of money is being dumped into the downtown. Lots of new businesses, a condo boom, some awesome resteraunts. As for the famous Tacoma aroma - it's isolated to a small area that happens to include I-5, so you sometimes smell it if you're driving past on the freeway, but never if you're actually in town.
sure. i guess all they have left in tacoma are high-ranking cops who snuff their ex-wives in mall parking lots, only after the department ignores cries from the now-dead wife that he beat the shit out of her and stalked her ... btw - the paper did a hell of a nice job AFTER all that happened, even though they had the info before the murder the cop was a freak. ... what about cops walking into homes and shooting people who posed no threat dead while issuing a "knock and enter' warrent without ever knocking? sure dude, tacoma's a nice, nice town. would love to raise my kids somewhere up on hilltop. and, if you live there long enough, i'm sure it doesn't stink nearly as bad as it did the first day you moved there.
Whoa buddy whoa. Tacoma is no where near the murder-and-mayhem town you lay it out to be. Someone must have lived there in the 90s/early 2000s....
whoa, whoa what? what role did the trib play when police chief david brame shot and killed his wife in front of their kids in a gig harbor mall parking lot in 2003? how many letters of apology did the trib's editors write after that poor woman died? why did the seattle papers have to kick the trib in the balls to break the fact the woman had cried to the police department to help her, only to have them shine her on? where was the trib even though it had the same info and even more before her heart stopped beating?

how many innocent folks did brame's posse kill while serving warrents before he snuffed his wife in 2003 and how much other shit happened on brame's watch? ... we'll never know if you read the trib.  

as far as change in the area goes, did you guys call jesus person-to-person and ask for a miracle in the past three years, because as far as city hall is concerned, three years isn't much.

btw - i've been inside tacoma city limits in the '70s, '80s, '90s and '00s, thousands of times, although i am in no way proud of that fact. and guess what? it still smells like shit and people still lock their doors when they pull into town and unlock them when they drive up the hill into lacey.
Man, bitter feelings about Tacoma. Did Dale Chihuly give your wife the clap or something?

 

nope, just crabs ... but i still thought the city was a crap hole before that.

 

Coming in WAY late here, so sorry ... but I am just impressed by the vitriol you have for the city. Not that you are way off. You aren't. In some ways, Tacoma still sucks. I grew up there and worked there for three years. But don't hammer the city or the Trib to heavily for the Brame situation ... which, aside from the smell, seems to be your major point. Bad deal and, perhaps, bad reporting, but neither can serve singularly as a fair basis for measuring a town or a paper.

There are many, many good things about Tacoma and the paper. The downtown area is darn near vibrant with lots of cool retaurants and an emerging arts scene. It's still Seattle's ugly bitch sister who used to be the neighborhood crack whore, but the town isn't even close to what it used to be. In the early 1990s the place was ghetto as all hell. It still has some places where you want to lock your doors, but I no longer fear getting shot as I sit in the McDonald's drive-thru.

As for living there, when I was in the area I lived in Gig Harbor, which is one of many nice suburban areas available -- see: Puyallup, University Place, Edgewood, Kent, Auburn, Federal Way, Bonney Lake, Sumner, Port Orchard, yadda, yadda, yadda ... It's a good paper and there are far worse areas in which to live.

 

Wow, really? I interviewed there in the 1980s, stayed in a downtown hotel and walked around downtown after dark wearing a suit, including the somewhat seedy-looking area near the bus station. Nobody bothered me. Maybe they thought I was a pimp.

 

You were in the decent part of town. Hardly great, but well travelled and kept decent. The bad part was about five blocks up hill ... Hilltop and similar areas. I'd say the late 80s, early 90s was when things were at their worst around there.

 

So what's up with this job? Is it good? What's it like to work there?

 

Good job, good people. (And the area is nowhere near the dump some suggest it is/used to be.) There's a concerted effort to get younger in the department, but that stems less from a desire to save money and more from a desire to innovate. There's a growing emphasis on Web presence, as is the case at most other joints. The section itself has problems (stories often are too long, no real Page 2) but has improved quite a bit in the past few years (more ambitious designs/packages, better headlines).

Not sure about the circumstances, but my understanding is that the guy who vacated the desk job (for ESPN.com) is trying to get back to Tacoma. There's also a strong in-house candidate who appears to have the upper hand.

 

How about the bosses? SE on down?