Turns out there are actually two separate groups trying to jump-start new local news Web sites to unofficially replace the P-I, or to compete with any surviving remnant of the P-I site.

Besides the “Packers model” group mentioned here on Wednesday, there’s also a team of P-I staffers planning what Sandeep at Publicola calls a “non-profit news entity, primarily focused on investigative journalism covering the Western states, which would be funded by foundations and other major donors.” Its inspiration is ProPublica, a foundation-funded “non-profit newsroom” specializing in big national stories “with moral force.”

This site would spend money and, more importantly, time on the kind of original research that commentary-based news sites simply aren’t set up to perform. It could also offer serious political, economic, and civic-planning news for a readership of hardcore wonks, activists, and organizers.

This product and market differentiation is good.

We don’t need two or three new organizations doing exactly what the P-I‘s done but on skeletal budgets. But two or three new organizations, each taking complementary but different approaches to telling us what’s going on—now that’s microbrew news.

Finally, someone’s announced a concrete (albeit still liquid concrete) plan to start a new, pro local-news site in town, no matter what Hearst finally chooses to do with the Post-Intelligencer brand.

A group of P-I vets, including reporter Kerry Murakami, are planning a local news site to be partly funded by voluntary reader “memberships.” They’re calling their scheme “the Packers Model,” after the Green Bay Packers’ fan-ownership structure. (The site’s organization may or may not end up emulating the Packers’ system of many small shareholders. It could, instead, be set up as a cooperative or a nonprofit.)

They’re going ahead with this plan without waiting to hear Hearst’s plan. This is good. Hearst is acting exactly within its reputation as one of the nation’s most secretive corporations. It could close the print P-I any day now (or any month now), and could relaunch or scrap the paper’s web site concurrently.

The Stranger‘s Slog team has its collective doubts about the plan, and about the “Packers model.” Why would thousands of individual citizens plunk down $25 a month, or even $25 a year, for a free-access Web site bent on carrying on the P-I legacy without its name?

I’ll tell you why. It’s because, while this new site probably won’t get the P-I‘s name, ad accounts, or archives, it would have some of the paper’s best known staffers. (They don’t know which ones yet; that all depends on whom they can recruit, and whom, if anyone, Hearst keeps around.)

It would be responsible, and responsive, to its stakeholders.

It would cover local/regional politics for readers who really give a darn about local/regional politics. Less heat; more light. More wonky details of the legislative process. More explanations about why we should become interested in, say, Port of Seattle mismanagement or a suburban mayoral race.

This is what I meant last week, when I compared the difference between the new news and the old news to that between microbreweries and the megaproducers of swill lagers.

Like microbrewers, new-news organizations will be smaller but more plentiful. They’ll craft their product with more care. They’ll appeal to a wider range of specific preferences/interests.

And, yeah, most of their product will have a stronger kick.

This “Packers model” team and a rump P-I site could both exist. Or one or the other, or neither.

My wish is for as many “voices” as the Web can carry.

Which, while finite, is a very large number indeed.

…the forthcoming posthumous/unfinished third novel by my main man David Foster Wallace touches upon a theme with which I’d recently been obsessed.

The novel is about people who find their mindfulness by taking on ultra-routine jobs at the Internal Revenue Service.

As D.T. Max quotes in The New Yorker, Wallace’s idea was that “Bliss—a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.”

I haven’t been pursuing employment at the IRS. But I have had a sequence of temp gigs for the county that involved equally rote tasks, performed accurately and performed all day. I found a great peace in simply going somewhere, doing something, and doing it well.

It may well be that my current search for renumerative employment could lead me back into the stress-filled realm of hustling for individual bottom-feeder freelance gigs.

But I’d enjoyed the clerical equivalent of chopping wood and carrying water. I could really do it some more.

…(or, rather, to a blog item reposted at CNN.com), “Any day now, women are expected to become the majority of the American workforce.”

…and his call for a huge uprising against Obama’s stimulus plan? And the small but well publicized “tea party” protests held in several major cities soon thereafter? Turns out they were all carefully planned by a network of right-wing PR groups, funded by a brother team of far-right billionaires.

The legendary radio commentator began his national career in 1951 with what, at the time, was a standard program format—15 minutes of news headlines mixed with personal opinions. Harvey outlasted all of that format’s other, now forgotten practitioners (Lowell Thomas, Fulton Lewis Jr., Gabriel Heatter, etc.). Like many of these forebearers, Harvey maintained an attitude of just-plain-folks populism while he advocated conservative policies that pleased big corporate advertisers. And like a lot of radio conservatives past and present, his “hot” personality translated poorly into the “cooler” aesthetic of television.

Both the Weekly and the Stranger have big feature stories this week about the P-I‘s probable-but-maybe-not demise next month. Neither story contains any actual info about the paper’s fate. If anyone at the P-I or parent Hearst Corp. knows anything, they’re not saying.

This could just mean Hearst is being the secretive, private bunch it’s been since ol’ Wm. Randolph H. died in ’51.

Or it might mean a deal’s being slowly, quietly negotiated with a potential purchaser; said deal may, if it exists, still collapse or succeed before we hear about it.

Or it might mean Hearst’s seriously thinking about maintaining an online-only P-I but is still sorting out what form it might take.

Or it might not mean a darned thing.

One actual piece of news in the Stranger article concerned an attempt by the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild to explore starting up its own local-news Web site. No matter how the P-I saga plays out, we need more local info sources, not fewer.

…print news can survive by transitioning to digital printing, using what are essentially souped-up laser printers in multiple locations—perhaps even a printing machine at every sales outlet.

Small acknowledges this would require great capital expenditures from what are often debt-laden publishers. He also acknowledges that digital printing’s currently more expensive per copy than offset printing, and a lot more expensive than the hi-volume printing used by newspapers. But he thinks that could change.

Paul also briefly mentions Printcasting, a fledgling software platform that promises to easily turn ad-supported Web sites into ad-supported .pdf files for either home or commercial printing.

The demo images at Printcasting’s site reveal some pretty bland looking design templates. I hope the final software, when released, offers more visual flexibility.

Speaking of which, page design for 8.5 x 11-sized paper pages or screens is a far different animal from design for current Web pages, which in turn is a far different animal from design for broadsheet or tabloid pages. A “newspaper” designed at that size for home PC printers or for “eInk” devices would likely take on a more magazine-y or newsletter-y appearance. I can think of only one print publication in that size that maintains a poppy, newsy aesthetic—The Hollywood Reporter.

As Eli Sanders at The Stranger‘s Slog notes, the P-I Web site’s ever so slightly added more links to outside news sites. Sanders then wonders out loud whether this is a harbinger of a future online-only P-I remaking itself into a local version of the Huffington Post.

Paul Andrews has expanded thoughts about this prospect. Go read his stuff yourself, then come back here.

Back so soon?

OK. HuffPo’s a great site, with healthy readership figures and ad revenues. Andrews is right to nail “news as personality” as one leg of its business-model tripod. (The other two are original blog entries and carefully chosen links to other sites’ news stories.)

It’s the “personality” that differentiates HuffPo from all the headline aggregators out there. At its heart is Arianna Huffington herself (even though she lives in LA and the site’s produced in NY). Her personality, and her range of interests, define the site’s general political POV, its curation of content, and its audience niche.

But despite its slogan (“The Internet Newspaper”), it’s not a source of much primary information. It has a couple of staff reporters, and it pays the Associated Press to post AP articles on its own pages, but most of its news items are carefully chosen (and re-headlined) links to stuff researched and written by others. HuffPo’s blog posts are mostly original (a few are simultaneously “cross-posted” at other sites), but none of them are paid for.

For all its accomplishments, HuffPo’s not the elusive answer to the conundrum of online news reporting and how to pay for same.

HuffPo’s formula, by itself, isn’t going to preserve the P-I as a professionally staffed newsroom.

But it might provide two ingredients toward the final recipe.

One is establishing mutually beneficial relationships with bloggers and solo Web journalists.

The other, more subtle, component is a site’s “voice” (or, to be coldly corporate, its brand image).

The P-I already has a stronger voice than any other mainstream print daily in the region. Thus, it has a head start in this department.

For another angle on branding, consider the Northwest beer industry.

Around the time the P-I shotgun-married the Times in the papers’ first Joint Operating Agreement, the first local microbreweries (Redhook and Grant’s) started up.

At the time, our region already boasted five major breweries, all producing nearly-identical watery lagers, differentiated mostly by advertising. The last of those breweries, Olympia, closed in 2003.

Instead, WA and OR now boast a lively array of smaller outfits creating a vast array of products. These products really are unique, not merely advertised as such.

As news moves online and becomes more decentralized, it will, by necessity, morph from the verbal equivalent of the old stubby-bottle Oly into a wider palette of flavors, crafted on a more artisanal basis.

I’m reminded of how Weimar-era Berlin had as many as 70 daily newspapers. These weren’t all huge endeavors. Some were raucous little scandal sheets. Others were intellectual and ideological journals. But each of them scraped out its own piece of the market.

That’s what news sites will need to do.

Jack Shafer believes there’s good precedent for charging users for online content. But it has to be content people really, really want, and it should be packaged in some form other than what we now know of as Web pages.

The “general news” sections of newspapers, and their affiliated Web sites, typically provide the opposite of what an online user could be persuaded to pay for. Based on theories of storytelling that go back to the days of street-corner newsboys, papers slice and dice the local events of the day into simple narratives that can support flashy headlines and cute or shocking images.

Consumers, we’ve learned, will pay for content that will guide them toward deciding where to invest and/or gamble (cf. the paid-access portions of wsj.com and espn.com). Business people will pay for information that’s relevant to their particular industries (cf. the Puget Sound Business Journal).

How can these lessons be applied to coverage of local government, politics, civic planning, social trends, and spot news?

That will be a topic for a later post.

…Nicholas Carr believes ad-supported online news will become profitable once the supply/demand imbanance is resolved—i.e., when a lot more news organizations go out of business.

The Newspaper Guild’s looking into midwifing a Post-Intelligencer employee buyout, which, at the paper’s recently-announced financial burn rate, would obligate each of the paper’s current employees to $80,000 or so in annual losses. On the surface it sounds like a no-go from the get-go; but an employee buyout, perhaps with outside backing added, could be one way to keep the paper (or at least its Web site) alive through the long process of hashing a new business model together.

Meanwhile, Hearst is rumored to still be considering a small-staffed online P-I, but is still weeks away from announcing anything.

And, from way back in December, here’s David Byrne comparing what’s happening to the newspaper biz these days to what happened to the record biz in the ’80s and ’90s—consolidation, buyouts, corporate debt, layoffs, and an institutional death spiral.

…(a population subset that again includes me) should view the CNBC documentary House of Cards, next airing at 5 and 9 p.m. PT tonight (Monday). In two hours, you learn just how the mortgage bubble grew and burst, taking countless common citizens with it. In short, greedy bankers + unregulated markets + creative math nerds = global fiscal disaster.

Dave Winer, software entrepreneur and untiring self-promoter, is one of those who believe the future of journalism is not only online but unpaid: “The key is to look at all those empty newsrooms, and to envision, before they completely shut down, filling them with volunteers—who we can teach to write the news.”

It should be noted that Winer, who calls himself one of the pioneers of both blogging and podcasting, has long believed Web content makers shouldn’t expect renumeration, at least not directly, from their sites. The most one can hope for, in Winer’s model, is publicity for one’s offline for-profit ventures. When he’s asked about people whose real work, whose “product,” IS their words/images/sounds, Winer invariably changes the subject to how the Grateful Dead sold lots of concert tickets by freely allowing bootleg tapes. As if the Dead’s business model could even have worked for non-“jam band” musical acts, let alone for writers or illustrators.

It’s only natural for newspaper people to think in a formula-driven, routine-driven manner. It’s how they’ve gotten their product out every day these past decades.

Inventing new products/services for the new media age takes a different kind of thinking. A lot of people are trying to retrain newspaper people into this new way. They include the Next Newsroom Project, Brandon Mendelson, Mark Potts, Alan Mutter, Steve Outing, Philip Meyer, Jane Stevens, Dan Vigil, Jeff Jarvis, Clay Shirky, my pal Paul Andrews, and ex-Microsoftie Michael Kinsley.

These folks have a consensus on many points. For instance, they all believe online news is both more populist and more niche-market than print news.

They disagree on by-the-slice or “micropayment” systems for news sites. Some believe they’d probably be more trouble than they’d be worth. Others, including Andrews, believe a workable scheme for subscriptions or one-shot purchases can be figured out; it’ll just take a little ingenuity.

As per the local situation with the endangered Post-Intelligencer, we’re talking about three scenarios here:

1) Preserving both the print and online P-I under new ownership, with the goal of making the combined operation self-supporting or close to it;

2) Preserving seattlepi.com alone, either under Hearst or new management;

3) Starting one or more all-new, all-online info ventures.

A lot of the local community talk this past month has concerned option 3, the only one that could proceed no matter what Hearst chooses to do.

Unlike a lot of folks in this conversation, I believe option 1 is both preferable and possible.

But it’ll take new ownership willing and able to shoulder continuing losses while evolving the paper and the Web site into new models. These models may or may not include online subscriptions or per-story payments. They may or may not include .pdf files or downloads for “e-ink” readers such as Amazon’s Kindle.

They will include many of the steps the P-I‘s already begun—staff and freelance blogs, other online-only content, community outreach, all-day site updates.

I’d revise or dump the joint operating agreement with the Seattle Times, a company that’s recently been proven lousy at generating ad revenue.

But I’d keep a printed paper, every damn day. A print product adds brand value to the Web property. It enables many kinds of combo ad and sponsorship deals. It keeps the P-I tangibly visible in stores, restaurants, buses, and street corners. And there’s still money to be made in print ads and inserts.

But the online dog would wag the print tail.

The site would have the full coverage and more, from a professional reporting team plus stringers and community bloggers.

The paper would be a compact-sized digest (perhaps free, perhaps without home delivery). It would offer the key pieces of the Web site’s coverage, for those readers who still prefer print. This would bring the print product at least closer to profitability, keeping the newsroom more-or-less intact while the quest for an optimal online business model continues.

As we mentioned on Monday, part of the key to holding a loyal online audience (and, potentially, commanding higher online ad rates) is to create a more direct, more honest relationship with that audience. Among other things, it means offering material people really want to know about.

The sports, business, arts, and lifestyle departments already offer plenty of that. There are people who really want to know about the new Seahawks coach, or about who’s performing in the clubs tonight, or about Starbucks’ latest marketing gimmick.

The “general news” section needs to become just as needed.

And it can.

The national success of Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos, and their brethren show that politics, economics, and similarly mundane topics can draw and keep enthralled audiences, if they’re presented by writers who can tell compelling stories.

Again, the P-I, with its continuing heritage of oldtime Hearstian populism, usually has more compelling local news content than the Times. The latter remains stuck in its longtime “what the Chamber of Commerce wants to tell you” mode of operation.

Here’s my list of what should be the essential reporting beats of any major local news operation, with or without the P-I brand. Some of them might be outsourceable to freelancers. Some of them might be doubled-up (one person servicing two or more beats). Your own idealized local newsroom might swap out some of these assignments for others:

Local news:

• City government
• County government
• State government
• Legal/courts
• Seattle neighborhoods
• The region (Eastside, south end, north end)
• Police
• Transportation
• Science/biotech
• Environment
• K-12 education
• Higher education
• Political columnists (2)
• Human interest columnists (2)
• Investigative unit (2)
• Breaking news/general assignment (at least 2)

Opinion:

• Opinion editor/columnist
• Forums/comments editor
• Editorial cartoonist

Business/economy:

• Editor/columnist
• Aerospace
• Tech
• Retail
• Real estate
• Labor/workplace
• Economy
• Port
• General assignment

Arts:

• Editor/columnist
• Film
• Stage
• Pop music
• Classical/dance/opera
• Visual art
• Books
• TV/radio
• Restaurants
• Calendars/general assignment

Life:

• Editor (and syndicated-features buyer)
• Food
• Fashion
• Travel
• Home/garden
• Outdoors
• Health
• Culture/lifestyles

Sports:

• Editor/columnist (2)
• Mariners
• Seahawks
• UW football
• Men’s college basketball
• Women’s college basketball/Storm
• High school sports
• Sounders/general assignment
• Participant sports/outdoor recreation

And, of course, there’d be ad sellers (all of whom would work on both print and online ads), IT people, admin staff, designers, a few photographers (though reporters would also be equipped with digicams), and, yes, copy editors.

This scheme would preserve at least half of today’s P-I staff positions. That’s a lot more than what some observers believe is feasible.

But this particular concept is about holding the line, preserving the ongoing production of first-level, relevant local information while developing a new business model to support it.

And who’s going to do this?

My amateur number-crunching skills tell me this plan could cut the P-I‘s losses within a year, from more than $1 million a month to less than $300,000. This shortfall should drop further as new revenue sources develop. (These might include online section sponsorships, paid access to investment databases, direct online sales of merchandise and event tickets, and, eventually, paid online subscriptions.)

But it’ll lose money before it makes money. Like any new or reinvented business venture.

It would probably take more than one investor to shoulder this. (Or, if the nonprofit route’s chosen, more than one donor.)

We’ll need a coalition of the local mighty and the local good. People closer to the P-I than I are already trolling some of these still-rich people.

But there’s one name I’d especially troll for if I were them.

It’s a guy who’s currently in the business of charging for content. Digital content. Verbal digital content. Ephemeral, periodical, verbal digital content.

Don’t call me, Mr. Bezos. You should contact Roger Oglesby direct.