As promised last week, here are my thoughts about the potential end of daytime TV mainstay Guiding Light.

When I’ve told people I’d become a GL viewer, they’ve scoffed. Some of them could imagine me watching Days, One Life, GH sure enough, but Guiding Light? Really?

Yes, really.

I’ve known about the show all my life, but only tuned in to it sporadically until last February. That’s when GL abruptly switched to what its PR called a “new production model.” It was an effort to cut costs and gain youth appeal in one fell swoop. Hand-held minicams replaced the big studio cameras. Twangy alt-country guitars replaced the syrupy synth-string background music. Four-walled studio rooms and real outdoor locations replaced the flimsy old sets. The show’s characters were the same, but its whole audio-visual vocabulary completely changed.

Daytime’s oldest, squarest show became an immediate mess.

Which made it a lot more fun.

At first, the crew’s unfamiliarity with the new format made for some of the clumsiest scripted drama this side of the Canadian network CTV (or the dialogue scenes on “Skinemax” late-night cable shows). Because they were making five one-hour episodes a week, they had to leave in a lot of imperfect takes.

It didn’t help that the new GL’s launch coincided with the first “scab scripts,” written anonymously during the 14-week writers’ strike.

After the strike, the show’s writing staff was reshuffled. The “handheld” cameras got attached to mini-tripods and Steadicam-type devices. The lighting and the sound gradually improved. GL again became a competently made show.

None of this affected the ratings, which continued to drift downward along with the rest of the oldline networks’ fare.

The new format had made the show profitable again, chiefly because it needed far fewer crew people. But if the ratings wouldn’t turn around, that profitability wouldn’t last.

At the end of last year, the producers speeded up the show’s plot pace and brought back several fan-favorite actors. The ratings stabilized. The gossip on GL message boards implied the show might make it to another year’s renewal by the network.

It didn’t.

Procter & Gamble, which has owned and sponsored the show all this time, says it’s shopping GL around to any other broadcast/cable channel that might be persuaded take it. P&G is U.S. television’s biggest single adversiser, so it’s got more than a little clout in that department.

At TV Guide (the magazine, not the online listings service no longer affiliated with the magazine), an exec with Telenext (the ad-agency-owned production company that produces GL and As the World Turns under contract to P&G) says they really are working to find GL a new broadcast or cable home. Fans on online message boards are trying to make their own voices heard in this regard.

The thing is, daytime soaps have a business model that’s just as last-century as that of daily newspapers. Talk shows, judge shows, game shows, and “reality” shows can be made for as much or as little money as a channel’s got. Daily soaps are different.

GL’s on-screen credits list 127 names, including those of several veteran (and presumably well-paid) actors. Anything resembling “fat” in its budget was excised with the new format. GL can’t be made much cheaper and still maintain both its stars and its staggering productivity.

GL produced 253 episodes last year, with only one rerun episode (at Christmas). Until the Internet, there was no domestic aftermarket for these episodes. New episodes now stream on CBS’s site. Past installments from before the full switch to the new production model are on Hulu.

If you look at these older GL episodes (and the many more posted by fans on YouTube), you can see how much slower and duller they were before the new format.

The new GL looks and moves a lot more like my all-time favorite soap, the British workhorse Coronation Street. The look is more naturalistic (when characters are outside in the snow, it’s the real outsides and real snow!). The dialogue is more intimate, less histrionic.

It’s still an American soap with your basic American soap plot themes–treachery, betrayal, crime, adultery, emotional turmoil, and the lot. But it’s been evolving a new approach to these formulae, an approach more suited to modern TV/film tropes.

That’s a feat for the world’s longest continuously running dramatic production. Then again, it’s continually reinvented itself since it began on radio 72 years ago. There were several total cast turnovers even before the switch to TV in 1952. (GL was on KIRO-TV’s first-day schedule in 1958.)

With a new home, and perhaps a more rerun-friendly production schedule, GL could shine the way toward a new future for drama on TV.

…for the Seattle Times, that local bastion of patrician conservatism, to reprint an essay from The Nation, that national bastion of defiant liberalism?

It takes a long screed in favor of government assistance to newspapers, direct or indirect.

Its co-author, Robert McChesney, is a scholar of media history and a longtime advocate against corporate consolidation in news and entertainment. What nobody except me seems to remember is he was a co-founder of The Rocket, the local rag that proclaimed the hotness of Seattle rock bands back when Seattle Weekly still ignored anyone born after 1950. It can be hard for younger or more recently-arrived folks to imagine a Seattle where the leading “alternative” paper was more culturally conservative than the local dailies. The rise of Seattle rock in the late 1980s was as much about DIY media as it was about DIY music.

After McChesney went off to Wisconsin for his Ph.D, he expanded his beliefs in indie media into a scholarly history, in books and essays, of U.S. corporate media and its discontents.

So it’s strange to see his words interpreted, by their placement in the Seattle Times, as a plea to bail out organizations like the Seattle Times.

Anyone familiar with McChesney’s larger body of work knows that’s not his real goal.

My big Guiding Light essay will show up here Friday. But for now, some other televisual content. It’s my Vanishing Seattle plug segment on KING-TV’s Evening Magazine.

First, my daily paper goes away. Now, my favorite (US) soap is going away too. I’ll have more about this later in the week.

…the working name of the local news site being prepared by some 20 P-I refugees—SeattleBulldog.org.

The link you just saw goes to an article about it; the site itself is not active yet, and there’s no word when it will be.

The article’s from Current, a trade paper for public broadcasters. It’s about KCTS lending office space to the Bulldog folks, and about a similar arrangement in St. Louis.

The article notes the initial Bulldog staff will consist of about 20 ex-print journalists—exactly the same number as the postprint SeattlePI.com.

Joseph Tartakoff offers another look at the Post-Intelligencer‘s final days; while Alan Mutter observes Seattlepi.com’s instant startup as a stand-alone site.

…did indeed, according to the hereby-linked story, offer to take over the Post-Intelligencer, keep it going in print, and assume its ongoing losses. But Hearst wouldn’t have gotten any cash under the proposal.

I keep wanting to know what Go2Guy thought of the Huskies’, Zags’, and Sounders’ spectacular wins. He’s not there. What entertainments do Gene Stout and William Arnold want me to feel guilty about missing this weekend? No way to know. Tomorrow, the Sunday preview paper will bear only the Seattle Times name. Which, if any, P-I comics will be carried over into it?

…asks the musical question, “Why didn’t the P-I fold sooner?”

The simple answer: The Joint Operating Agreement with the Seattle Times, proposed in 1981 and first enacted in 1983, kept the P-I alive lo those many years, despite all the subsequent efforts by the Times to kill it.

There’s another question others have asked in recent weeks: Why didn’t the Times die and the P-I live?

For that answer you have to go even further back in time.

When Wm. Randolph Hearst Sr. bought the P-I in 1921, it was the dominant local paper. By 1930, the Times had more readers, and would always have more readers thereafter.

The Times successfully marketed itself as the local paper run by local people. Hearst, by this time, had turned his papers into cookie-cutter local variants on the same chain-imposed formula, from the typography and the logos to the emphasis on celebrity gossip and hard-right politics (hmm, sound like any current media firms we know?). While the Times shared many of Hearst’s editorial stances, it was run by a local family that hobnobbed with the local business titans and kept close ties with local politicians (especially the Republicans).

Hearst Sr. died in 1951. His heirs were generally more interested in magazines than in newspapers, and gave their local publishers more leeway. (They still had to run W.R. Hearst Jr.’s weekly “Editor’s Report” column, which (heart symbol)ed the Vietnam War and Augusto Pinochet.)

But caring less about newspapers also meant the Hearsts underfunded them. The pre-JOA P-I was manufactured on creaky old presses. They could only print and distribute so many papers between the end of evening sports events and the start of morning rush hour. The P-I never regained the natural market advantage of a morning paper.

But, while Hearst closed up shop in most of the cities in which its newspapers operated, it stayed in Seattle through thick and thin. As late as 2007, when it legally forced the Times to keep the JOA alive, Hearst wanted to hold on to its position in the Seattle media marketplace.

It was only with the national collapse of the daily-newspaper business model that Hearst’s current management swooped in and gave the order to surrender.

…agrees that the new Seattlepi isn’t new enough, but adds that its independence-from-paper can allow it to become a better online product.

…reminds us there’s still a big audience niche for printed news—folks who don’t work in offices and don’t have broadband.

…who now runs a media company in Iowa believes news organizations should operate less like baseball and more like hockey. No, I don’t know what he really means by that.

Today is the day many of us have dreaded these past nine and a half weeks.

Found a newspaper plopped down outside my door upon awakening. But it was the wrong one.

When this happened in the past, I could call a voice-mail tree system to get the paper I actually wanted.

But I can’t do that anymore.

I can only accept the large-print, smugly conservative rag aimed at the suburban white elderly market.

Or I can quit it.

As I’d expected, the new Seattlepi.com is no substitute for the P-I paper and website that were. Its “front page” photo today is a cute puppy. The long list of local headlines on its still-cluttered home page links mostly to wire copy, short police-beat briefs, and stories on other sites.

But that’s what Hearst apparently wanted all along during this tragedy—to keep the P-I brand alive as cheaply as possible, while breaking both the Joint Operating Agreement and the Newspaper Guild.

The new Seattlepi (and we might as well call it that, instead of the beloved two-initial nickname of its already mourned predecessor) has nowhere to go but up.

How much better can it become, and how quickly?

Specifically, can it get its online-only act together before one of the proposed indie post-P-I sites gets going? (If any of them do get going, that is.)

Jeff Bercovici at Conde Nast Portfolio believes the online-only seattlepi.com is “a worthy experiment” that “won’t work,” because he doesn’t expect Hearst to keep it going long enough to hit any fiscal stride.

And remember, loyal readers: The new P-I site really launches on Wednesday, and may or may not look like it does today.

However, I dread Wednesday morning, when the P-I withdrawal symptoms begin. Thankfully, I’ve stockpiled three volumes of Emmett Watson’s out-of-print memoirs. They may hold me for a little while.