With nothing better to do and a strange aversion to getting sunburned, I spent a couple of lazy hours yesterday laying out the Sunday Seattle Times‘ staff-written and local freelance content (no pictures or sports) in a simple newsletter format. It came to 25 8.5″-x-11″ pages, boosted by the magazine section’s big gardening special. If I’d included sports, the total would have been similarly boosted by the annual college-football preview package. I’ll try it again with a weekday edition soon.

Putting it together this way helps to show:

1. Just how little SeaTimes-created “meat” is in the Sunday meal;
2. The extent to which the Sunday news package relies on pre-written feature copy (this is endemic in U.S. papers, with the biggest “news hole” on the day when the least “real” this-happened-yesterday news takes place);
3. How dull, square, and suburban-skewing the paper is in general (even the lead story, about medical patients with severe pain who can’t get the meds they need because of government policies, is made to be plodding and mealy-mouthed).

I could tell my old acquaintances still working at the paper about these thoughts of mine.

Well, aside from the probability that they wouldn’t want to hear what I’d tell ’em (i.e., that stubbornly holding on to their square aesthetic and city-hating editorial policy will only keep making their product more irrelevant to more people)….