The Stranger was furious about a story I wrote last week, in which I reported the news (before many of the paper's own staffers even knew) that the paper was hiring former P-I writer Claudia Rowe as news editor.

In my story, I criticized Rowe’s first article , in which she slammed Mayor Greg Nickels for "[blowing] it on youth violence" and attributed his primary-election loss, in part, to his failure to address youth violence

I wrote that the article was thin and underreported.

By any standard, that’s true: In a piece about Nickels’ failure to address gang violence, Rowe used an anonymous P-I commenter as evidence that drugs, gangs, and "drunk houses" were "rampant" in Ballard, South Park, and Southeast Seattle; strongly implied that Nickels had squeaked through the primary in Southeast Seattle (in fact, he won overwhelmingly);  cited a neighborhood activist's public records request as evidence that "certain areas—the South End, in particular—suffered a dramatic spike in homicides, assaults, and burglaries through 2008,"  without citing  any statistics to back that allegation up; and did no interviews with anyone involved with Nickels' $9 million youth violence program.

And the most basic reporting mistake in a piece criticizing the mayor: Rowe didn't bother calling the mayor's office.

Stranger editor Christopher Frizzelle told me Rowe didn't need to call the mayor because "she's been on this beat a long time."

Instead of trying to defend Rowe's underwhelming reporting, however, The Stranger complained about my statement regarding Rowe's allegation that "Kids were getting shot, but Nickels did not show up at their funerals or the community marches that followed." I said that was not accurate.

When I called the mayor's office for my post, his spokesman, Alex Fryer, told me that the mayor had attended several of the funerals of young black men killed in the Rainier Valley, and that he had met with the families of others.

However, Fryer has since clarified that the mayor did not attend the funerals of five specific teenagers that Rowe mentioned in her story.

Nickels did attend the funeral of Tyrone Love, who was killed in a gang-related shooting (Frizzelle dismissed this funeral as unrelated to youth gang violence because Love was not a minor), and did meet with the family of De'Che Morrison (one of the five kids that Rowe goes on to mention); in addition, as we reported, he sent deputy mayor Tim Ceis to a funeral (Morrison's) in his stead.

So the only "inaccuracy" in my blog post was that Nickels attended one gang-related funeral, not "several," as Fryer initially told me, and that he met with one victim's family, not "several," as Fryer initially told me.

But the larger point of my post, and the substance of most of Fryer's quotes, was that Rowe's piece was thin. The story didn't meet the bare minimum standards of reporting—calling the subject of the story, checking allegations (particularly anonymous allegations) before publishing them, talking to the families about whom you're writing, citing statistics rather than anecdotes.

In addition, Rowe strongly implied that Nickels did poorly in Southeast Seattle, alleging that "districts that might have carried him by a landslide ended up much closer." In fact, Southeast Seattle was the only area that went for Nickels, in many areas by more than 40 percent.