Circuit City, the (actually mostly suburban) big-box seller of electronic goodies, is shutting down. It wasn’t too many years ago that they were gonna overturn the DVD biz with their own limited-play, disposable discs. Now, they’re disposable (and, alas, so is their 30,000-member nationwide workforce).

First, I’d like to again acknowledge all the other local folks who’ve also proclaimed their admiration for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and its seattlepi.com Web site, and who want to see at least the latter continue.

Today’s additions to this list include Meghan Peters, Dylan Wilbanks, and my ol’ pal Grant Alden.

Peters hopes Hearst will continue seattlepi.com as a laboratory in transitioning local pro journalism to the Internet era.

Wilbanks offers his own formula for an online-only news organization. In his vision it might only employ 20 or so people to do what absolutely cannot be duplicated by bloggers.

Alden, fresh from having to euthenize the print version of music magazine No Depression, is somewhat more downbeat about the Web’s ability to support quality original content:

“Right now the web is a parasite, killing its host.… All this citizen journalist stuff is lovely, except that it assumes that all writing is functionally the same, or that the web is a meritocracy, or that people will keep contributing for free because it’s fun and they have nothing else to do. Which, in this economy, may be true, but I wouldn’t want to build a long-term business model around that notion.…”

I happen to believe there’s life in pro content.

Even in print.

Even in daily newsprint.

Even as an urban “second paper.”

And so, as I’ve promised all week, here’s how I’d revamp the printed P-I:

• “Ich bin ein Berliner.” The P-I and Seattle Times have narrowed their page size in recent years, and (in a move announced prior to the P-I‘s announcement of potential sale or closure) will narrow their page size again by another inch next month.Take that narrower width, then crop four or five inches from the page height, and you’ve got the “Berliner” format. It’s popular in France (Le Monde), Britain (The Guardian), and elsewhere in the world. It has more impact and design versatility than a tabloid, but is still compact and easy to hold and carry. It can be produced in either an unfolded, one-section version or a folded, multi-section version.
• Stop trying to be everything to everyone. Let the Web site contain the total product of the staff. Turn the printed paper into something intensely focused on local/regional politics, policies, and people.
• Be bright and bold. The P-I, with its Hearst-populist roots, already does a better job of this than the Times. Keep pushing in this direction with powerful photos and compelling stories. Make a newspaper something people want to read again.
• The print product should promote the online product, not the other way around. Let the site have the full coverage. Let a leaner paper version be the tease that recruits more online readers.
• Slash expensive home delivery, except perhaps on Thursday and/or Friday.
• Revise, or dump, the Joint Operating Agreement. The Times could continue to print and deliver the P-I, but as a contractor. Bring ad sales back in-house (you can’t possibly do a worse job of selling ads than the Times is doing these days).
• Turn Saturday into a “Weekend Edition,” with think-piece essays and entertainment features that would otherwise go into a Sunday paper.
• Explore a Sunday edition that would be the same size as a weekday paper. Perhaps it could run only during college-football season, the only time of year when there’s something you know will happen on a Saturday afternoon that people will want to read about the next morning.
• Be a real alternative to the Times. Not in the formula of an “alt weekly,” but as a dynamic, well-written, well-edited product with its own mission and its own audience. If the Times continues to be a paper by and for suburbanites, the P-I can be the paper for those who prefer city life, and for those in the suburbs and exurbs who look to the city for cultural and civic leadership.

With these and other innovations, the print P-I‘s financial losses can be pared down to a level that could be supported by a consortium of local angel investors. With anything resembling an economic recovery, such a printed paper might even pay its way for a while, until new digital-delivery mechanisms make it fully obsolete.

So far, I’ve delineated the bigger reasons why Hearst wants to stop printing the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. I’ve also mentioned the efforts by several concerned citizens to make a case for saving the P-I at least in online form, asserting not just why but how to preserve the state’s oldest news-gathering organization.

Today and tomorrow, I join these hypothesizers, such as Brian Reich, Todd Bishop, and the paper’s managing editor David McCumber, in mapping out how I’d restructure the P-I for short-term survival and long-term growth.

First, the Web side. After all, digital delivery’s where all ephemeral media’s eventually going, though it won’t necessarily always be in what we now know of as Web pages.

But despite their typographic and design limitations, Web pages are the dominant medium for online written matter, at least this year.

And, at least for now, Web pages with pro content on them are supported by on-screen ads. Despite current setbacks, that’s still a market space with a lotof remaining growth potential. As my fellow blogger David Goldstein has noted, “People will always need to sell things. They’ll always need to get their messages out.”

I was involved with Goldstein and several others in 2007-8, in an ultimately aborted attempt to start a local progressive news site. It failed to launch for various reasons, chief among them the fact that none of us were businesspeople. Now, Goldstein’s about to incorporate some of the design and operational schticks we’d discussed into his Horse’s Ass blog.

Goldy now believes our “online publication” metaphor was wrong from the get go, that what the progressive Web needs is a way to help financially support bloggers and other individual content creators. As an individual content creator myself, I appreciate that.

But I also appreciate that some sounds we need to hear can’t be generated by a soloist but by a band or even an orchestra. With a conductor.

Professional editing is part of the edge a pro-news operation has over a one-person operation such as mine. So is juxtaposition. So is organization. So is “team reporting.” And so is “branding,” that elusive quality that gives, say, a piece on Salon or Slate more cachet than a piece on Pajamas Media.

In short, the P-I‘s whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Its columnists’ clout is enhanced by the paper’s regular reporting. Both beat reporters and pundits are enhanced by full-time salaries that allow in-the-field research.

That’s what seattlepi.com does, and what it can continue to do once unshackled from the JOA (and, possibly, from Hearst).

Seattlepi.com has already made great steps in adding value to its site, beyond merely repeating the print paper’s content. This should continue. Use the Web’s unique attractions (comment threads, reader-contributed texts and pix, polls and surveys, slideshows, dynamic links, HuffPost-style “quick reads,” constant updating, reader “memberships” that supply valuable demographic data to advertisers, etc. etc.)

The site’s design, these days, retains a 1999-era notion of a newspaper’s Web offshoot. A home page crammed with headlines and links. Story pages of plain text snaking around huge multiple ad blocks. This can be altered, even within the Web’s current design disciplines, to be more aesthetically luring to readers and more effective to advertisers.

Another suggestion: Make the section differentiation greater. The news/opinion/business, sports, arts, and lifestyle departments could be treated as separate sites (or “microsites”), with mostly autonomous staffs, separate budgets, and separate promotional strategies.

So, I fully believe the P-I has a viable future online.

But not only, not just yet. There’s still value in producing a tangible, physical product. My idea for a future printed P-I Thursday.

(‘Til then, here’s another member of our would-have-been media empire, Paul Andrews, who agrees with Goldstein that the basic concept of newspaper-style institutional journalism doesn’t really translate to the Internet age.)

Less than two years ago, the Post-Intelligencer’s Joint Operating Agreement (JOA) with the Seattle Times was last renegotiated. At the time, everyone said (and most everyone thought) the P-I was saved for at least another decade.

What happened between then and now? Only the perfect storm of the media biz.

Retail advertisers, who’d once been the papers’ biggest supporters, moved to direct mail (especially supermarket chains), to the Web, and to cable channels—at least those retailers who were still in business (unlike many indie merchants and strip-mall chains) and still spending money to advertise (unlike car dealers).

And then there’s Craigslist.

The nationwide free-classifieds site essentially killed off newspapers’ other biggest means of support. The Times and P-I each once had 10 pages of want ads each Monday-Thursday. Now they’re lucky to have two.

Online readership of news sites has exploded, especially during this past election season; but online ad revenues have risen far more slowly.

Publishers tried to cut costs in big and small ways. As an example, the Seattle Times (which runs all the P-I‘s non-editorial functions under the JOA) cut back on distribution to outlying counties. This hurt the P-I more, because it traditionally had a more regional reach than the Times.

So now we’ve got two “failing newspapers,” with no assurance that the putative “survivor” (the Times) can turn its fiscal fortunes around with true monopoly status. The Times will have the same costs that both JOA papers had heretofore shared. The only savings will come from having only one product to print and distribute each morning instead of two. And the end of the JOA’s profit-sharing arrangement doesn’t matter if there are no profits to cease sharing.

Leaving this aspect of the discussion for now, let’s get back to our main topic, saving the P-I.

Right now, Hearst execs say they’ll choose one of three options, sometime in March:

1. Shutter the operation altogether;2. Keep it going as a (much more thinly-staffed) online entity; or

3. Sell it to a willing taker, if there is one.

Hearst is a very private, family-run enterprise. There’s no telling how they’ll act. They could turn down a healthy buyout offer and shut the place down if they simply want to.

So instead of trying to predict what they will do, let’s parse out what they might do.

Option 1 would be a relatively simple, quick move. Pay unionized staffers their severance packages. Invoke the death clause in the JOA. Settle any final monies owed by or to the Times. Donate the globe to MOHAI (which already has the pre-1970 P-I photo library).

It’s something a pubilcly held corporation might do to instantly revive its stock price.

Hearst isn’t publicly held.

And that specific part in the JOA’s original death clause you might recall, the part that would have paid Hearst a share of any Times profits even if the P-I dies? That was removed in the 2007 revision. A dead P-I isn’t worth more than a living one.

Option 2 would keep something of the P-I legacy and presence alive. Depending on how the lawyers work things out, it might be a JOA-ender, putting Hearst in full control of seattlepi.com’s destiny. (They’d have to hire their own ad sellers under this sub-scenario, but it’d be hard to sell fewer ads than the Times is doing these days on behalf of both papers.)

Option 3 would require a deep-pocketed ownership group (let’s not expect a single investor to try it) willing to shoulder the losses and perhaps wield the layoff axe while the reinventing goes on.

But such an ownership group could potentially keep a paper P-I going. And it might be willing to keep more P-I people on staff than a Hearst-owned online-only venture might. (I know, all these unknowns and hypotheticals…)

Coming Wednesday: What I, specifically, would do if I bought the P-I or worked for someone who did. (I know, I’m dragging this on, but it’ll all be worth it I promise.)

Last Friday came the horrible news that Hearst doesn’t want to run a printed daily paper in Seattle anymore, but would consider selling the Post-Intelligencer or turning it Web-only. Since then, several people besides myself have spoken out in favor of keeping the P-I newsroom going. Some have even offered more-or-less-vague ideas for making this possible.

Here are a few:

• First, the paper’s own Art Thiel explains why the P-I, as an ongoing info-resource, should stick around:”…The P-I always has been poor in staff numbers and rich in cantankerousness, light on editors and heavy on writers, mean when needed (and unneeded) and benevolent when least expected. Somehow this added up to a newspaper as exhilarating as it was exasperating.…

  “If ever there were a place where private wealth, invention, technology, emergency, opportunity and desire are in abundance for a new idea, it is here, now.

  “Even in a profound recession, some things cannot be surrendered..”

  In the Web comments to Thiel’s piece, “llachglin” nails the real reason newspapers around the country are in panic mode. It’s the advertising. It’s dropped, faster and fuller than most anyone expected.

• As we’ve mentioned briefly before, Brian Reich at WeMedia offers his own “Plan for the Seattle P-I“ based, so far, on re-organizational generalities: “A renewed focus on issues that impact the local community;” “explaining why, how, and what impact an event will have;” “look at all the ways to make money in the news space—my list includes selling content and advertising, providing research and insights, aggregating and syndicating everything;” “an increased role for local media in the community.”These prescriptions largely match those on a list by Edward Roussel, who runs the Web site of London’s Daily Telegraph: “Narrow the focus,” “plug into a network,” “engage with your readers,” “nimble, low-cost structure, “invest in the Web,” “shake up leadership,” and so on.
• At TechFlash.com (owned by the Puget Sound Business Journal’s parent), ex-P-I scribe Todd Bishop offers “Ten steps to save the Seattle P-I, and maybe the rest of the industry.” Bishop envisions a lean-n’-mean, locally-owned, online-only operation, with “a top technologist” and “a top Internet executive” on the payroll, but with much of the news-gathering outsourced to freelance “vetted bloggers,” whatever those are.

  On the same site, John Cook nominates “twelve techies who could help nurture and save Seattlepi.com.” Yes, the name of Paul Allen is predictably dropped. So is David Brewster, who’s already learned one way not to make money from online local news.

• Peter Kafka, writing on the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital site, agrees with some local pessimists that an online-only local “paper” couldn’t possibly turn a profit. Kafka asserts that seattlepi.com’s 2.6 million monthly unique visitors might be enough fo sustain a low-staffed site with a national niche audience (like, say, All Things Digital), but not a local general-interest site.However, Jeff Jarvis at guardian.co.uk offers grist for a potential counter-argument to Kafka. As Jarvis notes, the Los Angeles Times now claims it’s making enough money from online ads to support the paper’s entire editorial payroll (albeit one that’s almost half what it was a few years back):

  “I see hope: the possibility that online revenue could support digital journalism for a city. The enterprise will be smaller, but it could well be more profitable than its print forebears today and—here’s the real news—it would grow from there. Imagine that: news as a growth industry again.”

  At Brewster’s Crosscut.com, Bill Richards suggests profitable online local news is closer than a lot of people think, and notes that Hearst is already investing in Kindle-like digital reader products. Richards posits that Hearst might keep an all-online P-I and use it as a grand experiment in paperless news.

• And back at the P-I itself, editor David McCumber offers up his own take on the crisis:”It’s a fine mess we find ourselves in—but I’m not giving up yet. This newspaper is for sale. No, it may not be the most attractive investment around (What is the most attractive investment around? Your 401k? Your house? Yeah, right) but that doesn’t mean we won’t find someone who cares about Seattle and about journalism, and sees promise where others see only loss.

  “Might we go online only? Yes, that’s a distinct possibility too, although that operation would inevitably be much, much smaller than our current newsroom, which is to say it will inevitably have to feature other content besides the kind of journalism that takes significant people resources to execute correctly.

  “Right now, I’m determinedly positive, but I’m not completely unrealistic.”

All this quoting other people, and I still haven’t given my own P-I Rx. Tuesday, I promise.

…to formulate my scheme for saving the P-I (any good number-crunchers out there wanna help?), here’s Brian Reich with his own plan.

Yep, it’s true. Hearst doesn’t want to run the Post-Intelligencer anymore, at least not as a printed daily paper.

If no buyer’s found in the next month or two, and none’s likely to show up, Seattle will become a one-newspaper town.

This is the moment many of us have tried to prevent for the past quarter century or more.

And I don’t know what to say or do about it.

The whole premise of the Committee for a Two-Newspaper Town is predicated on the presumption that big city daily papers are, at least potentially, profitable, at least if they’re protected from predatory monopolistic behavior. This notion has become increasingly doubtful, particularly over the past year.

I still don’t want a pure Seattle Times monopoly. That paper’s made many dumb right-wing moves over the years, in both its editorial pages and its “news” coverage. The P-I is better written, better designed, and much more attuned to this city’s working-class past and progressive present.

But what can be done now to save this voice?

• 
  Find a buyer for the P-I as is? The big media combines are trying to get out of some of the newspapers they do own. The industry’s business model is broken, maybe permanently. Sure, some local buyer(s) could step in; maybe even the same guys who didn’t rescue the Sonics. But in pro sports, you lose money with the prospect of making it back when you resell the team. In today’s newspaper biz that’s quite unlikely.
• 
  Buy the P-I and shrink it, to something whose losses would be small enough for rich owners (or a nonprofit entity) to sustain? A newsstand-only paper (no home delivery)? A compact tabloid format? A free weekly? There’s no limit to how small a paper can be shrunk. Just don’t expect a point of “core profitability.”
• 
  Go online-only? Again, nobody’s yet figured out how to make professionally-created online news pay its keep. But a lot of people are trying to figure that out. I worked last year with one such group.

Earlier this week, I complained about the Seattle Post-Intelligencer dropping the Zippy comic strip. Now, according to unconfirmed rumor, there might not much longer be a P-I to carry or not carry the strip.

KING-TV claimed Thursday night that the Hearst Corp. will put the Post-Intelligencer up for sale, as a formality under the Joint Operating Agreement with the Times toward shutting down the P-I within months. P-I and Times bosses all claimed they haven’t heard yet of any such move. However, it would seem a plausible possibility. The owners of Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, also the junior partner in a JOA, have made just such a move. And both the Times and P-I severely cut their page counts following pathetic holiday-season ad sales.

We, and the papers’ staffs, will learn the degree of truth of this telecast rumor sometime Friday. (There likely won’t be an official announcement in the papers themselves until at least Saturday.)

Needless to say, I’ve not wanted this to happen. I’ve supported the efforts of the Committee for a Two-Newspaper Town, which put public pressure on the Times to keep the JOA alive. I’ve long preferred the P-I, which long ago shed its last vestiges of William Randolph Hearst Jr.’s right-wing squareness to become the region’s dominant center-left editorial voice.

Yet few people, especially within the newspaper biz, quite expected industry-wide ad revenues to plummet so far so fast. Recent Times and P-I issues have had fewer than four pages of display ads and fewer than two pages of classifieds.

And you can’t expect the papers’ owners to just eat these declines. The Times’ majority owners, the Blethens, have tried to sell some of their other properties with no takers. The Times’ minority owners, the McClatchy chain, allegedly wants to sell its most prestigious possession, the Miami Herald, also with no apparent takers.

And the P-I owning, family-held Hearst Corp. is notoriously private in its business dealings; but it’s clear that its major income-earning properties (Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Esquire) also carry far fewer ad pages these days.

I’ll talk more about this when I know more, which will be after anyone else in the business here knows more.

…the missing pieces of the econo-disaster puzzle.

We’ve already told you, as if you didn’t already know, that the “macro” economy, and the lifestyles of the rich and famous, grew substantially in recent decades whilst the well-being of most of the rest of us stagnated or declined.

But Tasini figures that the wage collapse directly caused today’s macro-economic crisis:

“People had no money coming in in their paychecks so they were forced to pay for their lives through credit–either plastic or drawing down equity from their homes…”We will never fix the economic crisis, whether through short-term economic stimulus and certainly not through tax cuts, until paychecks are re-inflated. Dramatically.”

Of course, doing that will likely require even more political guts and popular demand than Obama’s got now.

…and the whole greed/corruption/warmongerin’ Bush era dept.: Saturday’s Sunday-preview Seattle Times will have its editors’ choices for the top local news stories of the year. Here’s mine:

1. Washington Mutual goes pffft.

2. The Sonics go blort.

3. Safeco goes doink.

4. General economic and real-estate kerplunk-ness.

5. Obamamania a huge hit locally; Democrats win just about everything except the 8th Congressional District.

6. December’s Snowtopia brings beauty, wonder, photogenic bus wipeouts, and the sudden discovery that not everyone loves the Nickels administration.

7. Seattle music rules again (Fleet Foxes, Grand Archives, Saturday Knights, the Dutchess and the Duke, Team Gina, Mono in VCF).

8. The incredible shrinking newspapers.

9. We learn just how corrupt the Port of Seattle’s been.

10. Northwest Afternoon goes twok.

Some runner-up stories, in no particular order: Whooped-up nonsense over an atheist billboard at the state capitol; all major local sports teams have pathetic seasons at once; the local news media discover gang violence when it strikes in white neighborhoods; Twilight mania; Amazon Kindle a hit; Alaskan Way Viaduct and SR 520 replacement choices drag on; another round of school-closure threats.

We’ll miss ’em: Edward “Tuba Man” McMichael; politicians Ruby Chow, Jeanette Williams, and Ellen Craswell; sculptor/video artist Doris Chase; sports promoter Dick Vertlieb; Ellensburg installation artist Richard Elliott; DJ/jazz promoter Norm Bobrow; Blue Moon Tavern co-owner Bob Morrison.

And Su Job. The fiber artist, arts promoter-advocate, and 619 Western studio landlady passed peacefully at 7 p.m. Christmas night.

KB Toys goes under, right in the heart of the holiday season.

…some clever entrepreneur finally caught the idea of putting out officially licensed Popeye brand bagged spinach. It took another two decades for somebody else (specifically, Safeway (which, despite the oft-spread urban legend, IS NOT and NEVER WAS “owned by the Mormons”)) to come up with officially licensed Bugs Bunny carrots!

(Thanx and a hat tip to Matthew Hunter of Golden Age Cartoons.)

LET ME BE the first to bestow the most freakin’-obvious nickname onto the Mariners’ new manager: The Intentional Wakamatsu. Thank you, really.

SOME 3,000 WAMU HEADQUARTERS STAFFERS could lose their jobs in the next few months. Three thousand bankers hitting the pavement at once won’t be a good thing for all the local consumer industries (from real estate on down to doggie daycare) that have staked their futures on catering to the upper professional caste.

And where are we gonna place all these idled IT techs, comptrollers, paper pushers, junior flunkies, second-tier poobahs, and adjustable-rate adjusters? Michael Moore, on Larry King Live, suggested any automaker bailout be predicated on making the automakers start making what we need to have made (public transit infrastructure, post-petroleum vehicles). But what kind of make-work project can we create for bankers? Can we (and by “we,” I really mean Gates and Allen) launch a massive startup employing hundreds upon hundreds of bureaucrats to create an eco-friendly actuarial table? Or will we see panhandlers outside the WaMu Center tower holding professionally designed signs reading WILL WOO-HOO FOR FOOD?

…the end of The Christian Science Monitor as a daily newsprint product. The website, and a print weekly, will continue.

The Monitor was seldom, if ever, a moneymaker. It was subsidized by the CS church, which has faced dying-off memberships and financial belt-tightening in recent decades.

Its circulation peaked in the 1970s, before the NY Times was widely available outside the Northeast. To tens of thousands of readers over the years, it was a small but assured voice of reason and solemnity.

As an anomaly of the U.S. newspaper biz, the Monitor‘s very existence attested that serious “boutique” journalism was feasible in this country, so long as it didn’t have to turn a profit. These days, some industry analysts have offered up the idea that local daily papers might turn to nonprofit models as a means to preserving themselves.

In recent years, the printed Monitor hasn’t been widely available at newsstands or vending machines, only at CS Reading Rooms. It was still available by subscription; but if dead-tree journalism was becoming passé in the Internet age, a dead-tree journalism product distributed five days a week via the Postal Service was even more behind the times. Which simply added to its image as a charming oddity.

…of Washington Mutual Bank’s sale to JPMorgan Chase, another local end-of-an-era moment has received less attention. It’s the closure of the Rite Aid Pharmacy at Fourth and Pike in downtown Seattle, on the ground floor of the Joshua Green Building.

The store first opened in 1947 as the original location of Pay ‘n Save Drugs, founded by local businessman/philanthropist Monte Bean. Pay ‘n Save eventually grew to some 150 stores in five states; while the Bean family’s “Family of Stores” grew to encompass Ernst Hardware, Lamonts Apparel, Schuck’s Auto Supply and more.

Pay ‘n Save Corp. was taken over by New York investors in 1984. Nine years and two buyouts later, the remaining Pay ‘n Save locations became Payless Drug branches. Five years after that, Rite Aid acquired them.

Through all these changes, and while downtown’s fortunes ebbed and flowed, the Fourth and Pike store survived and thrived.

This summer, the Green Building’s owners announced a massive remodeling. The changes included the displacement of its other street-level tenant, Carroll’s Jewelers.

Rite Aid management still hoped to get a lease renewal. The store received its requisite stock of Halloween candy and costumes.

But the building’s owners decided in mid-September to divide the space into several smaller storefronts. Rite Aid’s pharmacy counter immediately closed Sept. 16; prescriptions were transferred to its Belltown store. The store’s other merchandise is being liquidated through October or until it’s all gone.