IN A SHORT-SHORT FICTION PIECE I haven’t uploaded to this site yet, I once imagined some potential Playboy magazine nudie features of the future: “America’s Sexiest Female CEOs,” “America’s Sexiest Female Judges,” “America’s Sexiest Congresswomen,” etc.

One I skipped: “America’s Sexiest Anchorwomen.”

It’s an odd omission. TV stations and networks have been hiring pretty ladies to share anchor desks with hairspray boys for decades. (One of Seattle’s most memorable, Sandy Hill, was an ex-Miss Washington who wound up co-hosting every newscast on the station from noon to 11 pm, before becoming Joan Lunden’s predecessor on Good Morning America.)

All this talk is a lead-in to discussing a peculiar softcore-fetish website, The Naked News.

It’s a 15-minute streaming video newscast, with a new edition each weekday. While it has no field reporters or on-the-scene footage, its four Toronto-based studio anchors read competently-written briefs headlining the day’s news, weather, and sports.

All the anchors are young women. All of them either appear on camera fully nude, or strip from dress-for-success outfits until they’re wearing only their microphones.

The concept’s borrowed from a Russian program that appears on regular TV over there. That show’s bare news readers have occasionally even staged (nude) on-location interviews with (clothed) major government officials.

The American Naked News anchors all keep straight, tho’ perky, faces during their readings. Their only variation from standard newsreader behavior is a short rump-wiggling walkoff at the conclusion of their segments. Their faces, hair styles, and (when they have any) costumes are standard-issue anchorwoman style, not stripper or porn-star or dominatrix style. If not for their perfect (perhaps surgically perfected) figures, they could be the sort of women a young-adult male Internet user might work alongside–or for.

Their straightforward demeanor also differentiates The Naked News from the constant, screeching hard-sell tactics common to sex sites. The streaming video contains commercials, but they’re relatively tame ones (for other entertainment websites). The site’s lack of constant selling is just as relieving as its lack of hardcore crudeness.

None of this means many female Net users would enjoy viewing The Naked News, or even approve of its existence.

The site’s stars might be pronounced non-bimbos, and they might project in-charge images, but they’re still portraying male fantasies, performing to be stared at.

To such potential critics, I might say that heterosexuality has always been with us and likely always will be. As long as most het-male brains are wired to respond to visual stimuli, such stimuli will be produced. They might as well be stimuli that emphasize beauty over crudity, with at least a modicum of brains and humor and friendliness.

And while The Naked News may be a trifle, a light-entertainment novelty work, it’s really no more entertainment-oriented than many news and “reality” shows on broadcast TV. (And it’s no less journalistically respectable than some of them either.)

IN OTHER NEWS: The first strikebound editions of the Seattle Times and Post-Intelligencer came out yesterday. They’re flimsy li’l 24-page things, full of wire copy, syndicated columns, and database features (weather, TV listings).

Because they were printed even earlier in the day than Tuesday’s last pre-strike papers, they didn’t include any evening sports results, stock listings, or even the Florida Supreme Court’s Presidential-recount ruling. Classified ads were truncated on a quota basis, unseen since the days of WWII paper rationing.

The result: Morning papers you didn’t need all day to read. A partial vindication for my long-held wish for a brisker, more immediate, even “alternative” daily; the sort of concept that could potentially bring true competition to the print-news biz and dislodge the local-monopoly papers such as those currently being struck.

(More strike news, and new material by picketing newshacks, is at The Seattle Union Record.

IN OTHER OTHER NEWS: George Clark, who’s self-published several occasional parodies of The Stranger and The Weekly over the years (so typographically accurate, many readers originally thought the Stranger staff had actually produced them!), has issued another, spoofing both tabloids in a double-cover format. The issue seems to have been in the works for some time; it contains parodies of features The Stranger hasn’t carried for two years or more (including my old section, cutely relabeled “Miscellanal”).

TOMORROW: Some things I actually like.

ELSEWHERE:

• Remember the Joan Rivers movie Rabbit Test? Or the feminist bumper stickers, “If men could get pregnant….” Well, one man claims he is!…