…five years away from the end of printed daily newspapers? The NY Times’ publisher thinks maybe.

A former supermarket tabloid stringer finds solace in berating his youngers for finally getting old.

Sheesh.

Yeah, Cobain’s image has been showing up on tacky nostalgia-kitsch merchandise. But it has been almost since his death.

Elsewhere in the no-shit-Sherlock realm, David Bowie just turned 60. Debbie Harry already passed that milestone. Joe Strummer and Joey Ramone didn’t get the chance to do so. Macauley Culkin’s been married and divorced. And the Earth revolves around the sun approximately once per calendar year.

“Gen X” never vowed to die before it got old. Rather, it (or some of its more vocal members) vowed not to look ridiculous while doing so.

“Bush Proposes Steep Cut to PBS Funding”

…in the ol’ reality-based commuity, folks. Columnist Molly Ivins has succumbed to cancer at 62. The Texas tornado was among Bush’s earliest and strongest observers/opponents, and never veered from her well-spoken progressive populist stance. She’s already missed.

The longtime P-I consumer-action and trivia columnist really was the total embodiment of the trenchcoat-and-fedora newspaperman, and a perfect gentleman to boot.

Megatrends author John Naisbitt, quoted at Poynter Online (a great media-news site), repeats the old baby-boomer canard that them kids these days aren’t reading anything. To illustrate this, the Poynter editors used a stock photo of wristbands–all festooned with words.

I’ve said it before, and it’s worth repeating until the boomer bigots finally listen: People younger than you or me are not necessarily a subhuman species. Yes, they can read.

Indeed, words are more pervasive than ever. All these millions of blogs, MySpace sites, and online forums–they’re all about words. (They’re certainly not about the graphic design.) Text messaging, IRC chats, email–all about words. Talk radio, podcasts–all about spoken words.

What media companies have to ask themselves is whether the words they’re generating are worth reading.

If any of you have last Sunday’s final edition of the King County Journal (nee the Bellevue Journal-American), I’d love to see it.

Meanwhile, some of the usual anonymous speculators are guessing that David Black, who bought and closed the KCJ while keeping its printing plant and its community weeklies, might have done so as the first step toward buying and preserving the Seattle P-I. My take: Possible, I suppose…

Seattlest.com has posted an email interview with yr. humble author, with a gushing introductory commentary about the book.

A few local shops have the book back in stock this week. But your best bet is still to buy direct, from the link near the top left corner of this page.

…not to trust the mainstream news media: SeattleTimes.com listed the Vanishing Seattle premiere party as a “Hot Ticket,” but then got the date wrong. As a result, many people may show up at Epilogue Books (2001 Market Street in brilliant Ballard) tonight, Monday, instead of the scheduled night, Tuesday. I’ll show up both nights just in case.

…to Steve Mandich, whose blog contains a lovely rave review of Vanishing Seattle.

…save the printed newspaper? They wouldn’t.

The new out-of-state management of Seattle Weekly is already failing miserably, just months after persuading all its top editors to quit.

The latest feces-storm: An unfunny “fake news” parody story alleging that Mayor Greg Nickels was spending $750,000 of city money on private soirees, starring big-name easy listening musicians.

The story, by chain-installed editor Mike Seely and filled with fabricated quotes from real political figures, doesn’t officially announce its ficticious status. The nightclubs it mentions (La Rustica and 5 West) are real businesses. Easy listening (or, under its more pretentious rubric, “smooth jazz”) is the known musical genre-of-choice for large swaths of the civic establishment (including several former Weekly editors). At least three people have asked me if the article was true; and, if so, why nobody else in the local news media has followed up on it.

In response to this childish, purposeless self-demolition of the paper’s 31-year journalistic reputation, two more longtime Weekly contributors have allegedly quit. (I haven’t confirmed the names yet.)

So why would Seely print something so simultaneously sophomoric and credibility-damaging? Either:

1) The New Times Publishing higher-ups thought it would be a great change-O-pace; or

2) Seely and/or his bosses felt desperate to get themselves some of that Stranger wacky-hip street cred.

The Weekly tried that before, albeit less severely, when it was first bought up by the chain that sold out to the chain that owns it now. Back then, it was sad, like a dowager dolled up like a young tart. Now, it’s closer to dangerous, like an elderly skier who can’t be persuaded away from the widowmaker slope.

Forbes now claims Kurt Cobain is now America’s most lucrative dead celebrity, having passed Elvis Presley with some $50 million in earnings. You may now make your own sick comment about what the poor lad would’ve done with the dough.

TIME MARCHES ON DEPT.: USA Today has discovered that a lot of those kids today are politically active and socially concerned. But writer Sharon Jayson felt obligated, alas, to insert the boilerplate disclaimer inserted into all mainstream media stories about youth activism lo these past three decades: “They may be less radical than baby boom activists in the 1960s and 1970s, whose demonstrations for civil rights, women’s equality and protecting the environment and protests against the Vietnam War became flashpoints for their times….”

…in its incessant search for trends to parse, has suddenly discovered “The Starbucks Aesthetic.” As you assuredly already know, it’s onr of comfort, reassurance, self-congratulation, and smug pseudo-hipness.

…do on the air, if you’re a playoffs baseball announcer: #3. Hurl an ethnic slur at Lou Piniella.