…asks the musical question, “Why didn’t the P-I fold sooner?”

The simple answer: The Joint Operating Agreement with the Seattle Times, proposed in 1981 and first enacted in 1983, kept the P-I alive lo those many years, despite all the subsequent efforts by the Times to kill it.

There’s another question others have asked in recent weeks: Why didn’t the Times die and the P-I live?

For that answer you have to go even further back in time.

When Wm. Randolph Hearst Sr. bought the P-I in 1921, it was the dominant local paper. By 1930, the Times had more readers, and would always have more readers thereafter.

The Times successfully marketed itself as the local paper run by local people. Hearst, by this time, had turned his papers into cookie-cutter local variants on the same chain-imposed formula, from the typography and the logos to the emphasis on celebrity gossip and hard-right politics (hmm, sound like any current media firms we know?). While the Times shared many of Hearst’s editorial stances, it was run by a local family that hobnobbed with the local business titans and kept close ties with local politicians (especially the Republicans).

Hearst Sr. died in 1951. His heirs were generally more interested in magazines than in newspapers, and gave their local publishers more leeway. (They still had to run W.R. Hearst Jr.’s weekly “Editor’s Report” column, which (heart symbol)ed the Vietnam War and Augusto Pinochet.)

But caring less about newspapers also meant the Hearsts underfunded them. The pre-JOA P-I was manufactured on creaky old presses. They could only print and distribute so many papers between the end of evening sports events and the start of morning rush hour. The P-I never regained the natural market advantage of a morning paper.

But, while Hearst closed up shop in most of the cities in which its newspapers operated, it stayed in Seattle through thick and thin. As late as 2007, when it legally forced the Times to keep the JOA alive, Hearst wanted to hold on to its position in the Seattle media marketplace.

It was only with the national collapse of the daily-newspaper business model that Hearst’s current management swooped in and gave the order to surrender.

Of late, I’ve been noting the eerie similarities between two U.S. corporations with similar names:

• American International Group (AIG), the insurance and investment giant now under fire for funny-money shenanigans; and
• American International Pictures (AIP), innovators in teen-oriented exploitation features from 1955 to 1980.

Let us compare and contrast, shall we?

AIP: First release: the original The Fast and the Furious.
AIG: First business: corporate insurance for US and European firms in China.

AIP: Worked on low budgets. Shot some films in as few as two days.
AIG: Spared no expense, at our expense, to enrich its own speculators.

AIP: Carefully market-tested titles and posters before making each film.
AIG: Brazenly insisted its mortgage-based derivatives were safe and secure.

AIP: Redubbed the original Mad Max from Australian into American.
AIG: Stamped questionable investment products with “AAA” ratings.

AIP: Mixed-and-matched film genres to make new hits (I Was a Teenage Werewolf, The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini).
AIG: Sliced-and-diced mortgages into credit default swaps and other slabs of tainted loan-burger.

AIP: Used subsidiary names to release even-lower-budget films (including the original Little Shop of Horrors).
AIG: Renamed its consumer insurance division “21st Century” to protect it from the now-tarnished AIG brand.

AIP: Helped launch the film careers of Annette Funicello, Jack Nicholson, Cher, Vincent Price, Pam Grier, Peter Fonda, and producer-director Roger Corman.
AIG: Paid “failure bonuses” to high-ranking derivative traders and executives.

AIP: Taken over by sitcom producer Filmways (The Beverly Hillbillies). Film library now owned by MGM.
AIG: Taken over by the U.S. government.

AIP: In-house formulae of sex, horror, and comedy helped inspire The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
AIG: Media critic Robert Stein has decribed politicians’ and pundits’ response to the bonus scandal as “Bailout Rocky Horror Shows.”

AIP: Known for its hokiness, its audacity, its improbable stories, and its ridiculous monsters.
AIG: Not much different.

Spent a couple hours at tonight’s big P-I employee wake at Buckley’s on lower Queen Anne. At least half the staff had drifted in while I was there. Hugs and toasts and loud Blethen-bashing all around.

It’s here. The announcement we’ve been dreading but expecting these past nine weeks was made shortly after 10 this morning. The last print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer will appear Tuesday. That’s one day sooner than the earliest closing date offered during Hearst’s Jan. 9 announcement.

Other than the date of the final edition, the winding down of Washington state’s oldest business enterprise has gone according to rumor.

Yes, Hearst’s keeping the P-I brand, and the globe.

Yes, there’s be a Web site, run by a tiny subset of the existing P-I staff (20 editorial staffers compared to 150 previously). Only a few of these surviving staffers have been announced; cartoonist David Horsey’s one of them.

Yes, nobody came forward with a solid offer to buy the paper and keep it in print. (What, nobody wanted the chance to lose $1 million a month as the junior partner in a JOA with the also-failing Seattle Times?)

Yes, the final announcement came when P-I columnist Joel Connelly was out of town, and local news-biz analyst Chuck Taylor had just gotten back into town.

The Stranger’s Eli Sanders was in town, and he noted that the P-I site went to a text-only “disaster” mode around 10:30 Sunday nite. When the full site reappeared an hour and a half later, its non-ad pages were bereft of the “nwsource.com” domain name. That’s the domain run by the Times under the 1999-revised terms of the JOA. As of this morning, seattlepi.com is its own freestanding thang. (Ads now appearing on the site were sold by the Times, but an in-house sales staff is being assembled.)

Newspaper people, everywhere, are fond of romanticizing their own. They’ll note that the Obama inauguration was the last big national story in P-I print; the December snowstorm and Washington Mutual’s collapse were its last big local stories.

Ken Griffey’s return to the Mariners, the launch of Seattle Sounders FC, the Husky men’s basketball team’s NCAA tournament run—not to be commemorated in a printed P-I. The opening of Sound Transit light rail, the final fate of the Alaskan Way Viaduct, this year’s mayoral race—all things we’ll have to read about elsewhere.

The P-I staff had already been preparing a big goodbye special section. That’ll show up Tuesday. Expect a huge wrap party/wake tonight at Buckley’s on lower Queen Anne.

This past Thursday, I spent a couple hours in the central library looking at microfilmed P-I issues from significant dates in my life—my birth date, the day the Sonics won the NBA title, the day Mt. St. Helens blew, etc.

The first thing I noticed: Monochrome microfilm just isn’t paper; novelist Nicholson Baker was right when he pleaded for libraries to hold on to printed newspapers.

The second thing I noticed: Papers sure had a lot more ads back then. Ten pages of classifieds at the minimum. Multiple ads for supermarket and department-store chains within the paper, not as separate inserts.

The third thing I noticed: The words describing major events can evoke memories just as strong as, or stronger than, the audio-visual memories of the events themselves.

But that’s what newspaper people do. They create what an old cliche calls “the first draft of history.”

And now, the Post-Intelligencer, as a tangible product and as a fully-staffed newsroom, is history.

Meanwhile, the various assorted attempts to jump-start a competitive post-P-I news site continue.

As will the pontificatin’, here and elsewhere, about what online news should be and how it could be funded.

There won’t be a P-I fate announcement until sometime next week.

P-I deathwatchers patiently wait to see if and when the shredders and recycling boxes might show up.

…chat up the notion of creating nonprofits to run papers and/or news Web sites, Utne Reader offers the simple reminder that political/social activism and corporate charity don’t necessarily mix.

…no P-I fate announcement today. Staffers and freelancers who published goodbye pieces this past week now get to go back to work for at least a little while longer.

Thanks to Charles Brubaker, I’ve rediscovered Ted Rall’s three-part column on the state of the newspaper biz in that simpler time known as November 2007. (Here are the links to installments one, two, and three.)

Rall begins with the now too-familiar roll call of woes besotting the newsprint industry; principally, the woe that online ads bring far, far less money per reader than print ads do.

Rall ends with the suggestion that the three national dailies might thrive while mid-market local papers wither away.

Instead, the recessionary rains have fallen on all newsprint creatures, great and small.

…since Hearst started a 60-day countdown to either sell, scrap, or drastically shrink the Post-Intelligencer. So far, the corporate brass have publicly issued nothing. Privately, they’ve made lowball offers to a few staffers for an online-only P-I. Several people who’ve gotten these offers have reportedly declined them.

All this time, meanwhile, P-I staffers and friends have quietly (and less-quietly) sought one or more buyers for the paper from among the city’s rich and civic-minded. Now, Slog hears rumors that a potential sale just might (might, mind you) be in the works. Or it could be just rumors.

I’m thinking of becoming a freelance book packager, leveraging the lessons I’ve learned over the years.

Here’s a sample lesson:

Book publicity is a two-headed monster. Or rather, it wants you to become a two-headed monster. Your first head’s supposed to quietly conform to hidebound notions of tweed-suited authenticity and NPR-mellow good taste. Your second head’s supposed to go all manic and aggressively hustle after every sale like Billy Mays hawking OxyClean in a late-night commercial.

Turns out there are actually two separate groups trying to jump-start new local news Web sites to unofficially replace the P-I, or to compete with any surviving remnant of the P-I site.

Besides the “Packers model” group mentioned here on Wednesday, there’s also a team of P-I staffers planning what Sandeep at Publicola calls a “non-profit news entity, primarily focused on investigative journalism covering the Western states, which would be funded by foundations and other major donors.” Its inspiration is ProPublica, a foundation-funded “non-profit newsroom” specializing in big national stories “with moral force.”

This site would spend money and, more importantly, time on the kind of original research that commentary-based news sites simply aren’t set up to perform. It could also offer serious political, economic, and civic-planning news for a readership of hardcore wonks, activists, and organizers.

This product and market differentiation is good.

We don’t need two or three new organizations doing exactly what the P-I‘s done but on skeletal budgets. But two or three new organizations, each taking complementary but different approaches to telling us what’s going on—now that’s microbrew news.

Finally, someone’s announced a concrete (albeit still liquid concrete) plan to start a new, pro local-news site in town, no matter what Hearst finally chooses to do with the Post-Intelligencer brand.

A group of P-I vets, including reporter Kerry Murakami, are planning a local news site to be partly funded by voluntary reader “memberships.” They’re calling their scheme “the Packers Model,” after the Green Bay Packers’ fan-ownership structure. (The site’s organization may or may not end up emulating the Packers’ system of many small shareholders. It could, instead, be set up as a cooperative or a nonprofit.)

They’re going ahead with this plan without waiting to hear Hearst’s plan. This is good. Hearst is acting exactly within its reputation as one of the nation’s most secretive corporations. It could close the print P-I any day now (or any month now), and could relaunch or scrap the paper’s web site concurrently.

The Stranger‘s Slog team has its collective doubts about the plan, and about the “Packers model.” Why would thousands of individual citizens plunk down $25 a month, or even $25 a year, for a free-access Web site bent on carrying on the P-I legacy without its name?

I’ll tell you why. It’s because, while this new site probably won’t get the P-I‘s name, ad accounts, or archives, it would have some of the paper’s best known staffers. (They don’t know which ones yet; that all depends on whom they can recruit, and whom, if anyone, Hearst keeps around.)

It would be responsible, and responsive, to its stakeholders.

It would cover local/regional politics for readers who really give a darn about local/regional politics. Less heat; more light. More wonky details of the legislative process. More explanations about why we should become interested in, say, Port of Seattle mismanagement or a suburban mayoral race.

This is what I meant last week, when I compared the difference between the new news and the old news to that between microbreweries and the megaproducers of swill lagers.

Like microbrewers, new-news organizations will be smaller but more plentiful. They’ll craft their product with more care. They’ll appeal to a wider range of specific preferences/interests.

And, yeah, most of their product will have a stronger kick.

This “Packers model” team and a rump P-I site could both exist. Or one or the other, or neither.

My wish is for as many “voices” as the Web can carry.

Which, while finite, is a very large number indeed.

The venerable art-house distributor’s parent company defaulted on a loan. New Yorker Films’ library, put up as collateral on the loan, will be auctioned off. Somebody with connections needs to step in and buy all 400-some titles. This priceless repository of world cinema should be kept and nurtured.

…a national girlie mag created a fictional pictorial essay about a Seattle coffee shop, the “Big Cups Coffee House,” with nude baristas. Now, someone in Maine has really opened one. The owner claims to have had 150 applicants for the 10 available jobs.