…my pal Glenn Fleishman believes the paper’s online revenues, at the industry’s current low ad rates, simply can’t support a newsgathering staff of more than 10 or so people.

Of course, if the P-I were to go web-only with fewer than 10 percent of its current personnel, the resulting product would likely generate far fewer online readers.

My thoughts:

A purely online local-news venture is a far different beast from a printed daily with a Web presence. It will need to be conceived, designed, and nurtured (yes, that includes startup-period losses) as its own thang. For the P-I to evolve into such a product, it will need deep-pocketed owners willing to steer it through this morphosis without immediately, excessively chopping the staff (the P-I’s one valuable asset).

U.S. daily papers evolved, especially during the local-monopoly era of the late 20th century, as bland mass-market products intended to be everything to everybody. Online content is far more of a niche business.

Seattlepi.com would need to evolve into a niche operation—or several niche operations. That’s why I previously suggested the news/opinion, business, sports, arts, and lifestyle departments be treated as separate sites, with separate balance sheets.

And each of these sites (subsites, if you will) will need to establish a newer, more direct rapport with its audience. (The P-I has already done a lot of preliminary work in this regard.)

The business, sports, arts, and lifestyles subsites could each be run by a dozen or so journalists (including those unsung heroes, copy editors) with about the breadth and depth of coverage the print P-I currently enjoys in those departments.

What the Seattle Times used to call “General News” is different. It encompasses everything from politics and the environment to human-interest profiles and pictures of scenic sunsets.

It’s the part that would/will need to evolve the most in a transition to an all-online or predominantly-online news space.

More on this later.

But, for now, back to Fleishman’s main argument: Yes, online banner ad rates are too low to support professional team content creation. These rates will likely stay low for the near future; even after the general economy improves, marketers will still think cheap, and sites based upon unpaid or “aggregated” content are cheaper to operate than pro sites.

Pro news sites will have to stand out from the deluge if they’re ever going to command higher rates.

Cutting the reporting team down to the level of a small group blog would hurt seattlepi.com’s chief point of differentiation.

Keeping a daily print edition, even in a digest version, would help promote the seattlepi.com brand.

In any event, there’s going to be a monetary burn rate. In the early dot-com mania, there were plenty of investors, here and nationally, willing to lose money up front in order to build their brands. Is there anybody like that left today?

Meanwhile, the P-I and Times have shrunk their daily classified sections to a single page in large type. The last time the local dailies had only one page of want ads was during the nadir of WWII paper rationing.

Time’s Walter Isaacson has what he believes is a surefire way to preserve journalism and other “content” industries—get online consumers to pay for what they get.

Meanwhile, the Puget Sound Biz Journal confirms what we’ve known all along, that any P-I buyer would need the capacity to absorb huge ongoing losses while reshaping the operation into something more fiscally stable.

…from the handsome Seattle City Council chambers. The room, and the new City Hall it’s in, may go down in history as among the last huge publicly-funded examples of New Seattle world-class-osity before economic conditions made such statements fiscally obsolete.

Today’s meeting is of the council’s Culture, Civil Rights, Health and Personnel Committee. (I wouldn’t have put all those functions in one heap, but what do I know?)

Nick Licata heads this committee. Jean Godden and Tom Rasmussen are also here. Right now, they’re going through regular committee business, to wit interviewing potential members of a LGBT health task force. The item I’m here for, a panel discussion on saving daily newspapers, will follow later in the meeting.

So let me give you a verbal image of the chambers, since many of you haven’t been here. It’s a big, bright, uber-clean room finished in light wood tones, glass, polished steel, and black vinyl seat covers.

Now the newspaper panel’s being seated.

Your panelists are:

• Roger Simpson and Doug Underwood, UW communications profs.
• Liz Brown, Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild.
• Tracey Record, West Seattle Blog.
• Anne Bremner, co-chair of Committee for a Two-Newspaper Town.
• David Brewster, founder of Crosscut and Seattle Weekly.
• Jennifer Towney, Peoria (IL) Newspaper Guild (by phone).
• Beth Hester, station manager, Seattle Channel.

Licata’s now reading from Jim McDermott’s P-I guest op-ed. I’ll post a link to it later. (Update: Here it is.)

Now, Licata’s reciting statistics about the Huffington Post. It’s more popular than all but eight newspaper sites. He didn’t mention that HuffPo still doesn’t pay its bloggers.

Licata sez he loves reading print, but acknowledges “we may all have to adopt to our changing ways.”

Prof. Roger Simpson tells of his long career working for newspapers and being a scholar about them. We’ve had daily newspapers for 220 years. Presently 1,400 dailies in the US, down 200 from 20 years ago. Total readership’s steadily declined also. In 1900, most households got 2-3 papers a day. Now, less than half even get one. “The newspaper though has always been the center for the consciousness of a community.”

The government, Simpson notes, has been wary of regulating this industry from an antitrust standpoint, until joint operating agreements were OK’d in 1972. Twenty-nine JOAs eventually formed. Today there are only nine JOAs left, including Seattle’s.

Prof. Underwood continues the talk about the industry’s changes. The newspaper we know is a product of an industrial era, and is subject to changes in technologies. JOAs, he says, were undermined when the Feds allowed the second papers in St. Louis and Miami to shut down but continue to share profits with the surviving papers of their towns.

Underwood says local-monopoly papers have become stodgy, and are having a hard time transforming themselves. Sites like HuffPo draw readers more effectively than papers’ sites with personalities and panache. But sites like HuffPo “depend on existing news companies to provide the product they riff off of.” In Norway the govt. subsidizes second newspapers in major cities. Should we?

Bremner: We started the Committee for a Two-Newspaper Town [CTNT] in ’03. Every citizen has a public responsibility. There’s so many important issues for us in having two newspapers in this town. We were pleased to be involved all the way in preserving the P-I for a while.

Bremner introduces Kathy George, one of her committee colleagues (and a onetime P-I reporter). She says they’re considering all options. A few ideas people are kicking around: Finding a civic-minded buyer or group to buy the P-I. The city council could provide leadership in guiding a purchase. Creating an endowment or non-profit to support in-depth reporting on local government and other community interests. Creating an employee-owned newspaper, such as the one in Omaha. You’ve read in local blogs about the possibility of creating a local public development authority. An online-only P-I is better than no P-I. But CTNT calls on Hearst to reveal its intentions as soon as possible, and to publicly reveal whether Hearst is making its annual, required $1 million payment to reserve its first right to buy the Seattle Times, should the latter be offered for sale. The public’s help in seeking these answers is invited.

Godden asks if an online-only P-I would still be part of a JOA. Kathy says the terms of the JOA are ambiguous about this.

Jane (sorry, no last name recorded here), another CTNT associate, asks Underwood about Norway’s subsidized papers. Underwood says there are official barriers keeping governments from influencing editorial content in these papers.

Licata asks Brown about Hearst announcing it may fire all the P-I staff. Brown mentions the Rocky Mountain News, Detroit News, and Chicago Sun-Times facing potential demise. The Baltimore Sun and Minneapolis Star-Tribune are in bankruptcy.

Newspaper Guild membership has gone from 820 to 420 members locally since ’00. Unionized press workers have gone from 140 to 43. Some 120 P-I jobs may be lost.

Brown says the Guild’s negotiating severance conditions with the P-I. She says Hearst said they didn’t know whether they’ll keep the option to buy the Times. “You don’t hear a lot of journalists out there talking about what’s happening… I don’t think they feel empowered to talk about the conditions of their industry.”

Towney, on the phone from Illinois, expresses her alarm about Starbucks’ layoffs. “Coffee and newspapers go together.” She lauds the value of reporters who have the time/money for long term research. Models she’s explored: Employee ownership, co-op ownership (“serving members over profits, in this case readers”), and non-profit ownership, a la NPR. She notes four papers in the US are owned by charitable trusts, but the papers themselves are still organized as for-profit entities. Her Peoria group opted to explore a hybrid of the three models. It would have both employee and community stockholders, and would be tied somehow to a subsidized non-profit. The Peoria paper had been employee-owned in the 1980s, then sold to a chain for $175 million. But that chain put it up for sale in 2006. The staff looked to the community for help. The paper was bought by another chain instead. The Peoria Guild held a public meeting to gather support. “The only thing stopping us from putting it out to the community is we don’t have a credible [business] model if we run a paper the way papers are run the way they’ve been run.”

Towney continues: They next explored an “L3C” organization. “Low profit limited liability corporation.” A foundation can invest in it. Its charter says community service comes before profit. Companies under it must create jobs and provide vital social benefits. “It opens up new funding channels.” The IRS, though, has consistently denied non-profit status to newspapers. Congress is now about to introduce a bill to allow L3Cs nationally.

Record: When you talk about saving newspapers, you really talk about saving journalism. Newspapers as a product and an organizational model may be becoming obsolete.

There are new ways of news gathering and dissemination coming up. In some ways they may be better than newsprint. Her site and similar ones around town have 100,000 regular readers; specifically in neighborhood-specific info. “We are serving our neighborhoods on a granular level to a greater extent than may have ever been done before.” Don’t be afraid of the future necessarily. Find ways to support journalism, the people who do the incredible work. This may be in blogs and smaller online operations. Her site is finally paying its way. Also: More discussion should be put into increasing information access to seniors and low-income people who don’t have computers.

Brewster: The news industry needs to find other bases of revenue other than advertising. The promise of flow of advertising revenue to the web is still a promise but it has slowed down. There are six other local web-only news sites around the country. In San Diego, Dallas, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Vancouver. The ones that are doing well are non-profit. Crosscut has converted into a non-profit corporation, Crosscut Public Media. It goes from one revenue stream, advertising, to three. The others are membership, as in public radio, and grants.

“Allow these web developments to flourish instead of planting new big oak trees to overshadow them.” Good stuff will grow underneath that if you let them and don’t impose solutions.

Young readers are very adept at navigating this [online] landscape. It doesn’t take the kind of mediation and paternalism these older models have provided.

Relax a bit. Allow the creativity, the ingenuity to figure what are good ways this will come about. It probably won’t be the Twin Peaks model of two equally large newspapers. It will probably be something with one large peak and 14 smaller peaks.
Licata asks Brewster, are these web projects hobbies for their contributors or real careers? Brewster: about three quarters of Crosscut’s writers are reimbursed, some at wages that can get you through life, some below that. The model is definitely to pay writers. Record: Our writers are paid, and we expect pro journalism standards from them.

Hester: Our footprint is local. While we don’t have great numbers of viewers on cable, online our numbers have grown tremendously; 5 million hits last year, twice the year before. We’re definitely trying to accommodate the transition to online. I don’t mean just taking our television product and putting it online, but providing additional information and interaction.

I don’t have the answer for print, other than this: We’ve actually been the beneficiary of corporate media downsizing. We’ve been able to use the resources of very talented people who’ve worked here in print and TV.

Yet we certainly don’t have the capacity to make up for the loss of talent in investigative reporting that comes from print journalism.

Underwood talks about the need for “the public sphere.” The Super Bowl’s the only place anymore where you can run ads that everyone will see. For many years, our democracy has thrived despite horrible coverage by the newspapers. Our UW interns provide half the Olympia press corps of the entire state. There are ways to do better journalism than has been done by the dailies. But where do we re-create the “public sphere,” some viable place which carries a sense of importance.
Someone in the audience asks via a notecard if the P-I could become a regional insert in the NY Times. Underwood remarks that we’d have to see it the NYT remains viable.

Brewster lauds the cooperation and “coop-etition” among online news sites/blogs.
Bremner: It’s not blogs or papers. It’s both. But there’s civic pride at stake here. We’re losing a part of Seattle.
Godden asks Simpson about the role of universities in supporting an independent voice in local journalism. Simpson notes the UW’s intern programs and other ways the U connects to the community. Underwood notes the Univ. of Missouri runs the “second paper” in Columbia MO. Serious journalists in all these areas will need to get together and figure out what the new model is.

Record notes corporate ownership of media isn’t necessarily something to save at all costs.

Licata asks how these new models will allow people the time for investigative reporting, and jokingly states, “the city of Seattle is not going to buy the P-I.” Yet he’d like to play a role in finding a solution. “I think at least we helped in this event to raise awareness.”

I’m back home now. What did we learn from this?

We learned about L3C corporations. A quick online search seems to imply these currently exist only in Vermont. And we heard a lot of people give general ideas on how the journalism profession as a whole may be going in the next few years, or how they wished it would be going.

We didn’t hear any concrete schemes to save the printed P-I and/or seattlepi.com.

But then again, it’s still Hearst’s thang, to sell or scrap as it wishes.

I wish there was some real civic leadership around here, to herd and announce a big group of civic-minded investors to first take the P-I local, then to mold the product and the organization into something with staying power.

The Puget Sound Business Journal has a lengthy look back at the comical tragedy that was Washington Mutual’s rise and fall. As you might expect, it involves a corporate culture in which fiscal prudence was equated with cowardice, and in which the only “values” were profit and growth. Shouldn’t we have learned this from Enron and the early dot-coms?

While I’d really like the printed Seattle Post-Intelligencer to continue, and believe it can continue, the real issue in this discussion goes beyond the fate of newsprint.

There’s nothing in the Constitution that says the constant search for Truth has to be subsidized by the purveyors of subdivision homes and used cars. Nor did the ancient Greek gods proclaim that investigative reporting need be in the same package as recipes, box scores, and comic strips.

The American newspaper as we’ve known it since the 1950s is not really what we’re trying to save.

What we’re trying to preserve and strengthen is local news coverage.

It’s just that a workable 21st century business model has yet to magically appear that would support teams of full-time professional journalists.

So we continue to flail and stumble and experiment.

So let’s give a hearty 1/20/08 welcome to David Goldstein, Josh Feit, and Sandeep Kaushik as they launch the newest such experiment, Publicola.

On Thursday evening, I attended a Metblogs Seattle meetup at the new Oddfellows bar on Capitol Hill. The meeting’s premise: Start the conversation on what we need in terms of local news in the Internet age. P-I staffers Monica Guzman and Michelle Nicolosi were on hand to directly receive ideas on what a post-print seattlepi.com ought to do.

But the meetup’s organizers want your input too. Live and in person even. They’re putting together a town meeting, basically as soon as they can nail down a location. Stay tuned to nonewsisbadnews.org for details.

Meanwhile, here are more thoughts about the P-I‘s potential fate, from Time magazine and from Laura Porto Stockwell.

Stockwell comments on a KUOW panel discussion, during which someone apparently repeated the figure, previously quoted here yesterday, that an online-only P-I might only keep 20 journalists employed. Stockwell seems confident such a skeleton crew can still produce a copmelling product by deftly coordinating the work of volunteer citizen journalists.

As I’ve already said, I want seattlepi.com to remain a professional site. Bloggers and citizen journalists are terrific, but there are also sounds that can only be made by a well-rehearsed orchestra. I want to preserve as much of the P-I talent pool as possible. Yes, that includes copy editors. (Believe me, I know how valuable they are.)

However, I also see the value of close-to-the-ground contributors such as neighborhood bloggers in bringing reader interest back to local news. Any surviving newspaper and/or news site will have to deal with with I call the “willfully ignorant,” those “smart,” “hip” urbanites who only read the New York fuckin’ Times and only listen to NP fuckin’ R. You’ve gotta get these people to care about what’s going on HERE.

First, I’d like to again acknowledge all the other local folks who’ve also proclaimed their admiration for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and its seattlepi.com Web site, and who want to see at least the latter continue.

Today’s additions to this list include Meghan Peters, Dylan Wilbanks, and my ol’ pal Grant Alden.

Peters hopes Hearst will continue seattlepi.com as a laboratory in transitioning local pro journalism to the Internet era.

Wilbanks offers his own formula for an online-only news organization. In his vision it might only employ 20 or so people to do what absolutely cannot be duplicated by bloggers.

Alden, fresh from having to euthenize the print version of music magazine No Depression, is somewhat more downbeat about the Web’s ability to support quality original content:

“Right now the web is a parasite, killing its host.… All this citizen journalist stuff is lovely, except that it assumes that all writing is functionally the same, or that the web is a meritocracy, or that people will keep contributing for free because it’s fun and they have nothing else to do. Which, in this economy, may be true, but I wouldn’t want to build a long-term business model around that notion.…”

I happen to believe there’s life in pro content.

Even in print.

Even in daily newsprint.

Even as an urban “second paper.”

And so, as I’ve promised all week, here’s how I’d revamp the printed P-I:

• “Ich bin ein Berliner.” The P-I and Seattle Times have narrowed their page size in recent years, and (in a move announced prior to the P-I‘s announcement of potential sale or closure) will narrow their page size again by another inch next month.Take that narrower width, then crop four or five inches from the page height, and you’ve got the “Berliner” format. It’s popular in France (Le Monde), Britain (The Guardian), and elsewhere in the world. It has more impact and design versatility than a tabloid, but is still compact and easy to hold and carry. It can be produced in either an unfolded, one-section version or a folded, multi-section version.
• Stop trying to be everything to everyone. Let the Web site contain the total product of the staff. Turn the printed paper into something intensely focused on local/regional politics, policies, and people.
• Be bright and bold. The P-I, with its Hearst-populist roots, already does a better job of this than the Times. Keep pushing in this direction with powerful photos and compelling stories. Make a newspaper something people want to read again.
• The print product should promote the online product, not the other way around. Let the site have the full coverage. Let a leaner paper version be the tease that recruits more online readers.
• Slash expensive home delivery, except perhaps on Thursday and/or Friday.
• Revise, or dump, the Joint Operating Agreement. The Times could continue to print and deliver the P-I, but as a contractor. Bring ad sales back in-house (you can’t possibly do a worse job of selling ads than the Times is doing these days).
• Turn Saturday into a “Weekend Edition,” with think-piece essays and entertainment features that would otherwise go into a Sunday paper.
• Explore a Sunday edition that would be the same size as a weekday paper. Perhaps it could run only during college-football season, the only time of year when there’s something you know will happen on a Saturday afternoon that people will want to read about the next morning.
• Be a real alternative to the Times. Not in the formula of an “alt weekly,” but as a dynamic, well-written, well-edited product with its own mission and its own audience. If the Times continues to be a paper by and for suburbanites, the P-I can be the paper for those who prefer city life, and for those in the suburbs and exurbs who look to the city for cultural and civic leadership.

With these and other innovations, the print P-I‘s financial losses can be pared down to a level that could be supported by a consortium of local angel investors. With anything resembling an economic recovery, such a printed paper might even pay its way for a while, until new digital-delivery mechanisms make it fully obsolete.

So far, I’ve delineated the bigger reasons why Hearst wants to stop printing the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. I’ve also mentioned the efforts by several concerned citizens to make a case for saving the P-I at least in online form, asserting not just why but how to preserve the state’s oldest news-gathering organization.

Today and tomorrow, I join these hypothesizers, such as Brian Reich, Todd Bishop, and the paper’s managing editor David McCumber, in mapping out how I’d restructure the P-I for short-term survival and long-term growth.

First, the Web side. After all, digital delivery’s where all ephemeral media’s eventually going, though it won’t necessarily always be in what we now know of as Web pages.

But despite their typographic and design limitations, Web pages are the dominant medium for online written matter, at least this year.

And, at least for now, Web pages with pro content on them are supported by on-screen ads. Despite current setbacks, that’s still a market space with a lotof remaining growth potential. As my fellow blogger David Goldstein has noted, “People will always need to sell things. They’ll always need to get their messages out.”

I was involved with Goldstein and several others in 2007-8, in an ultimately aborted attempt to start a local progressive news site. It failed to launch for various reasons, chief among them the fact that none of us were businesspeople. Now, Goldstein’s about to incorporate some of the design and operational schticks we’d discussed into his Horse’s Ass blog.

Goldy now believes our “online publication” metaphor was wrong from the get go, that what the progressive Web needs is a way to help financially support bloggers and other individual content creators. As an individual content creator myself, I appreciate that.

But I also appreciate that some sounds we need to hear can’t be generated by a soloist but by a band or even an orchestra. With a conductor.

Professional editing is part of the edge a pro-news operation has over a one-person operation such as mine. So is juxtaposition. So is organization. So is “team reporting.” And so is “branding,” that elusive quality that gives, say, a piece on Salon or Slate more cachet than a piece on Pajamas Media.

In short, the P-I‘s whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Its columnists’ clout is enhanced by the paper’s regular reporting. Both beat reporters and pundits are enhanced by full-time salaries that allow in-the-field research.

That’s what seattlepi.com does, and what it can continue to do once unshackled from the JOA (and, possibly, from Hearst).

Seattlepi.com has already made great steps in adding value to its site, beyond merely repeating the print paper’s content. This should continue. Use the Web’s unique attractions (comment threads, reader-contributed texts and pix, polls and surveys, slideshows, dynamic links, HuffPost-style “quick reads,” constant updating, reader “memberships” that supply valuable demographic data to advertisers, etc. etc.)

The site’s design, these days, retains a 1999-era notion of a newspaper’s Web offshoot. A home page crammed with headlines and links. Story pages of plain text snaking around huge multiple ad blocks. This can be altered, even within the Web’s current design disciplines, to be more aesthetically luring to readers and more effective to advertisers.

Another suggestion: Make the section differentiation greater. The news/opinion/business, sports, arts, and lifestyle departments could be treated as separate sites (or “microsites”), with mostly autonomous staffs, separate budgets, and separate promotional strategies.

So, I fully believe the P-I has a viable future online.

But not only, not just yet. There’s still value in producing a tangible, physical product. My idea for a future printed P-I Thursday.

(‘Til then, here’s another member of our would-have-been media empire, Paul Andrews, who agrees with Goldstein that the basic concept of newspaper-style institutional journalism doesn’t really translate to the Internet age.)

Less than two years ago, the Post-Intelligencer’s Joint Operating Agreement (JOA) with the Seattle Times was last renegotiated. At the time, everyone said (and most everyone thought) the P-I was saved for at least another decade.

What happened between then and now? Only the perfect storm of the media biz.

Retail advertisers, who’d once been the papers’ biggest supporters, moved to direct mail (especially supermarket chains), to the Web, and to cable channels—at least those retailers who were still in business (unlike many indie merchants and strip-mall chains) and still spending money to advertise (unlike car dealers).

And then there’s Craigslist.

The nationwide free-classifieds site essentially killed off newspapers’ other biggest means of support. The Times and P-I each once had 10 pages of want ads each Monday-Thursday. Now they’re lucky to have two.

Online readership of news sites has exploded, especially during this past election season; but online ad revenues have risen far more slowly.

Publishers tried to cut costs in big and small ways. As an example, the Seattle Times (which runs all the P-I‘s non-editorial functions under the JOA) cut back on distribution to outlying counties. This hurt the P-I more, because it traditionally had a more regional reach than the Times.

So now we’ve got two “failing newspapers,” with no assurance that the putative “survivor” (the Times) can turn its fiscal fortunes around with true monopoly status. The Times will have the same costs that both JOA papers had heretofore shared. The only savings will come from having only one product to print and distribute each morning instead of two. And the end of the JOA’s profit-sharing arrangement doesn’t matter if there are no profits to cease sharing.

Leaving this aspect of the discussion for now, let’s get back to our main topic, saving the P-I.

Right now, Hearst execs say they’ll choose one of three options, sometime in March:

1. Shutter the operation altogether;2. Keep it going as a (much more thinly-staffed) online entity; or

3. Sell it to a willing taker, if there is one.

Hearst is a very private, family-run enterprise. There’s no telling how they’ll act. They could turn down a healthy buyout offer and shut the place down if they simply want to.

So instead of trying to predict what they will do, let’s parse out what they might do.

Option 1 would be a relatively simple, quick move. Pay unionized staffers their severance packages. Invoke the death clause in the JOA. Settle any final monies owed by or to the Times. Donate the globe to MOHAI (which already has the pre-1970 P-I photo library).

It’s something a pubilcly held corporation might do to instantly revive its stock price.

Hearst isn’t publicly held.

And that specific part in the JOA’s original death clause you might recall, the part that would have paid Hearst a share of any Times profits even if the P-I dies? That was removed in the 2007 revision. A dead P-I isn’t worth more than a living one.

Option 2 would keep something of the P-I legacy and presence alive. Depending on how the lawyers work things out, it might be a JOA-ender, putting Hearst in full control of seattlepi.com’s destiny. (They’d have to hire their own ad sellers under this sub-scenario, but it’d be hard to sell fewer ads than the Times is doing these days on behalf of both papers.)

Option 3 would require a deep-pocketed ownership group (let’s not expect a single investor to try it) willing to shoulder the losses and perhaps wield the layoff axe while the reinventing goes on.

But such an ownership group could potentially keep a paper P-I going. And it might be willing to keep more P-I people on staff than a Hearst-owned online-only venture might. (I know, all these unknowns and hypotheticals…)

Coming Wednesday: What I, specifically, would do if I bought the P-I or worked for someone who did. (I know, I’m dragging this on, but it’ll all be worth it I promise.)

Last Friday came the horrible news that Hearst doesn’t want to run a printed daily paper in Seattle anymore, but would consider selling the Post-Intelligencer or turning it Web-only. Since then, several people besides myself have spoken out in favor of keeping the P-I newsroom going. Some have even offered more-or-less-vague ideas for making this possible.

Here are a few:

• First, the paper’s own Art Thiel explains why the P-I, as an ongoing info-resource, should stick around:”…The P-I always has been poor in staff numbers and rich in cantankerousness, light on editors and heavy on writers, mean when needed (and unneeded) and benevolent when least expected. Somehow this added up to a newspaper as exhilarating as it was exasperating.…

  “If ever there were a place where private wealth, invention, technology, emergency, opportunity and desire are in abundance for a new idea, it is here, now.

  “Even in a profound recession, some things cannot be surrendered..”

  In the Web comments to Thiel’s piece, “llachglin” nails the real reason newspapers around the country are in panic mode. It’s the advertising. It’s dropped, faster and fuller than most anyone expected.

• As we’ve mentioned briefly before, Brian Reich at WeMedia offers his own “Plan for the Seattle P-I“ based, so far, on re-organizational generalities: “A renewed focus on issues that impact the local community;” “explaining why, how, and what impact an event will have;” “look at all the ways to make money in the news space—my list includes selling content and advertising, providing research and insights, aggregating and syndicating everything;” “an increased role for local media in the community.”These prescriptions largely match those on a list by Edward Roussel, who runs the Web site of London’s Daily Telegraph: “Narrow the focus,” “plug into a network,” “engage with your readers,” “nimble, low-cost structure, “invest in the Web,” “shake up leadership,” and so on.
• At TechFlash.com (owned by the Puget Sound Business Journal’s parent), ex-P-I scribe Todd Bishop offers “Ten steps to save the Seattle P-I, and maybe the rest of the industry.” Bishop envisions a lean-n’-mean, locally-owned, online-only operation, with “a top technologist” and “a top Internet executive” on the payroll, but with much of the news-gathering outsourced to freelance “vetted bloggers,” whatever those are.

  On the same site, John Cook nominates “twelve techies who could help nurture and save Seattlepi.com.” Yes, the name of Paul Allen is predictably dropped. So is David Brewster, who’s already learned one way not to make money from online local news.

• Peter Kafka, writing on the Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital site, agrees with some local pessimists that an online-only local “paper” couldn’t possibly turn a profit. Kafka asserts that seattlepi.com’s 2.6 million monthly unique visitors might be enough fo sustain a low-staffed site with a national niche audience (like, say, All Things Digital), but not a local general-interest site.However, Jeff Jarvis at guardian.co.uk offers grist for a potential counter-argument to Kafka. As Jarvis notes, the Los Angeles Times now claims it’s making enough money from online ads to support the paper’s entire editorial payroll (albeit one that’s almost half what it was a few years back):

  “I see hope: the possibility that online revenue could support digital journalism for a city. The enterprise will be smaller, but it could well be more profitable than its print forebears today and—here’s the real news—it would grow from there. Imagine that: news as a growth industry again.”

  At Brewster’s Crosscut.com, Bill Richards suggests profitable online local news is closer than a lot of people think, and notes that Hearst is already investing in Kindle-like digital reader products. Richards posits that Hearst might keep an all-online P-I and use it as a grand experiment in paperless news.

• And back at the P-I itself, editor David McCumber offers up his own take on the crisis:”It’s a fine mess we find ourselves in—but I’m not giving up yet. This newspaper is for sale. No, it may not be the most attractive investment around (What is the most attractive investment around? Your 401k? Your house? Yeah, right) but that doesn’t mean we won’t find someone who cares about Seattle and about journalism, and sees promise where others see only loss.

  “Might we go online only? Yes, that’s a distinct possibility too, although that operation would inevitably be much, much smaller than our current newsroom, which is to say it will inevitably have to feature other content besides the kind of journalism that takes significant people resources to execute correctly.

  “Right now, I’m determinedly positive, but I’m not completely unrealistic.”

All this quoting other people, and I still haven’t given my own P-I Rx. Tuesday, I promise.

…to formulate my scheme for saving the P-I (any good number-crunchers out there wanna help?), here’s Brian Reich with his own plan.

Yep, it’s true. Hearst doesn’t want to run the Post-Intelligencer anymore, at least not as a printed daily paper.

If no buyer’s found in the next month or two, and none’s likely to show up, Seattle will become a one-newspaper town.

This is the moment many of us have tried to prevent for the past quarter century or more.

And I don’t know what to say or do about it.

The whole premise of the Committee for a Two-Newspaper Town is predicated on the presumption that big city daily papers are, at least potentially, profitable, at least if they’re protected from predatory monopolistic behavior. This notion has become increasingly doubtful, particularly over the past year.

I still don’t want a pure Seattle Times monopoly. That paper’s made many dumb right-wing moves over the years, in both its editorial pages and its “news” coverage. The P-I is better written, better designed, and much more attuned to this city’s working-class past and progressive present.

But what can be done now to save this voice?

• 
  Find a buyer for the P-I as is? The big media combines are trying to get out of some of the newspapers they do own. The industry’s business model is broken, maybe permanently. Sure, some local buyer(s) could step in; maybe even the same guys who didn’t rescue the Sonics. But in pro sports, you lose money with the prospect of making it back when you resell the team. In today’s newspaper biz that’s quite unlikely.
• 
  Buy the P-I and shrink it, to something whose losses would be small enough for rich owners (or a nonprofit entity) to sustain? A newsstand-only paper (no home delivery)? A compact tabloid format? A free weekly? There’s no limit to how small a paper can be shrunk. Just don’t expect a point of “core profitability.”
• 
  Go online-only? Again, nobody’s yet figured out how to make professionally-created online news pay its keep. But a lot of people are trying to figure that out. I worked last year with one such group.

Earlier this week, I complained about the Seattle Post-Intelligencer dropping the Zippy comic strip. Now, according to unconfirmed rumor, there might not much longer be a P-I to carry or not carry the strip.

KING-TV claimed Thursday night that the Hearst Corp. will put the Post-Intelligencer up for sale, as a formality under the Joint Operating Agreement with the Times toward shutting down the P-I within months. P-I and Times bosses all claimed they haven’t heard yet of any such move. However, it would seem a plausible possibility. The owners of Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, also the junior partner in a JOA, have made just such a move. And both the Times and P-I severely cut their page counts following pathetic holiday-season ad sales.

We, and the papers’ staffs, will learn the degree of truth of this telecast rumor sometime Friday. (There likely won’t be an official announcement in the papers themselves until at least Saturday.)

Needless to say, I’ve not wanted this to happen. I’ve supported the efforts of the Committee for a Two-Newspaper Town, which put public pressure on the Times to keep the JOA alive. I’ve long preferred the P-I, which long ago shed its last vestiges of William Randolph Hearst Jr.’s right-wing squareness to become the region’s dominant center-left editorial voice.

Yet few people, especially within the newspaper biz, quite expected industry-wide ad revenues to plummet so far so fast. Recent Times and P-I issues have had fewer than four pages of display ads and fewer than two pages of classifieds.

And you can’t expect the papers’ owners to just eat these declines. The Times’ majority owners, the Blethens, have tried to sell some of their other properties with no takers. The Times’ minority owners, the McClatchy chain, allegedly wants to sell its most prestigious possession, the Miami Herald, also with no apparent takers.

And the P-I owning, family-held Hearst Corp. is notoriously private in its business dealings; but it’s clear that its major income-earning properties (Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Esquire) also carry far fewer ad pages these days.

I’ll talk more about this when I know more, which will be after anyone else in the business here knows more.

The P-I has dumped Bill Griffiths’ Zippy in favor of yet another demographic/domestic sitcom comic strip. The papers are full of those strips, but there’s only one Pinhead. The P-I tried to dump Zippy previously in ’97, but reinstated the strip after massive reader response. Let’s do so again.

…a nice commentary piece about newspapers firing their arts writers, written by the person who fired me from The Stranger.