makela steward via rainiervalley.komo.com

Welcome to all our kind readers who still have Internet connections after “Malware Monday.” In today’s randomosity:

• Let’s congratulate the Seattle woman who just became Ms. Plus Size America.
• The Tacoma Art Museum is getting a big collection of “western American art,” and a big new building addition to put it in.
• Wash. state’s wine biz has become big enough for the Gallo empire to move in on it, buying up Covey Run and Columbia Winery. I remember, of course, the late ’70s days when Gallo was radical America’s favorite brand-to-hate, a status later taken by Nike and later still by Wal-Mart.
• Another sometimes-radical-hated company, Apple, said it will stop submitting its products for “green electronics certification.”
• Ex-Posie Ken Stringfellow has done a lot since his last solo CD in 2004, including abandoning the States to become a free man in Paris. Now he’s finally getting another set of music out, incluidng a duet with comedian Margaret Cho. Title: Danzig in the Moonlight.
• One fifth of all “adult fiction” physical books sold in the U.S. this past spring were Fifty Shades of Grey (the submission-porn story set in Seattle by a British author) or one of its sequels.
• Underwater oil-exploration teams have found the lost city of Atlantis in the North Sea, if you believe the U.K. tabloid Daily Mail (which you really shouldn’t).
• As banking-behemoth blunders spread to the Brits, one analyst notes that, within the industry, “it had become acceptable or perhaps even encouraged to provide false information.”
• David Carr summarizes recent developments in the newspaper biz, and, as you might expect, sees a biz whose troubles just keep getting worse.
• Romney (hearts) the Koch Bros., those campaign-funny-money far-right oil/chemical/paper-towel barons who occasionally claim to be “libertarian” (as in, you know, protecting the “freedom” of mega-corps to control everything and ruin the planet).
• Extreme heat, like they’ve had everywhere in the contiguous states except here, is lousy for the fish.
• And finally, local-politics site extraordinaire PubliCola is back! Yaaaayy!

ford 'seattle-ite xxi' car display at the world's fair; uw special collections via edmonds beacon

• In the revived Baffler, self described “anthropologist and anarchist” David Graeber has a long “salvo” of an essay that starts out by asking some of the questions a lot of folks have asked during the World’s Fair semicentennial: Where the heck are the flying cars, missions to Mars, or other techno-wonders we were promised back then? Graeber smoothly segues from that into a more general modern malaise, in which nothing seems to be getting better except info-tech—and that’s turned us all into serfs to bureaucracy, even in our private lives. His answer: a more egalitarian economy. (I know, easier to say than to make.)
• Online Media Shrinkage Watch: The combo of Crosscut and Publicola turned out to be more of a springtime fling than a marriage. Crosscut’s cutting back. Not just on its new hires (Publicola founders and city hall insider reporters Josh Feit and Erica Barnett), but the site’s existing staff and freelance budgets. Three big funding sources are expiring around the same time. Crosscut founder David Brewster says a new funding scheme (and a reorganization, with Brewster stepping back from full hands-on management of the site) is on the way. And Feit’s talking about restarting Publicola with his own new reorg. Weezell see….
• As Wash. state’s privatized booze biz rolls on, could people actually start drinking less?
• Attendance at Occupy Seattle’s “general assembly” meetings has plummeted. Is the organization fading away? If it does, its range of causes has not and will not go away. Tactics change. Goals remain. Eyes on the Prize and all that.
• While the alpha-male hustlers running most all of America’s tech companies (and the equally estrogen-lacking tech journalists and bloggers) weren’t noticing, Internet usage has become majority female. So are the usages of GPS, e-book readers, Skype, text messaging, mobile-phone voice usage, and more.
• The Waterfront Streetcar might or might not run again. If it does, it won’t be for at least seven years.

• More remembrances of the Cafe Racer shooting victims come from the blog of Georgetown bar 9 Lb. Hammer and from 14-year-old Sam David, whose parents Marlow Harris and Jo David curate Racer’s “Official Bad Art Museum of Art” permanent exhibit.
• Memorials and benefit shows for the surviving victim and the families of the deceased victims continue to be scheduled and put together at a rapid pace. They include a service at St. Mark’s and a jazz jam outside the cafe, both on Sunday evening.
• What the 1 Percent do in their free time: Ex-Microsoft bigwig Nathan Myhrvold has got his own whole newly-created cooking genre. It’s called “Modernist Cuisine,” and it’s got a professional staff, a huge six-volume manual, plus a best-of cookbook for home use.
• The several people who’ve left SeattlePI.com in the past year have, to a person, declined to comment on the understaffed “online newspaper” or why they left it. Until now. Cartoonist-columnist David Horsey, now syndicated thru the L.A. Times, has written a “future of news” piece in which he mentions his ex-employer, and implies that that site has become a “click whore.”
• The reason news sites behave so desperately to gain every single “page view” is that ad revenues per page view are low and getting lower. Meanwhile, Michael Wolff says any fiscal hope for ad-supported content sites is about to implode and soon. The immediate culprit, according to Wolff, is Facebook, with its vast “inventory” of spaces and its investor expectations. But he claims that even without Facebook leading a race to the bottom,

…the value of digital ads decreases every quarter, a consequence of their simultaneous ineffectiveness and efficiency. The nature of people’s behavior on the Web and of how they interact with advertising, as well as the character of those ads themselves and their inability to command real attention, has meant a marked decline in advertising’s impact.…

I don’t know anyone in the ad-Web business who isn’t engaged in a relentless, demoralizing, no-exit operation to realign costs with falling per-user revenues, or who isn’t manically inflating traffic to compensate for ever-lower per-user value.

• Five days and counting until Wash. state’s booze biz goes all private. Expecting greater competition to lower the price of getting besotted? Guess again, my fun-loving friends.
• Social media: a great way to organize group bullying episodes.
• David Lowery has a long, detailed, snark-filled rant about how today’s music-download biz is often worse for indie musicians than the old record biz had been. It’s also got relevance for our ongoing “future of news” topic, because part of Lowery’s shtick is to dismantle the “web gurus” and their evangelical pronouncements for/defenses of today’s online content business-as-usual.
• Yes, the Twilight series makes Emily Temple’s list of “epidemically overrated books.” But so do The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, and even Finnegans Wake.
• Arun Gupta at AlterNet ponders whether the Feds are planting violent agitators among Occupy activists in order to discredit the whole movement.
• New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was quoted as saying that it’s harder to get a minimum-wage increase past his Legislature than gay marriage. To me that’s perfectly understandable, if the politics of gay rights are anything there like they are here (i.e., as a nice, clean, upscale, white “minority” movement).

east baton rouge parish library

The decline of newsprint has reached the point of the first proverbial dropping shoe.

A major U.S. city will be without a seven-day local printed newspaper.

Hurricane Katrina could not stop the 175-year-old New Orleans Times-Picayune from printing (or at least putting out an online .pdf edition). But the Newhouse/Advance Publications chain (which also owns the Oregonian and the Puget Sound Business Journal) just did.

Starting later this year, the Times-Picayune will only appear in print on Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday.

(Advance’s Alabama papers in Birmingham, Mobile, and Huntsville will also cut to three days.)

One third of the Times-Picayune’s remaining reporting staff (after several years of previous cuts) will be laid off.

The company’s official announcement says it will “significantly increase” its NOLA.com news site, augmented by “enhanced” print editions.

But if you believe that, then you’ve probably paraded too often with Krewe Delusion.

The recession has claimed another victim, the Betsey Johnson boutique on Fifth Avenue.

• King County Exec Dow Constantine was caught with an email revealing he’d had an affair with a co-worker. At a press conference, “No Drama Dow” (who has an unmarried live-in partner) quietly admitted the indiscretion.
• The city and county could announce they’re signing off on the Sodo arena plan as early as today.
• KOMO’s Ken Schram insists that the poor (and everybody else) should still get to buy things with cash.
• A community activist group says light rail has accelerated the gentrification of the Rainier Valley, making the mixed-race neighborhood a lot paler.
• Video footage helps a May Day protester escape prosecution.
• The wages of not supporting the iPhone: T-Mobile USA‘s laying off another 900 workers.
• First it was nuns. Now the right-wing Catholic bishops are harassing the Girl Scouts. (Make your own joke about how everybody knows they prefer boys.)
• ‘Future of News’ Dept.: A spokescritter for Rupert Murdoch’s iPad news app The Daily (no relation to the infinitely more distinguished UW Daily) insists the online newspaper is on the road to profitability.
• Even with health insurance, medical care is getting prohibitively expensive.
• America’s real first gay president? Buchanan.
• Michael Lind at Salon asks, “Why do conservatives hate freedom?”…
• …while “MinistryOfTruth” at Daily Kos makes brutal accusations toward your sterotypical teabag conservative:

I don’t think you do love America. At least, not as much as you hate everyone in America who isn’t exactly like you.

• Here are some lovely pix of a Kansas City amusement arcade circa 1968. Not a single video monitor in sight.

sobadsogood.com

The Guardian parsed the NY Times‘ latest financial numbers. Some of its conclusions:

• The NYT’s online paywall seems to be working at attracting paying readers. But what works for the NYT, with its strong national brand and its loyal national audience, might not work for local papers (including the NYT Co.’s Boston Globe).
• Online ad revenue for news sites may be plateauing or even shrinking. So much for the notion, often heard among “future of news” web gurus, that all you have to do is hustle like hell for page views and social-media tie-ins, and ad revenue will automatically follow.

alliance for pioneer square via seattlepi.com

• An artistic ad poster, promoting the native American cause “Honor the Treaties,” was wheat-pasted in multiple copies all over a series of artists’ murals in Pioneer Square. The “Honor” campaign didn’t do it, and neither did the poster’s original artist. It was PosterGiant, the city’s leading poster putter-uppers.
• Congress just might kill off “Boeing’s bank.”
• One idea to save journalism is the concept of a nonprofit news website. Several of these are already up in scattered spots around the country. But the IRS is taking its own sweet time processing some of their applications for official nonprofit status.
• Here’s King County Metro’s current plan for bus changes effective September. A few new routes would be added, but a lot of key current routes would be reduced or dropped.
• You’ve only got 44 more days to enjoy your state liquor stores.
• This story speculating about potential “robot prostitutes” reminds me of (1) that whole “dildonics” nonsense in the 1990s, and (2) Westworld. Remember: Nothing can possibly go wrong….

oldtime (print) proofreading marks; via nisus.se

It’s a couple months old but still a worthy topic of debate. It’s ex-Microsoftie Michael Kinsley bitching about how the Web has brought forth an explosion in written content—much of which is tons of total dreck.

Even a lot of professionally written online stuff, Kinsley gripes, is poorly thought out, poorly constructed, and sloppily assembled.

I say that’s just what happens with an explosion of activity in any “creative” field, from neo-punk bands to televised singing contests to self-published horror novels.

The trick is to (1) have a way to find the good stuff, and (2) encourage folks to strive for better work.

As for the first part, there are tons of aggregation sites and blogs (including this one) that link to what some editor thinks is “the good stuff.”

The second part still needs work.

One problem is that so much of the Web is run by techies. Dudes who know the value of tight, accurate, effective code, but who might never have learned to appreciate the same values in words.

A bigger problem is that, even at sites run by “content” people, there’s intense pressure to put everything online the second it’s written, and to slavishly avoid taking the time or staff money to edit anything.

It would help if more sites felt an incentive to put out better stuff. (A big incentive would be to maybe, just maybe, even pay writers and editors a living wage).

Don’t think of the ol’ WWW as code and wires.

The Web is words (and pictures and sounds), distributed via code and wires.

Today’s lesson in why traditional websites can’t support professional local news begins at a blog called Seattle Media Maven.

It’s run as a moonlighting project by Maureen Jeude, who’s got a day job in the Seattle Times’ “strategic marketing research” department. While the blog is her own endeavor, Jeude often uses it to tout the Times and its online ventures.

Thusly, Jeude ran a piece last month plugging the Times‘ website as one of the top local media sites in the nation. She posts stats and a graph showing the site garnering about 1 million page views per day (twice that of the local runner-up, KING5.com), and 1 million unique visitors per month.

This means each Times online reader reads an average of just one article a day.

Further, if each of the 240,000 Times print buyers (not counting “pass along” readership) read only the average four stories on each edition’s front page, that alone would essentially match the Times’ online readership.

And that online readership is the 16th biggest of any U.S. newspaper.

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Elsewhere in medialand, three research studies in the past year (by A.C. Nielsen, the FCC, and Pew Research) each purport that news sites comprise only a small percentage of total Web traffic, and that local news sites comprise only a small percentage of that.

One industry analyst, Tom Grubisich, says the studies fatally discount the role of links and summaries of news sites’ stories on other sites such as Facebook.

Another analyst, Joshua Benton, insists that news sites’ readerships make up in community influence what they lack in sheer numbers.

• The local progressive organizing group Fuse Washington has put up The Slanted Times,  a spot-on jibe at our local really-conservative-but-pretending-to-be-centrist monopoly daily. Why bother? Because, as the anonymous authors put it…

The Seattle Times editorial board advocates for the rich and powerful in Washington state every day. They have used their editorial page to attack any proposal that would lay a finger on the 1% or their expansive stock portfolios. At the same time, they do their best to ensure kids, seniors, and low-income families absorb billions in budget cuts year after year.

• Meanwhile, Hugo Kugiya at Crosscut explores territories we’ve traipsed through lately—the steady decline of SeattlePI.com, in terms of staffing and quantity of compelling content. A newsroom that needs to get bigger is instead getting smaller. And the site’s whole premise of “anything for page views” is dumb and unproductive. It needs new blood at the top, to reorganize it into a full service local news source—or as close to one as chintzy web advertisers will support. In the long term, it needs to become a strong enough “brand” that it could eventually command a subscription price, at least in web-app and tablet form. In the short term, that will require investing in the site’s content beyond what web ads, alone and in their current form, can pay for. If Hearst won’t do it, they should turn the brand over to local operators who will.
• Seattle Central Community College administrators tried to craft new campus-use policies, specifically to ban Occupy Seattle from coming back. The college brass tried to rush the new rules through while the college was on spring break, and fewer students (and pro-Occupy faculty) would be around to speak out. That tactic has failed. A full schedule of hearings will be held.
• It turns out the right-wing sleaze machine does have one use for African American voters—as a tactical “wedge” in anti-gay-marriage campaigns.
• Libertarian Wet Dreams Dept.: BitTorrent search site The Pirate Bay says it’s looking into ways to operate outside the reach of the copyright police, even by running server computers inside unpiloted drone airplanes. All this impractical tech, just so doodz can keep downloading free video games and porn?

benjamin day's new york sun, one of the original 19th century 'penny press' papers; via ricardoread.wordpress.com

Even before the online news “revolution” (that looks more and more like “creative destruction” without the “creative” part), newspapers and TV/radio stations, and especially local slick magazines and “alt” weeklies, had begun to ignore whole swaths of their communities, all in the name of the dreaded “upscale demographics.”

That means wanting only wealthy (or at least really affluent) people in your audience, the audience you sell to advertisers. (The original Seattle Weekly was particularly notorious at this. Its rate cards proclaimed, “Who are the Weekly’s readers? In a word, rich.”)

The age of dot-com media has only exacerbated this trend. AOL’s “Patch” sites deliberately only cover wealthy communities. The West Seattle Blog is apparently pulling in a lot more ad revenue than the Rainier Valley Post.

And the “future of news” bloggers, who demand that all news orgs conform to their formula of unfettered-access, ad- and pageview-dependent standard websites, sometimes seem to believe the entire nation is made up of people exactly like them—18-34-year-old, college-educated white males, with home broadband, smartphones, and techie jobs that let them browse the web throughout the day.

And now a Pew Research study claims “fewer than half of Americans who make under $75K a year go online for news.” If the online realm, as we now know it, becomes the only place to get written short-form journalism, a lot of Americans are going to be informationally shut out.

That last stat came from the page for “A Penny Press for the Digital Age.” That was a panel discussion at the digital media section of the SXSW music/media convention last week. You can hear it here.

Its aim: to explore “how low-income and working-class people–the majority of Americans–can be included in the future of online news.”

(Hint: Most of the solutions offered by the panelists involve non-profit, cooperative, and/or volunteer operations.)

It’s just one of more than a dozen “future of news” panels at SXSW you can hear at this link. They’re all full of “cutting edge” new-media concepts.

Indeed, the new-media world these days has more cutting edges than a blister pack of Bic razors (most of which will prove just as enduring).

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Elsewhere in journalistic doom-n’-gloom land, Eric Alterman at HuffPost has collected a whole boatload of depressing industry statistics. Perhaps the most depressing of them all:

Newspaper revenue fell to its lowest level since 1984, although adjusted for inflation the income is actually worth half of what papers earned back then.

Many of these stats come from media-biz blogger Alan Mutter. Mutter also notes that retailers are putting up more “advertorial” content—and even ads for other stores—on their own sites (which would help negate the need for these stores to advertise in news-media outlets).

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Meanwhile, the entertainment side of the media biz (at least the movie and TV entertainment side) continue to hold its ground against the “open web” demanders.

By continuing to insist on affiliate rights fees from cable providers and streaming websites alike, the big media giants have largely kept themselves surviving, if not thriving.

Could the news biz, including the news sides of some of these same companies, learn something from this?

The cherry blossoms agree with the calendar that spring has arrived. Why does the weather argue?

• Today (Tuesday 3/20) is half price Amazon gift card day.
• Seattle’s apparently on the cutting edge of privacy-free office interiors.
• Who wouldn’t love a local art exhibit of classic electric mixers, model cars, and miniature Space Needles? Nobody, that’s who.
• Who still supports Mike Daisey’s not-entirely-true “exposé” of Apple’s subcontracted Chinese gadget factories? Would you believe Steve Wozniak?
• More bad news for everybody who thinks web ads could eventually support professional online news. Turns out that 68 percent of all online ad spending goes to Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft, and AOL. Only the latter two employ any journalists (Microsoft through its half interest in MSNBC.com; AOL through HuffPost, Patch, and other sites).
• Meanwhile in Maine, one of the most aggressively hyped “digital first/print last,” “hyperlocal,” “new media business model” companies has crashed, taking some almost 200-year-old weekly papers with it.
• Jonathan Chait at New York mag insists that Obama’s aborted budget compromise with John Boehner’s House Republicans last year was an attempt “to sell out liberalism,” which only failed because Boehner was “too crazy” to go along. I have a different interpretation. I believe Obama made a show of offering Boehner almost everything the latter wanted, knowing full well the latter would reject it anyway, as a part of the grand strategy of rendering the GOP utterly irrelevant on the national level and turning the Democrats into the new “party of business.” (Which could still be seen as “selling out liberalism,” if you want to see it that way.)
• Meanwhile, said House Republicans are desperate to keep the 1 percent’s loyalty by proposing a near total re-deregulation of Wall St. funny-money practices.
• To end on a fun note, here’s some animated “3D .gifs” by local artist Dain Fagerholm.

p-i carriers, 1942; mohai/seattlehistory.org

Three years ago Saturday, the print Seattle Post-Intelligencer published its last issue.

There’s still a P-I sized hole in the regional info-scape.

SeattlePI.com doesn’t even partly fill it.

What’s worse, that site is shrinking when it should be growing.

From 20 journalists and “producers” at its launch as a stand-alone operation, it’s now down to 12.

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The way I figure it, a local mainstream news operation here would need about 40 editorial full-timers to come close to comprehensively covering the community and to producing a thorough, compelling daily product:

• 12 general news reporters;
• 2 opinion columnists/guest-column editors;
• 4 business reporters;
• 7 arts and entertainment reporters;
• 7 sports reporters;
• 3 photographers;
• 4 shift editors (“producers” in web-speak); and
• 1 editor in chief (“executive producer”).

This also happens to be close to the reporting staff numbers of today’s Tacoma News Tribune.

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I can say it would be nice to have a bigger, fuller PI.com site.

But can I reasonably ask Hearst New Media to front that kind of money, considering the site’s probably not profitable at its current budget (and considering the money Hearst’s probably losing at its still-extant newspaper and magazine properties)?

I believe I can.

Even though I believe web ads will never come close to supporting a local site of the size I’m talking about (or, really, much professional journalism period).

That’s because online content won’t always be tied to the ugly, inefficient, insufficient genre known as the commercial website.

I’m talking about tablet apps, Kindle/Nook editions, HTML 5-based web apps.

Products that bring back the concept of the “newspaper” as a whole unified thing, not just individual text and directory pages.

Products whose ad space can be sold on the basis of their entire readership, not just individual page views.

Products that could even command a subscription price.

A renewed P-I would be the perfect vehicle to test and refine this concept.

And Seattle is the perfect place to do it.

And if Hearst doesn’t want to, let’s get together some of our own town’s best n’ brightest to do it instead.

Let’s make a news org that wouldn’t just be a “corrective” to the Seattle Times‘ square suburban worldview, but would present a fully expressed alternative worldview.

A site that lives and breathes Seattle.

That tells the city’s stories to itself.

That shows how this could be done in other towns and cities.

Harper’s Magazine publisher/subsidizer John R. MacArthur has always kept his mag’s online version behind a paywall.

In a recent speech at Columbia University, transcribed at the Providence Journal’s site, MacArthur insists that Harper’s is making more money this way than it would if all the content were free and management scratched n’ scrambled to somehow sell enough web ads.

But he doesn’t stop there.

In the speech, he accuses “Internet con men” (i.e., the dot-com and Web 2.0 propagandists and evangelists) of “ravaging” publishing.

He denounces “Internet huckster/philosophers” as “first cousins—in both their ideology and their sales tactics—to the present-day promoters of “free trade.” Just as unfettered imports destroy working-class communities through low-wage outsourcing, MacArthur avows, so has the Internet driven writers, artists, and editors “into penury by Internet wages—in most cases, no wages.”

With web ads incapable of supporting living wages for content makers, MacArthur insists online readers will have to learn to pay “if they want to see anything more complex than a blog, a classified ad or a sex act.”

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Immediately, defenders of online business-as-usual stepped up to denounce MacArthur’s remarks.

Some, like Mike Masnick at TechDirt, settled for simplistic name-calling. MacArthur, Masnick insists, represents the “Platonic ideal specimen of the ‘I’m an old fogey elitist Internet Luddite.'” Masnick’s “rebuttal” piece goes on to call MacArthur at least 20 more varieties of out-of-it, while not bothering to actually rebut any of his points.

(OK, Mesnick does counter MacArthur’s claim that freelancers are being forced into poverty by online freebie sites, by citing a single example of one writer who says he’s offered more work than he can take.)

A more lucid response comes from Alexis Madrigal at Harper’s age-old arch rival The Atlantic (which not only has a free website but posts a lot of web-only material). Madrigal insists his mag’s “doing just fine thank you,” with equal amounts of print and web ad revenue.

Madrigal and Mensick both assert infinite, if intangible, benefits to having one’s writing part of the “open web” where it can be linked to, commented upon, and become part of the big meta-conversation.

But does that have to come at the expense of adequate research, thorough editing, and living wages for writers/editors?

And does everything really have to be on the open web?

If MacArthur wants to keep his paywall up, and if he believes his little nonprofit highbrow mag can support itself better that way, let him.

The old fogey might actually be on to something.