The Stranger has hired former Seattle P-I reporter Claudia Rowe as news editor (a position both Josh and I previously held). The hire, in theory, is something of a coup for the alt-weekly: Rowe has nearly 20 years of experience in mainstream journalism. Rowe starts at the end of this month. The paper has yet to announce the hire, but will likely do so by Monday.

Joining the Stranger may be a culture shift for a traditional journalist like Rowe. Judging from her first article for the paper, it looks like the Stranger wants her to report less and editorialize more. Last week, Rowe debuted a piece that asserted the mayor had "[blown] it on youth violence."

The mayor's office complains that the story contained factual inaccuracies and that the Stranger did not contact anyone there before running the story. In the piece, Rowe bolstered her case against the mayor using quotes from anonymous P-I commenters and said the mayor "did not show up at [the] funerals" of kids killed by gang violence, which Nickels spokesman Alex Fryer says is untrue. Fryer says Nickels attended several funerals (sending deputy mayor Tim Ceis to one in his stead) and met privately with the families of several of the murdered young men.

Nickels' office also confirms that Nickels' legal counsel Regina Labelle contacted The Stranger to complain after the story ran. "The bigger issue is that the reporter did a pretty big story on a major initiative of the mayor's without calling anyone at the mayor's office, ... which was totally odd and quite frankly not professional, either," Fryer says. "You can't just do a story like this without even contacting us."

Neither Rowe nor The Stranger has returned emails for comment yet.