editorandpublisher.com

Former Seattle Times staffer Glenn Nelson has thoughts of his own about the paper’s pending online paywall (or, as he calls it, its “digital tin cup”).

Nelson mentions how, following his Times years, he served in several “subscription-model Internet startups.”

At those places, Nelson kept fretting that the Times would suddenly wake up and smell the digital coffee, then trot out online products based on the vast manpower the paper had (at the time) in sports, entertainment, food, and business coverage, and in photojournalism. (Nelson doesn’t think a better Times local-news site would have mattered, because “general news already was being rendered a commodity on the Internet.”)

These sites, had they been created, would have blown away any indie-startup competition.

But they never showed up.

•

Meanwhile, news-biz pundit Alan D. Mutter dissects why many people under the age of 45 don’t like print newspapers. It’s because they’re just too inconvenient to have around.

Mutter quotes venture-capital exec Mary Meeker as claiming…

…that young people don’t want to own CDs, haul around books, buy cars, carry cash, do their own chores, or be committed to a full-time job. Instead, they use their smartphones to buy, borrow, or steal media; rent shared cars at home and book shared rooms when they travel; hire people to buy groceries or cut the grass; and use apps from Starbucks and Target to pay for lattes and redeem coupons. Many of the digital natives even prefer short-term gigs that allow them to arrange their work around their life, rather than arrange their life around their work.

Actually, many younger (and older) adults would like full time jobs if there were any around to be gotten. But that’s beside the point here.

More important is Mutter’s observation that…

…The warmed-over digital fare offered by the typical newspaper falls well short of the expectations of two whole generations of consumers who are not only empowered by technology but also damn well sure of how to get what they want.

So it has come to this. The Seattle Times, unable (just as most all metro dailies are unable) to survive on shrinking print-ad volume and meager online-ad revenue, is resorting to the “paywall.”

Starting some time in mid-March, full access to the Times website will be restricted to paid subscribers.

Print subscribers will get full online access. Online-only subscriptions will be available at $3.99 per week (following an initial discount). That’s higher than the Sunday-only print subscription price, at least within King County. This is undoubtedly devised to prop up the paper’s print numbers, particularly on ad-flyer-heavy Sunday.

In announcing the paywall on Sunday, Times executive editor David Boardman wrote that the money’s needed “to support quality journalism.” The essay’s comment thread, natch, is full of wags snarking that “quality journalism” is worth paying for but the Seattle Times isn’t.

•

Even more than some metro dailies, the Seattle Times has painted itself into this corner, over many years.

It’s held to a bland, institutional ethic and aesthetic; even as its average reader became older, squarer, and whiter than the metro area’s overall demographic.

Its editorials hewed as close to a GOP party line as the Blethen family dared, in a solid-Blue city.

Faced with ever-declining revenues, it chose not to “reinvent” itself. Instead it became an ever-smaller version of its same-old same-old.

One issue this past month hit a new low of 22 pages (the bare minimum under its current design).

If there’s anything I’ve learned in my many years of studying the media, it’s that if you want to be “supported,” you’ve got to make people actively want to support you.

A thin assortment of lifeless stories about the ritual dances of politicians and corporate press releases ain’t gonna accomplish that.

(Meanwhile, one national commentator claims paywalls aren’t really working so well for non-national, non-business-centric papers.)

photo by kyle johnson, from the set 'portraits of seattle' on flickr

It’s been more than a week since Jen Graves’ Stranger story, “Charles Krafft Is a White Nationalist Who Believes the Holocaust Is a Deliberately Exaggerated Myth.”

The paper’s print issue is now off of the stands.

The controversy continues.

Like many participants in and observers of the Seattle visual-art scene, I’ve long known about Krafft’s open admiration for neo-Nazis and Holocaust revisionist pseudo-scholars. He didn’t keep his views secret. They just hadn’t been written about in the local arts media, prior to Graves’ article.

While Krafft was out of the country when the article was written, Graves was careful not to allege anything about Krafft’s beliefs that he hadn’t specifically mentioned in national blogs, podcasts, talk-radio shows, newsletters, and his own Facebook posts.

Still, the counter-allegations of “hatchet job” etc. against Graves abound.

In the online comment thread for the original article.

In a spirited defense of Krafft (“despite his occasional idiocy”) by his friend (and my sometime book publisher) Adam Parfrey.

And in an essay by white-nationalist book publisher Greg Johnson, “The Persecution of Charles Krafft.”

Some of the counter-attacks are predictable.

There are people who sincerely defend white nationalism and anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.

Then there are people who assert that Graves, the Stranger, and the Seattle cultural establishment in general are a bunch of PC do-gooders who can’t handle any real dissent from their party line.

Ah, the last rhetorical refuge of the bigot and the bully; to turn around and whine that they’re really the victims.

By the way, that last remark of mine is directed toward Johnson and some of the other commenters—not against Krafft himself. Krafft has always been open and forthright about his extreme beliefs, and about his fondness for guys who express even further-extreme beliefs than he does. He hasn’t, as far as I know, ever played the faux “victim” card.

•

So how do I feel about Krafft, you might (or might not) be asking?

I believe he’s a sincere admirer of various military and paramilitary aesthetics, including those of the Nazi and Warsaw Pact eras.

I believe he’s got a big flaming ego, that enjoys tripping on the “Oh, aren’t I being a naughty, politically-incorrect cad?” vibe.

And I believe “irony,” at least the kind of irony viewers have long perceived was in Krafft’s ceramic rifles and hand grenades and Nazi-kitsch revival pieces, is a tiresome premise.

Every work of “satire” or “parody” contains, in its aesthetic, the real worldview of its creator.

Andy Warhol, for instance, really was a capitalist. Quentin Tarantino really is an exploitation filmmaker.

And Charles Krafft really does get off on power fantasies.

Even really, really sick ones.

• Seattle artist Ellen Ziegler’s mom was a ballet dancer—and a onetime girlfriend of the great Mexican comic actor Cantinflas. Ziegler’s turning this story into a very-limited-edition art book.
• In other news about local women and art and books and images of hotness, Charlotte Austin and Ciolo Thompson have created The Better Bombshell. In it, a variety of writers and artists of both genders contemplate that age-old issue of female role models and what they should be now.
• Online “cyber-bullying” isn’t just for teens anymore. The disgraced now-former Snohomish County executive did it too.
• The Oatmeal explains why “How to Suck at Your Religion.” (Essentially: if you preach brotherhood but practice bigotry, etc….)
• The drive to preserve the Bauhaus coffeehouse’s building, by getting it named an official historic landmark: rejected.
• The lawsuit challenging the Sonics arena scheme: rejected.
• Even Republicans believe Tim Eyman’s “lying whore” comment against Gov. Inslee went too far.
• PONCHO, granddaddy of Seattle arts fundraising groups (and inventor of the “charity auction”), is no more.
• Can private tech colleges, charging $30,000 or more for degree programs, really solve Wash. state’s learning gap?
• Eastern Washington, now with more radioactive sludge.
• Life imitates Portlandia, at least 30 times.
• Chuck Thompson at the New Republic derides microbrews, and the brewpubs who sell them, as icons of silly urban gentrificaiton. But they’re really, really tasty icons of silly urban gentrification.)
• The sad tale of the “food critic on Food Stamps” finally has a happy ending. Ex-Tacoma News Tribune restaurant reviewer Ed Murrieta finally found a job, after spending years among the long-term unemployed. He now writes blurbs for Sacramento’s tourism board.
• In Virginia, a white mom wants white kids not to have to read books about past racial violence.
• I know I’m not the only one who still remembers LaserDiscs, those 12-inch analog video discs that were the best way to see movies at home in their day.
• Here’s an artistic vision of a future car-free Manhattan, funded by (who else?) a car company.

boingboing.net

• Seattle artist Shawn (“Beatkit”) Wolfe’s simple absurdist gag about tech product hype, the “RemoverInstaller,” is 20 years old and still going strong in a new “anniversary edition.”
• Alden Mason, 1919-2013: The master Northwest landscape painter deftly switched to beautiful yet playful abstractions, then again to cartoony acrylic works that fit right in with the “pop surrealist” movement (yes, that term again). The point is, he kept looking for something new to do, and always did it well.
• Even before it’s digested Seattle Weekly, the Canadian-owned Sound Publishing has bitten off its biggest local media morsel yet, acquiring the Everett Herald from the Washington Post Co. Not included in the sale are the Herald’s building or its printing plant. (Sound already has a plant in Everett that prints its assorted suburban and small-town weeklies.) The Seattle Times now runs the Herald’s home-delivery operation.
• Surprising nobody, Chris Hansen’s group has officially applied to the NBA to move the Sacramento Kings (which Hansen’s group has already applied to buy) to Seattle.
• REI boss Sally Jewell is, barring Republican obstruction tactics, the next Secretary of the Interior.
• City Councilmember Sally Clark participated in the “One Night Count” of Seattle’s homeless. Her team found a dead woman.
• Does everybody on a gluten free diet really need to be?
• Budapest’s current nightlife fad, that of “ruin pubs,” is threatened both by upscale development and by commercialized fake ruins.
• The Society of Illustrators thought it got a good deal when it contracted the printing of its latest Annual of American Illustration to a Chinese printer. That was until the plant refused to print a page containing an unflattering caricature of Mao. The society got its book copies with a blank page where that piece was supposed to be. It was later printed separately and hand-inserted into each copy.

alex nabaum’s 'the evolution of china'

ap via nwcn.com

• Just like at the Ballard Locks, Oregon’s Willamette Falls is plagued by salmon-hungry sea lions. Local officials’ answer? “A boat crew armed with seal bombs and shotguns loaded with firecrackers.”
• A Seattle Times headline labels “art” as a waste of state taxpayer money, right up there with legislators’ dry-cleaning bills. This is not the sort of objective reporting of which the Times claims to be a last bastion.
• You want real spending waste, in a project about, well, waste? Then look no further than Seattle Public Utilities’ new south end transfer station, still not ready months after its ribbon cutting.
• Another stupid shooting in another local nightspot. How utterly gross. (Here’s news of the benefit for the bar bouncer’s recovery.)
• I seem to have found out about this story in progress, but the UW’s Women’s Action Commission has created its own theater piece in the tradition of The Vagina Monologues. Only this all-new work is called The ___ Monologues. The title is apparently an attempt to make the work “more trans-friendly.”
• The Yankees don’t like A-Rod anymore.
• Marijuana industry trade associations are now a thing.
• The Wall St. Journal says Microsoft wouldn’t have to take a majority stake in Dell in order to have  a pivotal degree of influence in the beleagured PC maker.
• The newest version of MS Office comes in a “cloud based” subscription version, which seems to essentially require you to have a never-interrupted Net connection (and, of course, to keep paying).
• Boeing’s global-outsourcing craze is now, more or less officially, a “disaster.”
• We must say goodbye to Regretsy, the site that pokes gentle fun at kooky craft products. Its operator April Winchell (yes, Dick Dastardly’s daughter) said the site’s concept had run its course (“now we’re just Bedazzling a dead horse”).
• Last week, Twitter launched a new streaming-video site called Vine. The premise is people posting six-second, repeating GIF videos. Yes, it’s already been used for porn, and for people taping themselves taking bong hits.
• Barnes & Noble plans to close perhaps 20 percent of its stores over the next decade. So much for the guys who were supposed to be taking over the industry and driving all the indie quirkiness out of the book biz.
• Someone’s written a long, detailed critique of the cinematography in Les Miserables—in the character of the Incredible Hulk.
• “Rei” at Daily Kos wants you to reconsider the Fox News story from last week about Iceland’s official baby-names list.
• Speaking of which, while my masses-bashing “radical” leftist friends like to imagine Fox News as “the most popular TV channel,” its ratings among adults under 55 are the lowest they’ve been in more than a decade.
• Jeb Boniakowski at The Awl would like a mega-McDonald’s in NYC’s Times Square, that would serve everything the chain serves everywhere else but not in this country.
• Public radio’s idea of “humor,” at once bland and cloying, reaches a new nadir in a Chicago station’s make-believe plea for its listeners to breed more public-radio-listening babies.
• Headline: “Ex-NFL player charged with beating boyfriend.” Comment: Yes, this is still what it takes to acknowledge the existence of gay athletes.
• Jim Nabors had been rumored to be gay ever since his days of sitcom stardom. Now he’s finally publicly proclaimed it, by getting married in Seattle.
• The NY Times has discovered something that’s been going on around here for some time—the “permanent temp” economy.
• One of the last of its kind in the region, the Valley 6 Drive-In Theater in Auburn, will not reopen after its most recent seasonal shutdown. Even sadder, its longtime manager Kieth Kiehl passed on shortly after the decision to close was made. Both will be missed.

beth dorenkamp via grindhouse theater tacoma

chris lynch, seattlest (2010)

Seattle Weekly now has new owners and a new office in Pioneer Square, not far from where the paper had begun way back in ’75.

And it’s going to have a new publisher and a new editor. Those guys announced their respective departures just after Sound Publishing took over the title.

I’ve sent in my application to be the Weekly‘s next editor.

I told them they shouldn’t consider me if they just wanted someone to supervise more shrinkage, with the occasional formal nod to “social media” and online platforms.

But if they wanted someone who would fight to make the Weekly matter to this city again, I’d be their person.

David Brewster’s original Weekly team vowed to bring us, as one of their ad slogans put it, “the news that actually matters.”

That goal can be revived.

The Weekly can be a lot more than just another freebie collection of entertainment listings and medical-pot ads.

It can be the “grownup” alternative to the Stranger; the seriously progressive alternative to the Seattle Times; the street-wise alternative to KUOW.

Think of the pre-cutback versions of Willamette Week and the NY Observer. Papers that treated their entire cities, and everything that occurred within them, as their “beat.”

Imagine a news/opinion organization that makes the right kind of noise, that afflicts the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, that answers the questions and questions the answers.

Not just another formulaic “alt weekly” but a full service forum where anything can be discussed and there’s always something new.

That’s what I want to help create.

It would be far easier to create that entity from the Weekly‘s existing staff, circulation, and ad accounts.

But if not, then a startup.

People ask what I want to really do with my life. That’s it.

getty images/otto greule jr. via seattlepi.com

No. There are still bureaucratic approvals to be gotten.

But we’re closer than we ever were!

On a morning dominated by national political pomp n’ circumstance, when the local TV stations were locked into network coverage (KIRO-TV couldn’t get to it until 1:35 p.m.), when only sports-talk radio, web sites, and “social media” could immediately spread the word, Chris Hansen issued an announcement:

We are happy to announce that we have entered into a binding agreement with the Maloofs to purchase a controlling interest in the Sacramento Kings NBA franchise. The sale is obviously subject to approval by the NBA Board of Governors, and we look forward to working with the League in the coming months to consummate the transaction.

While we are not at liberty to discuss the terms of the transaction or our plans for the franchise given the confidential nature of the agreement and NBA regulations regarding public comments during a pending transaction, we would just like to extend our sincerest compliments and gratitude toward the Maloof family. Our negotiations with the family were handled with the utmost honor and professionalism and we hope to continue their legacy and be great stewards of this NBA franchise in the coming years and decades.

The sale, and the move, still have to be approved by the league’s Board of Governors (the other team owners). A Seattle Times online story says that could happen in mid-April and would likely “win overwhelming approval.”

NBCSports.com blogger Aaron Bruski says Sacramento interests will have six weeks to make a firm counter-offer; but Bruski believes they haven’t much of a chance.

Meanwhile, the Times‘ Steve Kelley asks,

What’s the rule on number of exclamation points allowed in a column?

Why is the Hallelujah Chorus playing in my head?

Our ol’ pal Goldy says the potential move is a “big win” for Mayor Mike McGinn.

And KJR-AM’s site bears the premature, but understandable, banner GOT ‘EM BACK!

first 'weekly' cover, 1976; via historylink.org

In today’s second most important local business story, Seattle Weekly isn’t being sold to the Seattle Times.

It’s being sold to Sound Publishing.

That’s the outfit that bought the weekly Eastside papers founded in the wake of the daily King County Journal’s collapse almost a decade ago. It also owns a bunch of small-town papers around the area, plus the Little Nickel classifieds (yes, that’s still being published in print!).

It’s owned by Canadian newspaper baron David Black (who’s not related to disgraced former Canadian newspaper baron Conrad Black). David Black is also buying another Village Voice Media property, SF Weekly, adding that to a cluster of papers he’s got there.

The Weekly‘s content has withered, in quantity and quality, even more than most newsprint products these days. Village Voice Media (the renamed New Times Publishing from Arizona) has been an incompetent owner.

At the very least, the Black regime could stem the Weekly‘s slide toward irrelevance. But could it really bring the paper back to the civic-kingmaker role to which it once aspired?

via jim linderman on tumblr

• Dear Bellevue Police: People have sex. Sometimes the people who have sex are co-workers. Deal with it.
• You missed the suddenly announced closing night at Cafe Venus and the Mars Bar. It’s been around at least 16 years (the space, in a lovely old Eastlake Ave. apartment building, was the Storeroom Tavern previously). It hosted countless bands. It was cooler than all get out. Its status has been in doubt, like the statuses of so many cool spaces, for several years now.
• C.B. Hall at Crosscut reminds us that real “bus rapid transit” isn’t like Metro’s “RapidRide.” The real thing has its own lanes, for one thing.
• The Seattle Times couldn’t possibly be buying Seattle Weekly. That makes about as much sense as HP buying Compaq (oh wait, that actually happened).
• Shelby Scates, 1932-2013: It’s not just that we’re losing some of the great local journalists of our time, but that there’s no means to develop worthy successors.
• A 2007 anti-Iraq-war protest at the Port of Tacoma led to six arrests. Now the case is finally going to court.
• As the Legislative session nears, Brendan Williams at Publicola pleads for state Democrats to stop talking like diluted Republicans.
• We’re Number Five! (In terms of lousy traffic.)
• How did Vancouver’s economy do during the soon-to-end Hockey Lockout II? Not that badly.
• Newsweek refugee Andrew Sullivan’s new site won’t have ads. P-I refugee Monika Guzman agrees with the strategy. Guzman claims online ads earn too little money these days, and many sites that try too hard to attract ad revenue turn into useless “click whores.” But the problem then becomes attracting enough readers who like you enough to support your site by other means (pledge drives, merch/book sales, etc.).
• Hamilton Nolan at Gawker insists that real journalism means writing about someone(s) other than your own narcissistic self.
• “Intercity bus and rail ridership up, as car and air travel remain flat.”
• Folks luuuvvv those big online college courses. As long as they don’t have to pay for ’em.
• Frank Schaeffer isn’t the first pundit to note the geographical coincidence between today’s “red states” and yesteryear’s “slave states.” Nor will be be the last.
• In Iceland, like in France at one time, kids can only be named from names on an approved list. One 15-year-old girl is trying to fight that.
• The college football post-season was mostly a dud. But here’s one “highlight.” It’s the weird one-point safety Kansas State committed after blocking an Oregon point-after-touchdown.

current tv via daily kos

It’s been pundit-firing season in Seattle area media, as cash-strapped station bosses seem to believe politics is a topic we don’t care or need to hear about.

After the November elections we’ve lost Robert Mak from KING, Bryan Johnson and Ken Schram from KOMO, Enrique Cerna from KCTS, and all the syndicated talkers who had been on Progressive Talk 1090. C.R. Douglas still covers local politics on KCPQ, but he’s on an increasingly lonely beat.

And nationally, Al Gore and megalawyer Joel Hyatt are now selling the little-watched cable channel Current TV to Al-Jazeera. The Qatar-based, pan-Arab news service is expected to rebrand Current to its own name, dropping all or most of its current lineup of pundit and documentary/reality shows.

The first incarnation of Current specialized in short-form documentary bits, often bought up cheap from aspiring filmmakers. Its second era began with the hiring of ex-MSNBC superstar Keith Olbermann, essentially the founding father of liberal talk TV. But Olbermann, as contentious a firebrand off-screen as on, repeatedly complained about the low budgets and sloppy production work, until Current fired him. After that, a post-Olbermann slate of talkers, including Eliot Spitzer, garnered as few as 40,000 viewers in prime time.

Hyatt, meanwhile, had signed deals with cable companies that restricted how much of the channel’s content could be posted online. That meant that even during the channel’s peak months with Olbermann, almost nothing from Current was on YouTube or iTunes, and was unviewable to households whose local cable companies didn’t receive the channel.

Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas claims Joel Hyatt was less interested in building audiences or even selling commercials than in finagling subscription fees from cable companies. Hyatt apparently told big cable operators that Current would get and keep viewers who might otherwise drop their cable (political liberals being notorious for claiming not to even own TV sets).

That, Moulitsas alleges, is why Hyatt signed those contracts that kept him from promoting the channel’s content online.

Also, as a one-channel indie operation, Current didn’t have a “family” of other channels to air its promos.

Without any efficient means to keep attracting viewers, cable companies openly questioned the value of keeping Current in their lineups. Hyatt knew it was time to cut his losses and sell out.

Eventually, someone besides MSNBC will figure how to do liberal talk properly, and will make a mint at it. It just wasn’t these guys.

'he-man and she-ra: a christmas special,' part of the festivities at siff film center on xmas eve

And a dreadful sorry for not posting in the last 12 days.

What I’ve been up to: Not much. Just wallowing in the ol’ clinical depression again over my first mom-less Xmas, trying to figure out how the heck I’m gonna pay January’s rent.

(For those of you who came in late, I’m not independently wealthy despite the old rumors; a few little local photo books don’t earn anything near a decent living; and my eternal search for a little ol’ paying day job has gone nowhere slowly.)

But I have vowed to stay at it. And there will be new MISCmedia products in the new year.

And, as always, it’s the time of year for MISCmedia’s annual In/Out List, the only accurate guide to what will become hot and not-so-hot in the coming 12 months. Send in your suggestions now.

On with the accumulated random links:

• To be a fan of a Seattle team is often like being a Who (Horton Hears a Who! version), constantly needing to scream “We Are Here! We Are Here!” to the NYC/Bristol CT sports media. Finally, they’ve heard about the Seahawks, who just might be “the NFL’s best team” right now.
• Get ready for big labor strife at the Northwest’s grain export terminals.
• Gray’s Anatomy costar Patrick Dempsey says he wants to buy the remaining Tully’s Coffee stores, and says he may make Seattle his “home away from home.” What, someone associated with Gray’s Anatomy actually plans to be in Seattle? How will that affect the Gray’s drinking game, where you take a swig whenever someone says something hopelessly inaccurate about this town?
• Today’s example of trying to make the homeless “invisible” is brought to you by the City of Olympia.
• Are Safeway stores deliberately overcharging? And is Staples.com charging different people different prices for the same stuff based on where they live?
• One pundit’s predictions for the e-book biz in ’13: Free e-book reader machines.
• Al Sharpton looks back at 2012 as “the year the rich couldn’t buy.”
• The Paris Review reviews porn novels. Yes, really. Specifically, contributor Avi Steinberg discusses five recent porn novels with librarian characters, and wishes (among other things) that they had more sex scenes that actually took place in libraries.
• It’s been a week of losses for fans of fun TV and movies, with the departures of Jack Klugman and Charles Durning. Now we must also add Gerry Anderson, creator-producer (with then-wife Sylvia) of Supercar, Fireball XL5, Stingray, Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, UFO, and Space 1999. His “Supermarionation” shows were nothing less than “F.A.B.”

capitolhillseattle.com

• After years of redevelopment-related doom staring it in the face, Capitol Hill’s beloved B&O Espresso and Bistro finally closed last week. B&O will live on, however, in a soon-to-open Ballard location, and might return within the new mixed use structure to be built on the old site. Word is another Hill coffee institution, the Bauhaus, might also resurface in Ballard.
• The pairing of Paul McCartney with the remnants of Nirvana turned out to be an original composition, which was not all that bad. Overall, though, that all-star (and mostly old-star) benefit for Hurricane Sandy victims could have had a little more variety on stage, such as even one woman.
• Some dude at Buzzfeed put up a supposedly shocking exposé of local web comix king Matthew (The Oatmeal) Inman. Once you take out the stuff that’s either exaggerated or based on a fake online profile made by somebody else, you’re left with the hardly reputation-killing facts that Inman is thinner and more athletic than the alter-ego character in his strip, and that he once had a day job in “search engine optimization” (the pseudo-science of gaming Google’s page rankings).
• A few select Seattle neighborhoods are getting ultra-speed home Internet service some time next year.
• Stupid Republican Tricks, WaState style: Another state Senate “coup” is in the works with two turncoat Democrats’ collusion.
• Are sales of e-book machines really falling victim to tablet-mania, or is this just another overhyped “trend”?
• You know you want to read every fake newspaper headline that appeared in the first 16 seasons of The Simpsons.
• Gawker lists 22 “terrible things that must end in 2013.” Among them: “twee framed sayings,” “fake Twitter accounts,” and “the word ‘swag.'”
• Feminist pranksters in Baltimore made a clever send-up of a Victoria’s Secret panty ad, complete with “No Means No” slogans.
• Urban Outfitters “buys yard sale clothes in bulk and resells them to hipsters as ‘vintage.'”
• Dan Mascai at Fast Company really hates silly media stereotypes about his own “millennial generation.”
• Another venerable mag leaving print behind for an online-only future: The Sporting News, the “bible of baseball.” While it expanded its coverage into the other big U.S. team sports, its prime asset is its record of every major and minor league baseball game ever played in the U.S. and Canada. That alone is an ongoing endeavor worth keeping alive somehow.

spoon-tamago.com via buzzfeed.com

• Newest fun invention from Japan: the “3D photo booth.” Stand very still for 15 minutes, and a few days later a figurine that looks like you shows up in the mail.
• Wash. state is Number One! As, er, a “net importer of out-of-state parolees.”
• Question: “Is Amazon.com Taking Over the World?” Answer: No. Only the world’s potential profit centers.
• The remaining Tully’s coffee houses may have a buyer.
• Did the Bellevue City Council not really know that light rail tracks have to have a rail yard (train car parking lot) with them?
• Gender-neutral marriage licenses are on the way. Will they show up in time for the first rush of gay nuptials?
• Walden Three, Greg Lundgren’s ambitious attempt to set up a multimedia arts center in the old Lusty Lady building (and to partly pay for it all as a years-long “documentary film shoot”), now has a blog. In it, Lundgren spins completely fictional stories about fabulous exhibits and shows that would be occurring there if it were operating now.
• The Illinois company calling itself Boeing is still stonewalling in talks with the engineers’ union.
• After 11 years, the final edition of KING-TV’s Up Front With Robert Mak airs this Sunday. It’s ending for no good reason. A studio interview show doesn’t cost that much to make, particularly if any good bits can be reused on your regular newscasts.
• Yes, the Florida Republicans really were trying to stop people in Dem-leaning districts from voting.
• Speaking of state-level GOPpers, they’re now in full control of 24 state houses. Expect more Wisconsin-like extremist legislation and dirty tricks, just on the other side of the holidays (if not sooner).
• I still meet left wingers who imagine that in some utopian pre-television age, all newspapers were local mini versions of the NY Times, noble progressive institutions exposing social ills. In real life, even the NY Times mostly wasn’t like that. A lot of them were pugnacious right-wing rags that supported, or even contributed to, climates of fear and hate. Case in point: The Hollywood Reporter. The venerable showbiz trade paper recently ran a big essay describing, and apologizing for, its role in promoting the 1950s “blacklist” against film people even suspected of “communist” beliefs.
• The “Black Friday boycott” at Walmart stores, thankfully, turned out to be more than just self-serving online rants by lefties who never go there anyway. There were actual pickets and other actions at the stores, in favor of fairer labor practices. And now, fast food workers in NYC are also demanding a living wage.
• Something lost in all the copyright-police suppression drives against “file sharing”: the “obscure music” blogs, which unearthed and shared long-out-of-print LPs, 45s, and 78s in all kinds of non-hit categories.
• Larry Hagman, 1931-2012: The Dallas/I Dream of Jeannie star was as kind hearted and generous off screen as he could be villainous on screen. I once got to know his daughter Kristina, a local painter who had a space in the old 619 Western building. She is also a kind and generous soul.

Onetime P-I cartoonist Ramon "Ray" Collins, to be featured in the documentary Bezango, WA

• I don’t often plug Kickstarter fundraising projects here. But there’s one I fully believe in. It’s Bezango, WA, a feature documentary by Ron Austin and Louise Amandes about Northwest cartoonists past and present. It’ll have everybody from David Horsey to Ellen Forney. It should be a blast.
• It’s been a few days since the last Random Links, I know. No, I haven’t been dancing the liberal’s victory dance all this time. I’ve been working on another National Novel Writing Month novel. This one should be great. I’ve got a scene in which an electronics nerd compares a sexy woman to a freshly soldered joint. (Really.) (That part might not make the eventual final cut, though.)
• Remember, Seattle parks users: the owls are not what they seem.
• A nice Wikipedia contributor explains Seattle’s street layout. (This will be on your exam.)
• Don’t send too many Tweets® from a Husky football game, or the UW will accuse you of being an unlicensed media outlet.
• Andy Warhol’s studio submitted a proposal to paint the Tacoma Dome’s roof all floral-y. Now, it might finally appear.
• RIP Tristan Devin, 32. The Capitol Hill cafe owner and comedian was also the director of the “People’s Republic of Komedy,” staging group bills all over town and promoting a standup revival. Among the topics of his own act were his long struggles with depression and experiences in therapy.
• Bryan Johnson has retired after 53 years at KOMO radio and TV. On the radio side, he’d announced both the death of JFK and the eruption of Mt. St. Helens. Transferred to the TV side, he became a sort-of local Mike Wallace. In his booming baritone, he asked the tough questions, he made the snarky comments, he delivered the gloom-n’-doom “analysis.” His official last piece was an in-studio commentary on whether the feds would act to prevent pot legalization here.
• Some Occupy ____ activists have an idea that might just actually benefit people. It’s called “Rolling Jubilee.” Under this scheme, a donation-funded nonprofit would buy up unpayable consumer debt at pennies on the dollar, just like collection agencies do. But the nonprofit would then cancel, instead of try to collect, those debts.
• Google allegedly now makes more ad revenue than all U.S. magazines and newspapers combined.
• Is selling out to commercials now the only viable business model for indie rock bands?