On Thursday evening, I attended a Metblogs Seattle meetup at the new Oddfellows bar on Capitol Hill. The meeting’s premise: Start the conversation on what we need in terms of local news in the Internet age. P-I staffers Monica Guzman and Michelle Nicolosi were on hand to directly receive ideas on what a post-print seattlepi.com ought to do.

But the meetup’s organizers want your input too. Live and in person even. They’re putting together a town meeting, basically as soon as they can nail down a location. Stay tuned to nonewsisbadnews.org for details.

Meanwhile, here are more thoughts about the P-I‘s potential fate, from Time magazine and from Laura Porto Stockwell.

Stockwell comments on a KUOW panel discussion, during which someone apparently repeated the figure, previously quoted here yesterday, that an online-only P-I might only keep 20 journalists employed. Stockwell seems confident such a skeleton crew can still produce a copmelling product by deftly coordinating the work of volunteer citizen journalists.

As I’ve already said, I want seattlepi.com to remain a professional site. Bloggers and citizen journalists are terrific, but there are also sounds that can only be made by a well-rehearsed orchestra. I want to preserve as much of the P-I talent pool as possible. Yes, that includes copy editors. (Believe me, I know how valuable they are.)

However, I also see the value of close-to-the-ground contributors such as neighborhood bloggers in bringing reader interest back to local news. Any surviving newspaper and/or news site will have to deal with with I call the “willfully ignorant,” those “smart,” “hip” urbanites who only read the New York fuckin’ Times and only listen to NP fuckin’ R. You’ve gotta get these people to care about what’s going on HERE.