Sleep. Take a staggering variety of cold/flu medications. Sleep. Refrain from eating, in whole or in part. Consume bag after bag of store-brand cough drops. Listen to people tell me everybody’s been getting this debilitating bug, whatever it is. Make bad puns about the bird flu (“Of course it did; it didn’t walk!”). Cough up substances you don’t want me to describe, in mass quantities. Skip out on about half a dozen meetups, parties, Belltown Messenger interviews, etc. Sleep. Briefly attend a Drinking Liberally meeting at which I hear King County Executive Ron Sims talk informally about tying in any KeyArena rebuild with a larger Seattle Center makeover (he gave no specific suggestions as to what he’d like to add or delete from the complex). Sleep.

While the world was passing me by, an odd li’l Stranger essay suggested we might as well go ahead and let the Seattle Post-Intelligencer die. I, of course, utterly disagree. Ideally, I’d like the P-I to come out of its joint operating agreement with the SeaTimes as a viable, fully-independent, full-size daily. If that can’t be achieved, there are other options for keeping Seattle a two-daily town:

• Keep the JOA more or less as it is. If this is even feasible now (the Times says it isn’t), it might not be in a few years, as the new electronic media continue to drain ad revenue away from ol’ newsprint.
• Turn the P-I into an online-only operation, as the Stranger piece suggested. Intriguing but ultimately insufficient. There’s still not enough money in Net ads to support a local, mass-market operation employing 100 or more full-time journalists. One day, the money might be there.
• Turn the P-I into a separately-run section within the Times, like the current three pages of P-I Focus within the Sunday Times. The Las Vegas JOA was renegotiated a few years back, turning the Las Vegas Sun into a six- to ten-page features section within each day’s Las Vegas Review-Journal. Such an insert section might include strictly local news, features, and opinion pieces; leaving the Times itself to run stock tables, weather, sports stats, TV listings, comics, puzzles, wire copy, and syndicated columns. Such a solution would keep the P-I‘s “voice” in the public eye, albeit as a “kept” dependent to the Times.
• Turn the P-I into a freebie tabloid, either within or outside of a JOA. Free mini-dailies began in Europe in the ’90s, and are now found in a handful of U.S. cities (NYC, Chicago, Frisco, DC, Philly). They tend to be scrawny li’l things, offering the same content as regular dailies but far less of each department.Still, they provide the best current hope for a rethinking of the whole newspaper concept. Today’s big-city dailies have the same content mix they had 50 years ago, only they’ve gotten duller. There’s no absolute reason why we still have to have full local, world, sports, business, and “living” sections in every paper. There’s no reason except tradition to still print stock prices, or for the comics page to be two dozen tiny, mostly unimaginative, gag strips.

As I’ve written a few times before, the prospect of a post-JOA P-I allows all of us news fans to imagine a new type of paper for a new century. Let’s keep the imagining going. If the P-I doesn’t morph into our brave new paper, let’s start it up ourselves.