Seattle’s first TV station, KSRC-TV (soon to become KING-TV) signed on for the first time on Thanksgiving 1948. The debut telecast was a live high school football game, from the then-new (and apparently now doomed) High School Memorial Stadium.

In honor of this occasion, Feliks Banel offers a list of Seattle’s 25 most memorable live TV moments. In chronological order, they begin with that first local telecast and end with the Pike Place Market’s centennial concert on the Seattle Channel. In between are the first and last J.P. Patches shows, Mt. St. Helens, the Kingdome implosion, the WTO protests, and Cobain on Saturday Night Live.

Banel didn’t include, but I would’ve, the Seattle World’s Fair opening (KING, 1962), the last hour of the Dog House restaurant (KCTS, 1994), the weird Jay Leno-hosted party at the Microsoft campus for the launch of Windows 95 (KOMO, KING and KIRO, 1995), the Sonics’ final game (FSN, 2008), and perhaps one or two particularly naughty cable access shows.

I’m sure Time speaks for a lot of you in describing the past 3653 days (including three leap years) as having been a “Decade from Hell.” The bright clean new century we were promised so long ago turned out to have started with the Bush coup, 9/11, two useless stupid wars, continued eco-deterioration, and a world economy that just kept contracting for most of us even in its officially “good” years.

But at least we got Ratatouille and the iPhone.

With all the economic unhappiness going on around here, it’s nice to see the Christian Science Monitor (a much better publication as a slick weekly mag than it was as a skinny daily paper) laud Seattle as one of America’s five up-n’-comin’ New Economy cities.

Of course, this type of attention could be a curse in disguise, like they used to say about Brazil. (What they used to say: “Brazil is the country of the future, and always will be.”)

The NY Observer notes that Hearst is among three big publishers involved in a scheme to create an iTunes-like online store for electronic magazines. These will be works derived from the publishers’ print magazines, but specially redesigned for on-screen reading. The first products would be made for iPhones and Blackberries. Presumably there could later be editions for the rumored Apple tablet device or for netbook computers.

Could an e-mag P-I be far behind?

Former cable programming mogul and current DirecTV boss John Malone alleges local broadcast TV is fiscally doomed.

Thanks to ex-Rocket boss Robert Newman, I’ve found a Web page that collects every Seventeen magazine cover from the first issue in 1944 through 1968, plus a few select covers from subsequent years up to 1985.

Things to ponder about these images:

1. How the hell did then-Philadelphia Inquirer publisher (and future TV Guide founder) Walter Annenberg corral the resources and the staff, let alone the paper stock, to start Seventeen during the latter months of WWII?
2. Long before Mad Men, it’s been popular among the self-proclaimed hip to scoff at media/advertising images of women in the ’40s and ’50s. But these covers portray teenage girls with taste and dignity. These are personas of girls striding proudly into womanhood. Yeah, they’re impeccably dressed in the fashion industry’s latest odes to materialism, but (even into the Twiggy era) they’re shown as arbiters of fine aesthetics, as freshly-minted adults ready to handle the adult world’s burdens. The Seventeen Girl, back then, was no ditsy mall rat, but a mature and capable young lady to whom the mag’s younger “tween” readers could aspire. (Compare and contrast to this past September’s cover, with blurbs promising “Perfect Hair Every Day!” and “Flat Abs!” and teasing the shocker-story “My Coach Secretly Filmed Me Naked!”)

The NY Times site has a little “slide show” pictorial featurette extolling Seattle’s theater scene as a tourist destination (not necessarily as a generator of art).

U.S.News & World Report (itself only a quarter of the operation it used to be) lists 15 companies that might disappear by this time next year. Names you know include Rite Aid, Krispy Kreme, Blockbuster, Sbarro Pizza, and (making its umpteenth annual appearance on lists of this type) Chrysler.

Kudos to Seattle PostGlobe founder Kery Murakami. He’s taken a PR job with the Washington State Budget & Policy Center. (Publicola calls it “a liberal economic and fiscal policy think tank.”)

PostGlobe will continue.

Playboy (another now-imperiled oldline media brand) has posted a gallery of all of its 1970s covers. They display the peak of the magazine’s creativity, followed by a quick fall back into formula.

The magazine had begun in the 1950s with the simple premise of being the first US nudie mag respectable enough to attract mainstream advertising.

By 1970, its first real competitors had shown up. Its editors responded by turning the Playboy cover, theretofore a simple tease shot of a blandly grinning model in an artsy composition, into something more complex, more colorful, more mysterious.

The images still weren’t as complex as real sexual desire, but they began to approach that high-erotica territory. It remained a slick corporate publication promoting a superficial, smirking approach to sex, but it had begun to hint at the emotional and aesthetic layers beyond its skin-deep stance.

(This being the ’70s, the images also swirled with that era’s soft-focus photography and art-deco nostalgia.)

Then precisely in 1978, that effort ended.

Convenience stores had begun placing Playboy and its raunchier rivals behind the counter. To stem massive circulation losses, the magazine’s covers went to big bold headlines surrounding basic staring-at-the-camera poses.

Later on, of course, came all the models with teased-up hair and cartoonish implants and the rest of the unsexy nonsense that followed.

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One of the few things more formulaic and trite than Playboy is anti-Playboy criticism. Latest example: Kate Harding at Salon.com.

Harding quotes one of the mag’s recent models, Joanna Krupa, praising the opportunity it gives to women such as herself and asking why any feminist would criticize such success.

Then Harding reiterates some (not all) of the standard anti-Playboy and anti-porn stances—and other “actual feminist” arguments that aren’t even about the topic at hand.

Yes, as Harding asserts, Playboy is the pay-and-prestige apex of a certain type of modeling work, one that’s not open to women who don’t have the specific “look,” and which can be a tough and short-lived career even to those who break in.

But ALL OF CORPORATE ENTERTAINMENT is like that.

There are a few stars, a lot of would-be stars, and a heck of a lot of strugglers and strivers. They’re all fighting for the opportunity to express some committee’s vision of what will sell to the target market.

To change that, you need to change the whole showbiz industry model, away from the centralized purveyors of formula tripe (in any genre) and toward more street-level works expressing real ideas and passions.

In sex entertainment, that’s being done by the neo-burlesque movement and its many spinoff ventures, by the burgeoning erotic art scene, and by the thousands of amateur erotic writers, photographers, and painters now online.

An Atlantic writer has visited Seattle and talked to several former Post-Intelligencer staffers, including one who went from writing about dive bars to co-owning one (the fabulous Streamline on lower Queen Anne).

I’ve finally let my Seattle Times subscription lapse, after seven months with SeaTimes and 31 prior years with the now-discontinued print P-I. The only thing I’d still used the print paper for, that couldn’t be done online, was to methodically study how much smaller the SeaTimes was getting.

As a print subscriber, I was hardly supporting the newsroom. Subscription fees barely pay for the manufacture and delivery of the physical product. What I was doing was adding to the aggregate eyeballs the SeaTimes could sell to advertisers. That company’s done a lousy job at selling ads the past several years. Even before the Internet killed want ads and the Great Recession decimated home and car sales, they’d already been losing huge accounts to direct mail.

Supporting “newspaper style journalism,” and transitioning from it to something better, is a topic I’ve long written about.

Online ads earn far less income per reader than print ads. This is unlikely to change any time soon. SeattlePI.com has the potential to become profitable once the general economy improves, but won’t likely ever support anything near the news staff the print P-I had.

I currently see three potential scenarios:

1) Print papers continue to shrink, not to oblivion but to the point that they become vulnerable to startup competitors (who suddenly don’t have to pour in $30 million a year in costs and who can target niche audiences in a way old-line dailies can’t).

2) Print papers continue to shrink, to the point where they’re small enough to become subsidized by their big-business community friends (either through contributions or vanity ads).

3) New ebook-esque consumer devices (the long-rumored Apple tablet?) finally make true online publications with paid subscriptions not only feasible but popular.

Another viewpoint: Doug Morrison sees the Incredible Shrinking Newspaper as an issue affecting the exchange of ideas, the flow of facts, and even the future of democracy itself, and wonders if there could be a political solution.

The Huffington Post just started a books section.

The section’s editor, Amy Hertz, explains she won’t run traditional reviews. Too stale, too one-way, too old-media-paradigm.

Instead, she wants to treat books as a topic of, yep, “conversation with our readers.”

Sounds like Hertz wants to reconstruct the entire book marketing business, a business that could urgently use some new blood and some new ideas.

The ideas she’s choosing to implement are those of Web 2.0 (or is it 3.0?)—Facebooking, chatting, “buzz” seeding, and the like.

The thing is, these tactics end up looking like hokum when Hollywood movie publicists try to use them. They’ll surely look even more fake when the even less-slick hawkers of books start using them bigtime.

Which will, from the standpoint of online scoffers such as myself, make lots of fun. I can hardly wait.

Playboy, like a lot of oldline media outfits, is in fiscal trouble. Earlier this year, according to industry rumor, its management offered up the company for potential sale. The asking price was apparently far above the firm’s estimated market value. That’s because the 83-year-old Hugh Hefner wanted to make sure he maintained his ultra-hedonist lifestyle (and he didn’t really want to sell anyway).

Still, at least two potential buyers emerged. They’re private equity firms, companies that exist only to buy and sell other companies (like the one that briefly owned Chrysler).

One of these would-be bunny buyers, according to Marlow Harris, also currently owns the Century 21 and Coldwell Banker real-estate brands.

Make up your own puns about “development,” “view lands,” or “treating women like property” here.

You know I adore vintage advertisements. There’s now a site chock full of lovely ’50s-’70s TV commercials, in great prints. They were donated by an ad agency to Duke University. This means you open them in the “iTunes U” section of your iTunes app.