Just got back from the SeattlePI.com one-year anniversary party. The Crocodile was all done up with pastel pink and blue “baby color” balloons. (The Seattle Weekly anniversary parties I’ve been to were all festooned with black, white, and red balloons, as in “black and white and re(a)d all over.”)

The first song by the first band on stage included the repeated refrain, “I want to dance on your grave.”

With the prominent exception of David Horsey, most of the 120 or so people there were well under 40, nay under 30. They were significantly younger, on the average, than the people I’d seen at any of the P-I memorial gatherings over the previous year (of which there were at least three). They weren’t about mourning the dying old media. They were about celebrating the shiny new media (or at least celebrating this particular new-media venture’s survival in-this-economic-climate etc.).

I don’t need to rant about PI.com’s shortcomings. Its own people know about them. They’re scrambling to put out a popular site on a skeletal budget. I remember the early months of The Stranger, and that venture also was then heavy on proven circulation-building features, light on hard news.

What I can do, and will do, is suggest how PI.com or someone else can help fill the big holes that still exist in local news coverage.