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December 29, 2005

Suspense thriller; Wikipedia quickie; NYT: U.S. incomes outpace housing costs, but not here

Accidental fates: The Hard Road: Inside the Jennifer Porter case reads like a suspense novel, especially if you, like me, have never heard of Jennifer Porter, a 28-year-old Florida elementary-school dance teacher who lived with her parents and owned her own dance studio, a quiet, workaholic. On March 31, 2004, she fled the scene of an accident in Tampa in which three of Lisa Wilkins' four children died. Jennifer Porter says she remembers only a person flying up out of nowhere and hitting her windshield.

The St. Petersburg Times finds the timeless tragedy in the hard news of a hit-and-run,. There is a roundness to the resolution of this tear in the way things should be, not unlike that of a play by the Greeks where Fate looms large. Fine reporting, writing and storytelling by Thomas French, Christopher Goffard and Jamie Thompson keep you on the edge of your seat.

I took it in five chunks, the way it was published, and kept coming back for more after a few minutes elsewhere. Each of the parts includes photos that literally put faces on these names, but some of their captions are spoilers if you read them before the text on that page.

Also a spoiler, the archive of daily headlines that inched the case along in time.

Readers react in a Jennifer Porter blog on the news site.

The story link comes from CJR Daily: Five Great Stories You Didn't Read in 2005

Citizen encyclopediaism: Coincidentally, still in Tampa, the Tampa Bay Times does "Wikipedians live one entry at a time," focusing on a local pair of the more than 1,800 volunteer editors of the collaboratively written online encyclopedia at wikipedia.org It's a quick way to get up to speed on this mammoth enterprise as it attempts to stay pure.

Thanks, Andrea!

Never mind:
Twenty Years Later, Buying a House is Less of a Bite -- but not here. The New York Times accompanies this not-about-us story with a chart (uncopyable, since it's Flash) that reports it took 23.4 percent of your income to purchase a home in 1985, 28.2 percent in 2005 in the Providence-Fall River-New Bedford area.

When will our incomes catch up to our expenses in Southern New England? Rate hikes, tax hikes, raise hikes?

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 2:59 PM | Permalink