oh, NOW they get customers.

• SeattlePI.com is moving, away from what had been the Post-Intelligencer building on Elliott Ave. The new office space is said to be “larger” than the space the news site had been occupying. (Let’s hope that means the site’s going to add staff, to get at least slightly closer to a comprehensive local news source.) The P-I globe’s staying put, for now.
• The Seattle weekly that’s not Seattle Weekly gets the big fawning establishment treatment as it approaches its 20th anniversary in September.
• The alleged Norwegian mass murderer (mostly of teenagers) is shaping up to be a right wing “Christian,” a virulent racist and anti-Muslim, and a member of at least one nationalist cell group. None of this has stopped right wingers in other countries from falsely attributing the murders to Muslim terrorists.
• Looks like the ’04 Presidential election may have been just as rigged as the ’00 election may have been, though with operational differences.
• Fans descended on a low-key charity basketball event to proclaim their unflagging desire to see men’s pro b-ball back in town. I also want the Seattle Supersonics back, and I want them in Seattle.
• Amy Winehouse, R.I.P.: Let’s put this succinctly as possible. Drugs suck.

first 'weekly' cover, 1976, from historylink.org

The late investor and arts patron Bagley Wright lived just long enough to see one of the local institutions he jump-started, Seattle Weekly, descend from troubled to pathetic.

First, the paper got caught up, through no fault of its own, in the PR campaign against its parent company Village Voice Media and VVM’s online escort-ad site Backpage.com. Mayor McGinn has ordered the city to not advertise in the Weekly until VVM closes Backpage.

Second, and this is something local management’s responsible for, was a cover story about an S&M practitioner accused of turning a consensual encounter with a streetwalker into a non-consensual violent assault. Feminist blogger Cara Kulwicki has called the story’s writer and SW’s editors “rape apologists,” citing the author’s speculating that the event might have simply been “a bondage session gone haywire.”

Now, they’ve put out a cover piece about local true-crime author Ann Rule. The article’s writer (who’d never written for the Weekly before) claimed Rule had written lies and/or conducted sloppy research about an Oregon woman convicted of murder, in Rule’s 2003 book Heart Full of Lies. The issue was published before SW editors figured out the article had been written by the convicted woman’s boyfriend.

Setting aside the matter of Backpage, over which the SW staff has no power, the once solidly establishment Weekly is drowning in sensationalism. Maybe it should swim back toward safer areas like politics (oops, VVM cut way back on the Weekly’s formerly formidable news staff) or arts coverage (oops, ditto).

• The Tulalip Tribes don’t like it that Microsoft is allegedly using “Tulalip” as the internal code name of a rumored social networking project—even though anything the project produces will be renamed before it goes public. There are worse things to name a software project after than a group of disparate indigenous communities shoved onto a single reservation, where there’s now a big casino resort with a whale statue fountain.
• Nobody might walk in L.A., but bicycling there might be easier now that that burg’s city council has banned motorists from harassing bicyclists.
• More trouble for Puget Sound orcas—experts say the local whales show dangerous signs of inbreeding. Insert your own comparisons to the royal family here.
• Thurston County detectives nabbed a man suspected of stealing Hot Pockets from a local woman’s freezer. Isn’t this how Dr. Evil from Austin Powers got started?
• Gay activists, dressed as “barbarians” and armed with glitter to throw about, stormed Michele Bachmann’s hubby’s “ex gay” “therapy clinic.” (Mr. Bachmann has been quoted as calling gays “barbarians” who need to be “disciplined.)
• R.I.P. Lucian Freud, 88, British figurative painter extraordinaire, master of lumps and wrinkles and frailty and corpulence. Even when he painted young, “sexy” models, he showed them as the old people they would become.

happy bite of seattle consumers

• Food vendors, start your engines. The City Council likes you.
• A Vancouver news site describes last month’s Canuck riot as a desperate attempt by the city’s young males to momentarily escape “a state that could be described as a deficit of the real, which is dangerous and unstable place, full of unfocused outrage and an overdeveloped sense of personal entitlement that constantly simmers just below the surface.”
• As past allegations of phone tapping, computer hacking, and other dirty dealings resurface against Rupert Murdoch’s U.S. businesses (which still aren’t directly implicated in the current U.K. phone hacking scandal), Peter Cohan at Forbes suggests News Corp. shareholders would have themselves a much more robust business if it weren’t for Murdoch, his kinfolk, and their insistence upon continuing to run newspapers.
• One anti-tunnel measure stays on local ballots; a second gets kicked off by a judge.

No matter what you think of big box retail chains, I always find it sad to see one go.

Especially when it’s in an industry for which I have particular fondness (and in which I’ve invested much of my life).

This is the case this week. Borders Books and Music, not too long ago one of the Big Two of bookselling, didn’t find a buyer and will probably shut down. Going out of business sales at the remaining 399 branches (down from 1,249 in 2003) may start Friday.

You can read exhaustive histories of the company elsewhere. If you do, you’ll learn how the Borders brothers of Ann Arbor, MI started a book superstore operation that was bought by Kmart, which merged it with the mall chains Waldenbooks and Brentano’s; then the whole “books group” was spun off into a separate company.

“My” Borders, the downtown Seattle location, opened circa 1994, during the Kmart ownership. At the time, it was considered a major vote of corporate confidence in a downtown that had lost the Frederick & Nelson department store  two years before.

It seemed a warm and friendly place despite its size. It had downtown’s best CD selection, including a healthy stock of local consignments. It had a children’s section that served as a play area for shoppers’ tots. It had in-store events nearly every weekend, ranging from readings to acoustic musical performances and chocolate tastings. Its charity gift wrap table helped many a bachelor such as myself every Christmas season.

But the local store, no matter how cool it was, could not escape the parent company’s troubles.

As local staff was cut back, the in-store events disappeared. The up-only escalator to the mezzanine level was removed. The music and DVD departments were severely shrunk. The various book genres were shuffled around, and a huge section of floor space was given over to long-shelf-life stationery items and even iPhone cases.

Now it will be a brief bargain store, then get gradually emptier, then go dark.

There will still be physical places to acquire physical books, including Barnes & Noble and Arundel Books downtown.

But what of the Borders downtown space?

It’s not like there are a lot of other big chain stores itching for a two story space like that. (Though if you’re listening, University Book Store? Powell’s? Even JC Penney?….)

•

A secondary loser in the Borders shutdown: Starbucks. Its Seattle’s Best Coffee subsidiary had dwindled in the past few years, mostly to a string of coffee stands inside Borders stores. Will the rest of SBC’s stores survive this?

• A Japanese American community activist wants part of S. Dearboarn Street rechristened “Mikado Street,” the name of one of Dearborn’s 1890s predecessors. The question not raised in the linked news story: Can ethnic pride be boosted by the use of a name associated with British comic stereotyping? Or, conversely, could this move help “reclaim” the word?
• Tacoma’s biggest private employers these days? Hospital chains.
• Is Microsoft trying to build its own social networking site? Heck if I know.
• State Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown sez Wash. state just might be ready to approve gay marriage.
• Simon Reynolds finds a lot of retro classic rock n’ soul tributes on today’s pop music charts. And he’s sick and tired of it.

"rupert bear," ironically, was and is a comic in the non-murdoch owned london express.

The sometimes fiercely divided left and progressive factions in the U.S. are today united on one overriding desire.

They’d all like to see the phone-hacking and bribery scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s British newspapers result in the collapse of Murdoch’s American media empire.

Especially of the (deservedly) fiercely-despised Fox News Channel.

Could it happen?

Lefty pundits are pondering possible scenarios that could potentially lead to the sell-off and /or dismemberment of Murdoch’s stateside properties.

Such a move, these pundits guess, could be triggered by shareholders deathly afraid of the Murdochs’ sullied reputations ruining News Corp.’s American brands. Even if no direct link surfaces between the U.S. properties and the Murdoch U.K. papers’ scandals.

I’m not so sure.

If forced to do so, the Murdoch family could sell off its stock in, and retire from leadership of, the Fox broadcast network and its 27 network-owned stations. That move could avert any challenges to those local stations’ FCC licenses.

(Most Fox broadcast affiliates are owned by other companies. Here, KCPQ is owned by the Tribune Co.)

Such a spinoff could leave the Murdochs still in charge of the 20th Century-Fox film studio, along with its TV-production and home-video divisions. Rupert and his offspring could still own The Simpsons, even if they no longer owned the network on which it airs.

The family could also sell what’s left of the once mighty Wall Street Journal and Barron’s; perhaps to Bloomberg.

The assorted Fox cable channels are another potential matter altogether.

For one thing, the FCC doesn’t oversee the ownership of or content on cable channels.

And when Viacom spun off its former subsidiary CBS into a separate company again, some of Viacom’s cable properties (MTV, CMT) stayed with Viacom, while others (Showtime, The Movie Channel) became part of the new CBS Corp.

The Murdochs could sell off FX, Fox Movie Channel, Fox Soccer Channel, Speed, Fuel TV, Fox’s distribution/marketing contract with the National Geographic Channel, and its partnerships in the remaining regional FSN sports channels.

And they could keep Fox News Channel and Fox Business Channel.

Just to spite us liberals.

And with the money they get from selling their shares of all those other properties, the family could even keep subsidizing the New York Post for a few more years.

• One of the ex-News of the World editors allegedly being investigated in the phone-hacking scandal—CNN star Piers Morgan.
• Why film industry incentives in Wash. state should be brought back—not just for Hollywood location shoots but for home-grown productions, like the Spokane production co. trying to sell a network sitcom.
• What we miss with Sonics basketball gone—$100 million dollars in economic activity per year.
• A West Seattle nursery owner faces foreclosure, due largely to Bank of America bureaucracy.
• A gay activist infiltrated Michelle Bachmann’s hubby’s “therapy” operation and now claims, yes, the outfit does attempt to make people “ex-gay.”
• The Scott Walker junta in Wisconsin has gotten lotsa money and advice from a right wing foundation once led by a John Birch Society boss.
• Lori Gottlieb avers that “the obsession with our kids’ happiness may be dooming them to unhappy adulthoods.”
• A Microsoft mobile-software architect foresees a future universal operating system from MS, or a “single ecosystem,” encompassing PCs, tablets, phones, TVs, etc. But it might not carry the “Windows” brand.
• Good news! According to GQ, Seattle is only America’s 34th worst dressed city!

(Answer to yesterday’s riddle: The $25,000 Pyramid.)

pittsburgh post-gazette illo by anita dufalla, 2009

• Census data says even more of Seattle’s low-income population (some 68 percent) now resides in the suburbs. However, I’m not ready (as this linked article is) to declare the likes of Tukwila and Skyway to be “suburban slums.”
• New fun word of the day: “blagging” (defined by the BBC as “obtaining personal details by deception,” as in the Murdoch UK tabloids’ nefarious gossip trawling).
• R.I.P. Theodore Roszak, who was 35 in 1969 when his book The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society professed to know just what Those Krazy Kids were up to.
• Pyramid Hefeweisen is now called Pyramid Hefeweisen again, following a three-year failure to rebrand the wheat ale as “Haywire.” I could repeat my hefeweisen riddle here, but I won’t.
• There is such a thing as wearing too many clothes. If you’re in a mall. And you didn’t pay for some of those clothes.
• Amazon’s own tablet computer—look for it this autumn.
• The local ski season is finally over.
• Oh, all right: What do you call the last hefeweisen that causes a yuppie to total her new car? (Answer tomorrow.)

• Where the state fails, the city steps up, today’s edition: With no more govt.-sponsored tourism promotion in Washington, Seattle might tax hotels for its own tourist ads.
• Tuesday’s County Council hearing on the scheme to impose a car-tab surtax to save Metro Transit: Stuffed to overflowing with citizens, sparse on County Council members.
• You know that deal for Electronic Arts to buy Seattle’s PopCap Games, the deal PopCap management emphatically denied? It’s real, and it’s on.
• Rupert Murdoch will stop trying to buy all of the satellite TV company BSkyB after all.
• So far, the Murdoch newspaper scandals in Britain haven’t been directly tied to his U.S. properties. Well, here’s a fresh, all-American scandal for you: Murdoch’s Stateside businesses not only pay no income taxes, but clever exploitation of every tax dodge on the books has let Murdoch get $1 billion or more in tax refunds each of the past four years.
• Re/Search Books cofounder V. Vale, seeing his industry falter against the winds of tech-induced change, proclaims “If I were an alien from Outer Space wanting to ruin life on Planet Earth, I think I’d invent the Internet.”
• RIP Sherwood Schwartz, 94, the radio and TV comedy writer who became the creator-producer of Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch. Fun fact: Schwartz later admitted he’d named the S.S. Minnow after Newton Minow, the FCC commissioner who’d denounced most of primetime TV as “a vast wasteland.”
• Speaking of which, Joe Berkowitz has handy tips for those of us who refuse to live in televisual abstinence and who continually take gruff for it.
• While on the big screen, Carina Chocano sees all these “strong women” movie characters and hates ’em. She says they’re not identifiable as women, but just as a different set of stereotypes.
• New Lake City strip club owner: We’re really an “adult cabaret,” and a respectable business too.
• And there are many other stories out there, important stuff about the fate of humanity and all. But there’s only one topic on all online users’ minds this day. How dare Netflix raise its rates?

all my children newspaper ad 1986

Just when we had programmed the ol’ DVR to record the final two months of All My Children, came word that it (and sister show One Life to Live) might just come back from the dead like Lazarus Tad.

ABC announced it had licensed both long-running daytime soaps to something called Prospect Park, a production company run by ex-execs of Disney (ABC’s parent company). The venture would continue production of new episodes, to be shown online only (not on broadcast or cable TV).

Given that online advertising draws far fewer bucks per viewer/reader than broadcast or print advertising, and given that no five-day-a-week scripted TV drama has succeeded anywhere but on the traditional big three networks (except the noble experiment that was Norman Lear’s Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman), many commentators on soap-themed online message boards have doubted the viability of such a venture.

Now comes word that there might be a government subsidy involved.

Really.

The unconfirmed rumor is that Prospect Park was waiting for, and received, money from some grant program intended to help jump start “new media ventures.”

That’s just one of the many still unanswered questions about this supposed reprieve for two of entertainment’s most venerable brands, for stories that have unfolded for more than four decades.

When will they be revealed?

Apparently very slowly.

• Gubernatorial candidate Jay Inslee made a bold move when he suggested that the state’s Investments Board could put more pension fund money into Washington businesses. Now, Inslee’s backed off that a little.
• Remember suburban sprawl? Now, at least in apartment construction, almost all the region’s new development is in Seattle.
• Meanwhile in the suburbs, local small businesses are among the enterprises learning what they can do with abandoned big-box retail spaces.
• The now-shuttered Columbia City Cinema is a mess. The building, and the finances behind it.
• Nationally, Mark Sumner insists there is no federal fiscal crisis, only a trumped-up right wing power play.
• The group United for a Fair Economy has a chart of 11 different “Things the Wealthiest Americans Can Buy for the U.S. (that most families can’t afford for themselves!).” For instance, the nation’s richest 400 households could pay off the whole country’s credit card debts.
• The Rupert Murdoch phone-hacking scandal continues to obsess pundits everywhere. At The Observer (the Sunday-only sister paper to The Guardian, the left-leaning U.K. daily that broke much of the scandal’s details), Henry Porter claims that, at least in Brit domestic politics, “the door has shut on Murdoch.”
• And an unsigned piece in The Times of India sums up the standard operating procedure at Murdoch’s UK tabloids, even without their ickiest invasions of privacy, as “exploiting the pornography of sorrow.” A lot of U.S. media could be similarly accused.
• We close for today with Roger Ebert righteously snarking against rewritten “easy reading” versions of The Great Gatsby (possibly created for adult ESL classes):

There is no purpose in “reading” The Great Gatsby unless you actually read it. Fitzgerald’s novel is not about a story. It is about how the story is told. Its poetry, its message, its evocation of Gatsby’s lost American dream, is expressed in Fitzgerald’s style–in the precise words he chose to write what some consider the great American novel. Unless you have read them, you have not read the book at all. You have been imprisoned in an educational system that cheats and insults you by inflicting a barbaric dumbing-down process.

As mentioned previously here, Rupert Murdoch’s UK Sunday-only tabloid News of the World has printed its final edition. This final wraparound cover says it all. It calls itself “the world’s greatest newspaper” (a title also self-imposed in the past by the Chicago Tribune), while a background montage depicts dozens of screaming scandal headlines that have, and had, nothing to do with news.

And guess what? The last issue just happens to include a (stereotype-heavy) Seattle travel story.

• A book industry site asks, “What’s the most beautiful word in the English language?”
• Mayor Mike McGinn, on a crusade to restart big development projects, is proposing, among other things to relax regulations requiring ground-level retail spaces in commercial zones. This would allow all-residential complexes, instead of “mixed use” projects, along retail streets. Publicola’s Erica Barnett hates the idea:

…Recessions aren’t permanent, but land use often is. If we allow developers to build ground-floor housing instead of retail space now, those apartments won’t magically be converted to coffee shops, hair salons, and restaurants once the economy turns around. They will be, for all intents and purposes, permanent residential spaces.

And street-level land use matters. Pedestrians gravitate toward streets that are activated by bars, shops, and restaurants; in contrast, they tend to avoid sidewalks that run alongside apartment buildings and other non-public spaces like fenced-off parking lots.

• In more “hey, he really is a politician after all” news, McGinn ordered the city to stop advertising in Seattle Weekly. The official reason is because the paper’s out-of-state owners also run an online escort-ad site that actor Ashton Kutcher alleges facilitates underage hooking. The Stranger, which has its own in-house sex ad site (whose managers claim to thoroughly check all advertiser IDs), and which endorsed McGinn’s campaign, is not affected by the order.
• Elsewhere, authorities in Snohomish County are going after flashing bikini baristas again. As with last year’s arrests in Everett, these Edmonds arrests are based on the specious idea that breast exposure through a window qualifies as “prostitution.”
• Goodness and Hammerbox singer/songwriter Carrie Akre held her Seattle farewell show on Thursday. She’s been lured away to Minnesota by her day-job career. Now I’ll never get to host the “Carrie Akre karaoke” event I’ve dreamed of.
• Things that don’t belong in the “Recycling” bin: yard waste, old computer equipment, and, oh yeah, dead people.
• There was a fire at the McGuire Apartments demolition site in Belltown. The only result: the building’s owners will have less materials to salvage.
• And, in the only one of these links some readers will care about, there’s a huge scandal a-brewin’ about salmon. Was your last fish dinner really wild-caught Pacific salmon or just a farm-raised Atlantic fish with a false story and a higher price tag?

• Local business promoters have prepared an “infographic” hawking Seattle as the best place to start a hi-tech company.
• First, Sonic Boom Records said it would close its recently moved Capitol Hill branch. Now Everyday Music says high rents are forcing it out of its own site on the Hill. The store says it will move, somewhere.
• Seattle Goodwill tried several times over the past 12 years to redevelop its Rainier Valley campus. One scheme would have razed its beautiful mega thrift store for a Target. With the collapse of that and other concepts, Goodwill is finally going ahead with a limited plan to build a new job training complex.
• Alex Carson explains why “Seattle Mariners baseball is like an Elvis Costello album.” An album Carson hasn’t actually heard.
• In more tragic baseball news, a fan at a Texas Rangers game leaned over a railing to catch a ball and fell over.
• State Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna spoke to Young Republicans in Bellevue, and tried to have a Democratic Party operative kicked out of the room, even calling police.
• Meanwhile, a national “Christian Left” group bought ad space on Facebook for a quite inoffensive little message. Facebook pulled the ad after conservatives complained.
• A Portland judge approved a bankruptcy plan for the Northwest Jesuits. It sets aside more than $150 million for past victims of abusive priests.
• Meanwhile, a Centers for Disease Control report claims more than half of us had harrowing childhoods, “featuring abusive or troubled family members or parents who were absent due to separation or divorce.” In other news, Leave It to Beaver was never real.