Cleanergate

If you've missed the news, Cornerstone Cleaners/CS Cleaners on the corner of 14th and U has gone under. Recently, a hastily scribbled note in pink highlighter appeared on the door as the only alert to customers that the shop will be closing within a month. Fine. Trouble is that the storefront has not been open to customers who have clothing inside to pick up. Those who have called the phone number posted on the sign are usually greeted by a completely full voicemail box. Despite all of the Roy Pearson jokes on DCist, this news probably isn't funny to you if you entrusted clothing to Cornerstone.

The good news: Some effort is being made by the property manager to get people into the store. The bad news: not all customers' clothing is in there; according to DCRA, some items are in a storage warehouse, and the property manager does not know where exactly that warehouse is. The store will be open this evening from 3 to 8 p.m. Jim Graham's office is on top of the issue and reports that it has arranged with the store managers to "attempt" to keep Monday, Thursday, and Saturday evening hours (more here). If you would like DCRA's assistance on this issue, they have a web page dedicated to Cornerstone.

The interesting little side story that has developed out of this incident is a testament to the power of the blog. It appears that Herb of DC may have broken the story after an attempt to liberate his shirts on Saturday, which Sommer Mathis at DCist then picked up on Tuesday. Our crack local news outlets then scrambled over to 14th Street last night to cover the incident. At least if DCist picks up a story from another blog, they will give you credit for it. Of the four major networks who reported on this story, only ABC even alluded to having gotten information from a local blog, but they certainly didn't mention Herb of DC by name. NBC 4 has been the only station to give credit to DCist on its web posting of the story. WUSA 9 was so late to the party that their website didn't carry the Cornerstone news until 12 hours after the other networks got to it. (Their post is also hardly in English with missing punctuation and the quotation, "they had electrical and their lease was up.") I find it intriguing that the local news folks appear to be monitoring the blogs for leads but don't want to let on. Yes, generally blogs are full of opinion and unsubstantiated news, but if you can verify a story that someone else broke, then I think you ought to give credit where credit is due.