The NYTimes opinion section’s former token far-rightie and well-regarded grammar snoot had previously written some of Nixon and Agnew’s most infamous lines, in a speechwriting staff that also included MSNBC’s token wingnut Pat Buchanan. But by modern standards, he was an example of that rapidly dwindling species, a sane Republican who believed in rational persuasion rather than X-treme demagoguery. He’s already missed.

The Wall St. Journal now has a slick “style” magazine supplement called WSJ. (Yes, the period is part of the name.)

Its fall cover depicts a gold-painted apple and the headline “Forbidden Fruit: Selling Luxury in the Age of Abstinence.”

Which is precisely what the section’s articles and advertisements proceed to do.

Page after page (88 in all) lauds the charms of gaudy wristwatches, private jets, Lincolns with “eco” features, fashions (including fur items), jewelry, wines, boots, hotels, purses, and accessories for rich white people of all adult ages and genders.

The cover, though, really says it all.

How do you sell things/services/experiences of little to no practical value, at a time when even CEOs pretend to be regular folks trudging through thes times like the rest of us?

By re-imaging them as icons of daring rebellion.

Be un-PC! Thrift, practicality—BORING! Show the petty little people of this world you don’t give a damn about them. Look as unashamedly silly as any “white gangsta” teen hanging in the malls.

This morning brings another skinny 26-page SeaTimes, with only eight major staff-written news stories. Nevertheless, a laudatory NY Times piece relays that the SeaTimes is now claims to be “operating in the black,” though the Blethens are quiet about the financial metrics they’re using to make this claim.

The NYT story also notes the SeaTimes circulation has risen from 200,000 to 260,000, having kept most of the P-I subscriptions it had inherited in March.

However, that’s still a drop from the former combined circulation of the SeaTimes-dominated Joint Operating Agreement, which had been approximately 311,000 at the print P-I‘s demise.

Still, the SeaTimes’ current readership is close to its ’90s, pre-Internet peak.

Just don’t expect the paper to restore its newsroom staff size to ’90s levels. Not with the ad market still so shaky.

Somebody with the cute pseudonym of “Jane Austen Doe” has issued yet another of those “why the book biz sucks” essays.

Like most essays of this type, Doe’s invokes nostalgia for the kind, tweed-suited, boutique industry book publishing’s supposed to have once been.

I’m not buying it.

The book biz used to be such a personal industry because it used to be such a small industry. Low volume, low profits, high barriers to entry (especially for distribution to the small, sparse bookstores and department-store book sections of the day).

“Serious” publishing was subsidized by textbooks and technical/instructional books. Fiction was predominantly the realm of pulp magazines and of short-story sections within nonfiction magazines. Authors proved themselves worthy of book deals by placing stories in either the biggest or the swankiest mags.

The chubby, insider clique at the top of the publishing world kept things manageable by keeping the supply of available titles down.

Would Jane Austen Doe have fared better in that book industry than in today’s book industry? Only if she’d managed to break into a much smaller inner circle of literary stars.

Literary people often profess to progressive stances about politics and society. But when the topic is their own business, too many of them turn into the worst kind of nostalgic reactionaries.

At least the people who complain about the music industry sucking usually admit that that business always has sucked.

Postscript: None of the above caveats diminishes the fact that, just as Doe says, today’s book business does indeed suck.

Part of it’s due to the oversupply of stores (particularly big chain stores), copies, and titles. (It’s great that so many tens of thousands of books are coming out; it’s bad that publishers don’t even bother to promote most of them.)

Part of it’s due to the general media/entertainment glut and shakeout, which is affecting everything from TV and radio to magazines and DVDs. (Theatrical films, which still have gatekeepers, also still have profits.)

But a lot of it’s due to conglomerate-owned publishers striving too hard, as execs in so many other industries have, for unfeasible profit margins, in worship of the Almighty Stock Price.

…the biggest online-only news organization? Would you believe, AOL? Well, it does, if you count all the assorted AOL-owned content sites as one organization.

Or rather, I’ve visualized it in my head, based on some recent items on tech-rumor sites.

As some of you longtime readers know, I’ve long believed the Web page, as we currently know it, is not the ideal showcase for professional journalism (or several other forms of professionally-made content).

News-biz people will tell you how Web ads just don’t attract nearly as much money per reader as print ads.

They’ll also tell you how the Web’s basic structural metaphor (individual pages, infinite links) works against the notion of a journalistic product combining different stories about different topics into one whole.

And I’ll tell you that Web-based typography and layout, despite many clever workarounds, still leave a lot to be desired.

And it’s damn difficult to charge for content on the Web, as you may have heard. Even some commercial porn sites are having trouble.

Meanwhile, two or three big new platforms have emerged with great possibilities for content-based profits:

• Netbooks (Windows and Linux PCs in less-than-laptop sizes) have become such mass-market items that wireless providers are giving them away with new contracts. (This entry is the “or three” of this list, because these devices are still tied to the traditional Web.)
• Dedicated ebook reading devices have finally taken off, in the form of the Amazon Kindle and Sony Reader. New competitors are promised over the next few years. These platforms were designed from the ground up for commercial content, but are so far crippled by graphics and design limitations.
• Then there’s the beloved Apple iPhone, and its limited-feature-set cousin the iPod Touch, with their highly successful App Store.It’s revolutionized the whole consumer software business with its inexpensive, do-one-thing-well applications. It’s revolutionized the digital content business as a single mobile hardware platform for audio, video, games, and texts. (Both Amazon and Barnes & Noble now sell ebooks for the iPhone/iPod Touch platform, as do several smaller vendors.)

In the New Yorker, novelist and print-media historian Nicholson Baker lauds the iPhone/iPod Touch platform as a more satisfying e-reading environment than Kindle or Sony Reader. He likes that the iPhone’s screen offers sharper resolution and full color. He likes its (slightly) greater typographical diversity.

I agree, except for the size of the thing.

Yeah, I’ve got 52-year-old eyeballs and prefer larger-sized type.

But I also want the juxtaposition of word and image you get on a well-designed print page. I want the visual sensation of ordered confusion a good newspaper page can express. I want the “splash” of a good magazine spread. I want the visual sequential narrative of a well-curated photo essay.

Yet I’d like that in a handy, go-anywhere device. Something where you just turn it on and it works; no complex interface to fuss over, no confusing setup and maintenance issues, no frustrations. (Hint: This means I don’t want a Windows tablet.)

What I want is the iPhone/iPod Touch, only in a bigger, splashier, more useful size.

And that’s apparently what we’re going to get, sometime in early to mid-2010, if you believe the current industry rumors.

Some of the rumor articles call the gadget a “Mac tablet,” and claim it would run a stripped down version of Mac OS X.

But that’s not what I want it to be.

I want it to be an iPod Touch with more, not a Mac computer with less. I don’t want something that runs MS Office really slowly; I want something that delivers documents and media really well.

I truly believe such a device, or the second or third versions of it, could be the breakthrough product we need to truly replace print.

I’m no Photoshop whiz or demo designer, so let me verbally display what I’m imagining.

In my vision, individual newspaper and magazine articles would still be available as Web pages for free access. What readers would (quite willingly) pay for, in one-shot buys and subscriptions, is a whole package of carefully-chosen and carefully-designed words and pictures, in on-the-go tablet reader form.

Each “issue” would be a complete, self-contained document, including any embedded audio or video files. No additional downloading would be required. The reader could receive it at home in the morning, then access it on his/her iPod Tablet whenever and wherever, with or without a cell or WiFi connection.

They’d have full use of modern digital typography, not merely Microsoft’s ten “Web-safe” fonts or Flash-based font substitution schticks. PDF-like rendering would overcome HTML’s severe typesetting limitations. Justified columns, smart hyphenation, kerning, footnotes, superscripts and subscripts, indentations, drop caps, charts and graphs—these e-mags would look and read like professionally made works. (Technical manuals and scientific textbooks could go treeless and keep the typographical tricks they need.)

Like Zinio’s electronic editions of magazines, they’d have clickable headlines and table-of-contents listings, zoomable text, and intuitive navigation including animated “page turning.” Unlike them, they’d be designed for on-screen reading from the ground up, not merely digital replications of print layouts.

On the software end, this is all doable. The pieces and programming tools exist. So do the e-commerce platforms, such as Apple’s App Store.

Now, at last, the user-end hardware is almost here.

If my suspicion’s right, near-future historians will see the mid-to-late aughts as a tough but necessary transition period from print to ebooks and emags.

What will far-future historians will have seen ebooks and emags evolve into?

That’s a topic for another day.

…the Seafair Torchlight Parade drew thousands from the whole tri-county region to Fourth Avenue on July 25, to witness the usual sequence of drill teams, marching bands, floats, horses, big balloons, clowns, and politicians. This year’s grand marshalls were ex-Seahawks coach Mike Holmgren and local radio legend Pat O’Day.

KIRO-TV’s parade telecast ended promptly at 10 p.m., so the station could air a rerun of one of CBS’s near-identical detective shows. The telecast ended before the Seafair Pirates came into camera range, which is exactly like cutting off the Thanksgiving Day Parade before Santa shows up.

Now, the station has posted video of the Pirates’ performance online, perhaps as a make-up offering to angry parade-telecast viewers.

…boss Richard Nash insists the (for-profit) book business “cannot be saved (as it is).”

…I like McGraw-Hill’s books and magazines better than their records.

But now, the venerable publisher’s most famous print asset, BusinessWeek magazine, is up for sale, essentially to anybody willing to shoulder its losses. The hereby linked article from Ad Age claims BW‘s arch rivals Fortune and Forbes might soon face similar fates.

Remember, these are the outfits the rest of the magazine biz tried to emulate with their solid gold demographics, their cheerleading for BigCorps, and their niche of investment information (you know, the kind people are supposedly willing to pay for even online).

WIll Futurama replace its entire voice cast, or is it just a publicity stunt?

…which I’m not, might claim MSNBC keeps Pat Buchanan on precisely because he makes conservatives look soooooo archaic, bigoted, and just plain dumb.

…makes films. He also collects films. Here’s a full hour culled from his vault of vintage toy commercials—Batteries Not Included.

…a brief, handy list of “Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature .” Essentially, they’re all reasons why serious lit is just about to die off.

My question: Has serious lit ever not been just about to die off?

Arcade, the Northwest architecture and design quarterly, devoted its summer issue to environmental themes.

But instead of hyping new “green” buildings and products, many of the issue’s essays (guest-edited by Charles Mudede and Jonathan Golob) propose a world with fewer buildings and products.

Granted, this year we’re not adding too much to the total world supply of them.

This is particularly the case with California professor Barry Katz’s closing piece, “The Promise of Recession.” Katz remembers how past designers such as William Morris sought to influence the world by promoting an honest, simple aesthetic. Then Katz imagines a near-future in which “every act of production and consumption stabilizes, or even adds to, our collective natural assets.”

This, he believes, means a lot fewer new products (of all kinds), hence a lot fewer people employed to design those products. But there would be work for “post-designers.” Some of these would revamp the already-built world to be more sustainable and more nature-friendly. Others would devise “an ecology of information, thinning the festering datamass and rehabilitating the printed page.”

Similar themes are posited by Golob in “Green On Wheels.” He argues that today’s gasoline-powered automobiles are just about as efficient as they can ever be, when you figure in the costs of refining and transporting the fuel. No, Golob avers, “carrying about two hundred pounds of human being in four thousand pounds of boxy steel, glass and aluminum” is an activity whose time will soon pass, by necessity, whether we like it or not.

Also in the issue:

• Three fantasy illustrations by Jed Dunkerly, depicting speculative attempts at “Engineering the Environment”—using sky-bound sprinkler systems to rain on farmland, using offshore “wind rigs” to alter air currents, and using construction cranes to plant fully-grown trees.
• Nicholas Veroli on the meaning of “catastrophe,” and whether any situation (including the present environmental crisis) can be called one before it’s past-tense.
• Erin Kendig on Krazy!, a book documenting last year’s Vancouver Art Gallery exhibit exploring the surrealistic sides of comics, animation, and related arts.
• Jim Cava reviewing Tony Fry’s book Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practice. Cava agrees with Fry’s assertion that the constant making and selling of what Cava calls “unnecessary consumables” is bad for the planet, no matter how “green” any individual product is claimed to be. Fry and Cava insist we need to redesign our whole consumerist culture, not merely individual consumer products.

If we take Fry’s case (and those of the other Arcade contributors) seriously, the human-built environment will change. It’s not just unwise to keep going the way we’ve gone this past century, it’s impossible.

The only question is what we’ll change into.

…at Seattle Post-Globe these days.

First, publisher Kery Murakami is asking his loyal readers to support the nonprofit news site with regular donations, not just one-time gifts. Murakami’s surely learning a bit about the intricacies of funding from his partner organization, KCTS.

In site content itself, Post-Globe’s got a good piece by P-I refugee Larry Lange about how the soon-to-open light rail line could change everything in the region.

Murakami talks to mayoral candidate Mike McGinn about the latter’s allegedly radical idea for a city-owned fiber optic broadband network, something Tacoma’s had for about a decade now.

And, oh yeah, there’s a little thing by me about artist lofts, the potential one bright spot in today’s real-estate slump. Really.