One Craig Mod (apparently his real name), a Tokyo-based book editor and graphic designer, has plenty of detailed and well-expressed opinions about “Books in the Age of the iPad.”

His first proclamation: E-books mean the impending end in print of “disposable books,” the “throwaway paperbacks” with ephemeral interest and limited artistic achievement. Or so Mod believes.

I disagree, natch.

To me, commercial ephemera is America’s greatest art form. And it comes close to being Japan’s greatest art form.

What Mod disdains as the “dregs of the publishing world” are the darlings of eBay, the stuff of occasional legend. They include everything in between magazines and trade paperbacks. They are the literature of their specific times and places.

They include the beautiful Dell “map back” mysteries, teen fan books, fashion and hair guides, comics collections, pretty much all science fiction/fantasy, decades of progressively-more-sexual romance novels, giveaway cookbooks, Scholastic Book Club titles sold in schools, “adult reading” novels with “good girl art” covers, and pretty much any reading matter issued since 1930 that is or ever was popular.

Mod is wrong about this point. But I believe he’s right about some of his other points.

Like when he mentions that publications designed for the iPad or other ebook readers could be categorized as either “formless content” (straight text) or “definite content” (material that relies upon text/image juxtaposition or other design elements).

And when he notes that iPad books don’t have to conform to print-centric “page layout” design metaphors.

And especially when he chides both Apple and Amazon for leaving out essential typographic tools from their ebook software platforms.

At a site called Newspaper Death Watch, one Paul Gillin looks at a New England woman named Bobbie Carlton. who organizes marketing seminars for small businesses. Gillin finds in Carlton’s work one answer to the dilemma of “how to save local newspapers.”

Gillin surmises that, historically, local papers were local merchants’ de facto advertising and publicity advisers. Therefore, local papers could formalize and expand these relationships, turning themselves into full-range media advisors. For an appropriate fee, they’d help merchants build and maintain Web sites, engage in online social networking, send targeted email notices, and otherwise get their businesses out into their communities.

This idea could help the companies that put out local papers. But would it do anything to support newsrooms?

With newspapers struggling and investigative reporting disappearing from the commercial media, online efforts are afoot to bring original reporting to the Net. But who’s gonna pay for ’em? How about  right wing think tanks?

As I promised a week or so ago, here’s some of what I would do to improve SeattlePI.com.

But first, the answer to “why bother?”

This town needs a primary news source that isn’t the increasingly Foxified Seattle Times.

The local TV newscasts and their affiliated Web sites, themselves shrinking and mayhem-centric, are no substitute. Neither is the feature-oriented KUOW. Neither are the small and scrappy Publicola and Crosscut. Barring some new entrepreneurial venture, that leaves PI.com.

As I wrote, that site’s coverage has steadily improved since its inauspicious start as a standalone entity one year go. But it still has a ways to go.

First, the easy improvements:

• The home page could become more punchy, less cluttered. The “above the fold” portion, which you see immediately upon logging in, could take on a more Huffington Post tabloidy appearance, emphasizing one to four major “cover stories.”
• The Local index page needs to be particularly de-cluttered. It should be the alternate point-of-entry for readers looking for a summary of what important’s gone on in town lately. That means, among other things, taking out the sports headlines (the site already has a separate Sports index page).
• The sidebar box hawking links to “Special Reports” mostly hypes creaky old stories from the print Post-Intelligencer. It’s particularly annoying to see the link to “JOA Update,” which concerned the deal with the SeaTimes that ultimately failed to keep the print P-I alive. Either drop this box from the sidebar or create some new special reports to promote in it.
• Bring on more freelance and part-time “content providers.” Unpaid bloggers are fine for what they’re able to do. But for key subject areas that can really increase a site’s page views, you need people who can afford the time for research and legwork.
• PI.com’s biggest initial mistake was to not include local arts-and-entertainment coverage, a proven audience builder. They’re starting to rectify this. They can do more, by adding paid freelance reviewers, then building those into staff positions as they steadily increase the site’s overall hits.

Now for the hard part:

• PI.com needs to convince Hearst management to let it hire more full-time staff. The site’s still losing money (apparently); but from all accounts it’s on track to turn a profit once the online ad market rebounds, or when additional revenue streams (i.e., an iPad newspaper) become feasible. It can become THE place to go in this region for breaking news, politics, long-form feature writing, sports commentary, and A&E recommendations. But for that, it needs to have at least twice the in-house produced content that it’s now got.

When I return to this topic in a few days, I’ll talk about how a lean startup venture could help fill some of these holes in the local info-scape.

Just got back from the SeattlePI.com one-year anniversary party. The Crocodile was all done up with pastel pink and blue “baby color” balloons. (The Seattle Weekly anniversary parties I’ve been to were all festooned with black, white, and red balloons, as in “black and white and re(a)d all over.”)

The first song by the first band on stage included the repeated refrain, “I want to dance on your grave.”

With the prominent exception of David Horsey, most of the 120 or so people there were well under 40, nay under 30. They were significantly younger, on the average, than the people I’d seen at any of the P-I memorial gatherings over the previous year (of which there were at least three). They weren’t about mourning the dying old media. They were about celebrating the shiny new media (or at least celebrating this particular new-media venture’s survival in-this-economic-climate etc.).

I don’t need to rant about PI.com’s shortcomings. Its own people know about them. They’re scrambling to put out a popular site on a skeletal budget. I remember the early months of The Stranger, and that venture also was then heavy on proven circulation-building features, light on hard news.

What I can do, and will do, is suggest how PI.com or someone else can help fill the big holes that still exist in local news coverage.

Our pals at Seattle PostGlobe, one of the nonprofit online ventures started by Post-Intelligencer vets, have their own view of the still gaping hole left in this city by the print P-I’s demise.

Today, or yesterday, or the day before (however you wish to count it) is the one-year anniversary of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s disappearance from area newsstands and vending boxes and doorsteps. The final edition was edited on 3/16/09 and distributed on 3/17/09.

That made 3/18/09 the first day since the print P-I stopped. That’s why tonight, 3/18/10, is the one-year anniversary of seattlepi.com as a stand-alone Web site. The site’s “producers” (they were careful to avoid Newspaper Guild-recognized job titles) are holding what they bill as an evening of celebration at the Crocodile.

It’ll still seem like a wake to me.

PI.com officials say the site now gets as many “hits” and readers as it did when it had a newspaper feeding it content. They’ve scraped and scrambled to get to that level, using every trick in the old Hearst playbook–canned gossip items, comics, cute animal pictures, fashion pictures, basically all the soft sides of Wm. Randolph Hearst Sr.’s old circulation-building formula. (The hard side of that formula, the scandals and exposés, would require more person-hours of research than the site’s minimal staff can muster.)

Most days, there’s at least one significant local news story on the site. Its sports commentary and tech-biz coverage have steadily improved. Local entertainment coverage disappeared from the site altogether when it went web-only; now at least there’s some.

The site’s design is still too cluttered, but it’s better than it was.

But it’s not the depth-and-breadth news source that the print P-I had been at its best, and that today’s Seattle Times sometimes tries, but usually fails, to be.

To become that, PI.com would need to bulk up from its current 20-person core staff to at least double that.

Even if online advertising rebounds from the current all-around business slump, it’s unlikely to generate enough revenue to support that. (PI.com, from all accounts, is inching toward profitability as is.)

It’ll need some other, or additional, revenue model.  (An iPad paper? A print weekly?)

Until then, or until some other new venture or set of ventures shows up, Seattle’s information landscape will still have a P-I sized hole needing to be filled.

From a 1933 issue of Fortune magazine, here’s an in-depth analysis (with full color illos) of the industry that was newspaper comic strips. Competitive big-city newspapers were at or just past their peak, and collectively supported over 230 daily strips.

My main question about the Apple iPad is apparently answered “yes.” Developers will be able to use custom fonts in iPad applications, including print-media publications sold as apps.

Seattle’s own branding and logo-design hotshot Tim Girvin offers his own historical thoughts about Apple, Steve Jobs, and the road to the iPad.

My own thoughts:

• I don’t yet know enough about it to know if it really is the gadget that will save the news media, let alone the book or TV industries. For instance, I don’t know if it will support full professional typography in publications distributed as iPad apps (it doesn’t support it in Apple’s own iBooks app). I strongly believe real fonts, chosen and tweaked and kerned by real designers (and not just the seven or eight “web-safe fonts,” either) are the key to making online-distributed reading matter seem professional enough to command a price.
• The hardware’s limitations don’t bother me. It doesn’t have a cell phone in it, but third party software will certainly being Internet-based phone calling to it. It doesn’t have a standard USB plug, but it will have an optional adapter for one (which means you can attach external storage devices, webcams, etc.).
• The software’s limitations concern me a bit more. A device meant to be, among other things, a full service Internet browser needs to be able to run Adobe Flash. A device meant to be an on-the-go field computer needs multitasking (more than one application running at one time), or at least a universal clipboard. With luck, these discrepancies should be fixed before long.
• What are the fine-print terms of the AT&T 3G data subscription, available as an option with the higher-end versions of the iPad? Could I use it with WiFi to run a Net connection into my regular computer?
• As UK comedy legend Stephen Fry notes, Jobs gives a helluva presentation. As others noted, Jobs and Obama, those two master sales-orators of our time, spoke on the same day. Obama’s speech was telecast and streamed live to millions. Jobs’s speech wasn’t, except for a few brief excerpts on CNBC. Most people who wanted to learn every detail as the announcement was happening had to settle for “liveblogging” text commentaries at various techie Web sites—which can actually be a more intimate, more involving medium than just watching somebody talk.
• I don’t care about the name, either way. And the jokes about it are already old; which is probably just how Apple predicted they’d be when the name was picked.
• Yes. I want one.

At Paste magazine, Rachel Maddux asks the musical question, “Is Indie Dead?” Her answer: Yes. Deal with it and move on already:

Indie is, at once, a genre (of music first, and then of film, books, video games and anything else with a perceived arty sensibility, regardless of its relationship to a corporation), an ethos, a business model, a demographic and a marketing tool. It can signify everything, and it can signify nothing. It stands among the most important, potentially sustainable and meaningful movements in American popular culture—not just music, but for the whole cultural landscape. But because it was originally sculpted more in terms of what it opposed than what it stood for, the only universally held truth about “indie” is that nobody agrees on what it means.

I could spend the rest of my life researching old advertising and magazine art. Fortunately, Leif Peng at the blog Today’s Inspiration does it for me. (Thanks to Robert Newman Design for the link.)

Robin Williams was on the next-to-last Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien. Williams had also been on the next-to-last Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. It’s a tribute to O’Brien’s and Williams’s media-historicism that neither felt the need to announce this symmetry.

Then next on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, we learned how to get kids into more book-reading, thanks to the cast of the stage musical Fela.

My take on the whole two-week minicrisis that was the Late Night Wars? Leno should never have been offered five hours a week of network prime time. That immediately lowered NBC to the status of a secondary network along the lines of The CW, and made Leno’s own schtick seem as tired and overworked as, well, it is.

No, the Leno prim etime show should have been a weekly or twice-weekly franchise. Like Dateline or Deal Or No Deal, it could have become a programming backstop the network could plug into any troublesome timeslot. Now we’ll never know how that strategy could have worked. And we’re not likely to get comedy-variety back in prime time for some time.

Air America Radio, the high-profile attempt to build a national network devoted exclusively to left-O-center talk, suddenly shut down all its live programming on Thursday. Affiliate stations will be supplied with rerun shows through Monday evening, while the company plans an orderly shutdown.

This is NOT the end of liberal talk radio.

The local stations (such as the CBS-owned KPTK in Seattle) that had carried AAR’s shows have also carried liberal shows from other distributors. These shows, such as those of Ed Schultz and Stephanie Miller, will continue. Several former AAR hosts are also now with other distributors (including Randi Rhodes, Thom Hartmann, and Mike Malloy).

The remaining AAR personalities are now free to sign with these other distributors. They include the Seattle-based Ron Reagan, the last AAR host still carried on KPTK’s pre-midnight weekday schedule.

So what did AAR in? Why did it flail about in fiscal instability for six years?

From the start, its reach was bigger than its grasp.

It wanted to start up from scratch as an all-day, coast-to-coast, unified force in broadcasting. That’s not how antenna-based broadcasting works. You’ve gotta start one station at a time, and build each show in each region. That’s what the conservative talkers did, back in the 1980s and 1990s. That’s what the syndicators of Schultz, Miller, et al. do.

Robert McChesney was one of the founders of The Rocket, Seattle’s erstwhile rock n’ roll tabloid bible.

Then he went off to Wisconsin to be a radical scholar and professor of media studies, writing several books about the evils of corporate-controlled news and broadcasting.

Now, he and John Nichols have cowritten a manifesto book suggesting federal government subsidies for news organizations, presumably including the Seattle Times—which co-presented the authors’ Town Hall appearance Tuesday night.

How would an already fiscally flailing government find the funds for this? Not specified.