p-i carriers, 1942; mohai/seattlehistory.org

Three years ago Saturday, the print Seattle Post-Intelligencer published its last issue.

There’s still a P-I sized hole in the regional info-scape.

SeattlePI.com doesn’t even partly fill it.

What’s worse, that site is shrinking when it should be growing.

From 20 journalists and “producers” at its launch as a stand-alone operation, it’s now down to 12.

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The way I figure it, a local mainstream news operation here would need about 40 editorial full-timers to come close to comprehensively covering the community and to producing a thorough, compelling daily product:

• 12 general news reporters;
• 2 opinion columnists/guest-column editors;
• 4 business reporters;
• 7 arts and entertainment reporters;
• 7 sports reporters;
• 3 photographers;
• 4 shift editors (“producers” in web-speak); and
• 1 editor in chief (“executive producer”).

This also happens to be close to the reporting staff numbers of today’s Tacoma News Tribune.

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I can say it would be nice to have a bigger, fuller PI.com site.

But can I reasonably ask Hearst New Media to front that kind of money, considering the site’s probably not profitable at its current budget (and considering the money Hearst’s probably losing at its still-extant newspaper and magazine properties)?

I believe I can.

Even though I believe web ads will never come close to supporting a local site of the size I’m talking about (or, really, much professional journalism period).

That’s because online content won’t always be tied to the ugly, inefficient, insufficient genre known as the commercial website.

I’m talking about tablet apps, Kindle/Nook editions, HTML 5-based web apps.

Products that bring back the concept of the “newspaper” as a whole unified thing, not just individual text and directory pages.

Products whose ad space can be sold on the basis of their entire readership, not just individual page views.

Products that could even command a subscription price.

A renewed P-I would be the perfect vehicle to test and refine this concept.

And Seattle is the perfect place to do it.

And if Hearst doesn’t want to, let’s get together some of our own town’s best n’ brightest to do it instead.

Let’s make a news org that wouldn’t just be a “corrective” to the Seattle Times‘ square suburban worldview, but would present a fully expressed alternative worldview.

A site that lives and breathes Seattle.

That tells the city’s stories to itself.

That shows how this could be done in other towns and cities.

Harper’s Magazine publisher/subsidizer John R. MacArthur has always kept his mag’s online version behind a paywall.

In a recent speech at Columbia University, transcribed at the Providence Journal’s site, MacArthur insists that Harper’s is making more money this way than it would if all the content were free and management scratched n’ scrambled to somehow sell enough web ads.

But he doesn’t stop there.

In the speech, he accuses “Internet con men” (i.e., the dot-com and Web 2.0 propagandists and evangelists) of “ravaging” publishing.

He denounces “Internet huckster/philosophers” as “first cousins—in both their ideology and their sales tactics—to the present-day promoters of “free trade.” Just as unfettered imports destroy working-class communities through low-wage outsourcing, MacArthur avows, so has the Internet driven writers, artists, and editors “into penury by Internet wages—in most cases, no wages.”

With web ads incapable of supporting living wages for content makers, MacArthur insists online readers will have to learn to pay “if they want to see anything more complex than a blog, a classified ad or a sex act.”

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Immediately, defenders of online business-as-usual stepped up to denounce MacArthur’s remarks.

Some, like Mike Masnick at TechDirt, settled for simplistic name-calling. MacArthur, Masnick insists, represents the “Platonic ideal specimen of the ‘I’m an old fogey elitist Internet Luddite.'” Masnick’s “rebuttal” piece goes on to call MacArthur at least 20 more varieties of out-of-it, while not bothering to actually rebut any of his points.

(OK, Mesnick does counter MacArthur’s claim that freelancers are being forced into poverty by online freebie sites, by citing a single example of one writer who says he’s offered more work than he can take.)

A more lucid response comes from Alexis Madrigal at Harper’s age-old arch rival The Atlantic (which not only has a free website but posts a lot of web-only material). Madrigal insists his mag’s “doing just fine thank you,” with equal amounts of print and web ad revenue.

Madrigal and Mensick both assert infinite, if intangible, benefits to having one’s writing part of the “open web” where it can be linked to, commented upon, and become part of the big meta-conversation.

But does that have to come at the expense of adequate research, thorough editing, and living wages for writers/editors?

And does everything really have to be on the open web?

If MacArthur wants to keep his paywall up, and if he believes his little nonprofit highbrow mag can support itself better that way, let him.

The old fogey might actually be on to something.

I’ve talked briefly recently about the “future of news.”

I’ll talk about it some more.

But I should explain what I mean by that phrase.

I mean something different from what the cyber-hucksters mean by it.

By “news,” I specifically mean:

• Original reporting and storytelling, by people who are paid a living wage for their knowledge, their writing acumen, and their research skills.

Therefore, by “the future of news,” I’m talking about ways to fund professional reporting, particularly on a local/regional level.

Therefore, I am not talking about:

• Aggregation sites and apps.
• The latest flavor of social-media gimmickry.
• Comment threads and chat boards.
• For-profit websites built around unpaid or sub-minimum-wage contributions (reader blogs, “Examiners,” content farms).
• Search-engine gaming or other gimmicks to ginny up page views (presuming online ad revenue will follow).

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Ex-Seattleite (and Rocket music mag cofounder) Robert McChesney has been a longtime scholar and observer of the media biz.

McChesney’s and John Nichols’ 2010 book The Death and Life of American Journalism attempts to figure out what to do.

McChesney and Nichols, like many other commentators, note in great detail how the old-media industries of newspapers and local broadcasters are withering and, in some cases, dying off.

But they also note that the “new media” business model, putting everything up online for free and hoping web ads will pay the bills, is also not working.

And they conclude, as I have, that web ads are never going to work. No matter how frenetically you play the page-view game. No matter how thinly you dilute a site’s professional content with amateur and aggregated freebies.

At least they won’t work at supporting professional local reporting, which is what McChesney, Nichols, and I care about.

So what do they suggest?

Federal subsidies!

In McChesney and Nichols’ ideal future, newspapers and news sites would turn themselves into nonprofit or “low profit” organizations. Then they’d apply for a share of maybe $30 billion in “public media” grants, to be awarded on the basis of need and public service.

Yeah. From a U.S. government that can’t even supply more than a trickle of what public broadcasting needs, and gets bashed by right wing sleaze-mongers for even that.

McChesney and Nichols’ solution reminds me of certain early ’70s radical and feminist manifestos, in which every prescription for a better society began with the phrase “The federal government should…”.

Not practical then. Not practical now.

The search continues.

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Elsewhere, Arianna Huffington has come out with a diatribe against one of the cyber hypesters’ newest obsessions du jour: the insistence that every single news article must be contrived to “go viral” on Twitter n’ Facebook, and that news orgs must think more about “social media integration” and less on, you know, actual news. Of course, she then admits her own outfit’s just as taken in by the madness as the rest of ’em.