So far, I’ve delineated the bigger reasons why Hearst wants to stop printing the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. I’ve also mentioned the efforts by several concerned citizens to make a case for saving the P-I at least in online form, asserting not just why but how to preserve the state’s oldest news-gathering organization.

Today and tomorrow, I join these hypothesizers, such as Brian Reich, Todd Bishop, and the paper’s managing editor David McCumber, in mapping out how I’d restructure the P-I for short-term survival and long-term growth.

First, the Web side. After all, digital delivery’s where all ephemeral media’s eventually going, though it won’t necessarily always be in what we now know of as Web pages.

But despite their typographic and design limitations, Web pages are the dominant medium for online written matter, at least this year.

And, at least for now, Web pages with pro content on them are supported by on-screen ads. Despite current setbacks, that’s still a market space with a lotof remaining growth potential. As my fellow blogger David Goldstein has noted, “People will always need to sell things. They’ll always need to get their messages out.”

I was involved with Goldstein and several others in 2007-8, in an ultimately aborted attempt to start a local progressive news site. It failed to launch for various reasons, chief among them the fact that none of us were businesspeople. Now, Goldstein’s about to incorporate some of the design and operational schticks we’d discussed into his Horse’s Ass blog.

Goldy now believes our “online publication” metaphor was wrong from the get go, that what the progressive Web needs is a way to help financially support bloggers and other individual content creators. As an individual content creator myself, I appreciate that.

But I also appreciate that some sounds we need to hear can’t be generated by a soloist but by a band or even an orchestra. With a conductor.

Professional editing is part of the edge a pro-news operation has over a one-person operation such as mine. So is juxtaposition. So is organization. So is “team reporting.” And so is “branding,” that elusive quality that gives, say, a piece on Salon or Slate more cachet than a piece on Pajamas Media.

In short, the P-I‘s whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Its columnists’ clout is enhanced by the paper’s regular reporting. Both beat reporters and pundits are enhanced by full-time salaries that allow in-the-field research.

That’s what seattlepi.com does, and what it can continue to do once unshackled from the JOA (and, possibly, from Hearst).

Seattlepi.com has already made great steps in adding value to its site, beyond merely repeating the print paper’s content. This should continue. Use the Web’s unique attractions (comment threads, reader-contributed texts and pix, polls and surveys, slideshows, dynamic links, HuffPost-style “quick reads,” constant updating, reader “memberships” that supply valuable demographic data to advertisers, etc. etc.)

The site’s design, these days, retains a 1999-era notion of a newspaper’s Web offshoot. A home page crammed with headlines and links. Story pages of plain text snaking around huge multiple ad blocks. This can be altered, even within the Web’s current design disciplines, to be more aesthetically luring to readers and more effective to advertisers.

Another suggestion: Make the section differentiation greater. The news/opinion/business, sports, arts, and lifestyle departments could be treated as separate sites (or “microsites”), with mostly autonomous staffs, separate budgets, and separate promotional strategies.

So, I fully believe the P-I has a viable future online.

But not only, not just yet. There’s still value in producing a tangible, physical product. My idea for a future printed P-I Thursday.

(‘Til then, here’s another member of our would-have-been media empire, Paul Andrews, who agrees with Goldstein that the basic concept of newspaper-style institutional journalism doesn’t really translate to the Internet age.)