…asks whether newspapers have a future. His answer: Probably not, at least not as physical products.

…the endgame in Iraq is upon us, and withdrawal’s inevitable. The politicians and the media just don’t know it yet.

…about this being five years since you know what. Except this:

• I’ve only found a couple of reviews of the apparently silly, allegedly far-right-biased ABC 9/11 TV movie. As cheap publicity stunts go, the hype over the movie’s writer-embellished Clinton bashing seems to have brought more attention than the piece-O-tripe deserved.
• The right-wing sleaze machine still doesn’t want you to realize several things about the attack. Foremost among them: Al-Qeida has no interest whatsoever in overthrowing the United States government or imposing a strict Islamic regime on the U.S. citizenry. They’d like to install such regimes in Iraq, Somalia, the “Stans,” and Turkey; and they’d like Israel to disappear.
• The hijackers came not from Iraq but from “friendly” Saudi Arabia. You know, that country where the official religious poilce harass insufficiently-covered women, where a corrupt monarchy rules everything, and whose said monarchy’s big pals with Bush’s oil-piz pals.
• The real threats to the U.S. Constitution, U.S. democracy, and the U.S. way of life are internal, and they can all be traced to the right-wing sleaze machine. This is acknowledged by just about everybody who’s not directly or indirectly employed by the sleaze machine.
• As Nov. 2006 nears, and with it the potential end to total one-party control of the federal government, the sleaze machine will only get sleazier. Because fear-‘n-smear is all they know how to do anymore.
• But what if more of us stood up to the fear-mongering, not just in politics but in our daily lives and in the economy (too many of us, including many of us in the media biz, live in fear of being left behind by an increasingly inequitable economy, and thus become willing slaves to anything that will allow us a toehold into the “haves”).That’s the premise of Arianna Huffington’s newest book/web site, Becoming Fearless. Unfortunately, the site’s shackled by adherence to self-help publishing industry rules, including the rule that such material must be by/for/about women only.

  And what drives these media-biz rules? Strict commercialism, which at its bottom line is just another form of fear.

CBS has signed up for promotional announcements on perishable food products.

Meanwhile, CBS’s former parent co. Viacom is allegedly in talks to buy The Onion, the satirical newspaper and Web site originally co-founded by some of the original Stranger crew.

And Seattle mayor Greg Nickels, sounding more like his onetime election opponent Mark Sidran every week, told a Seattle Channel talk-show caller that he believed strip club owners were linked to “organized crime.” He specifically cited Rick’s/Sugar’s owners Frank Colacurcio Sr. and Jr., they of the conveniently-stereotypable Italian-American surname. The Colacurcios may be sly businessmen who exploit every advantage and try to create others; but so’s Paul Allen.

…to read about Boeing scandals that don’t quite make the local papers.

The paparazzi have finally begun to descend on Frances Bean Cobain, now 14. (No, I don’t know what deodorant brand she uses.) (Warning: Linked page may include really annoying “blink” ads.)

Seattle Weekly editor Knute Berger’s announced his resignation, six months after the paper was bought by the Arizona-based New Times chain. Berger (nephew of former Guiding Light soap star Barbara Berjer) spent his current editorship functioning as an old-guard defender of the faith, maintaining a sense of the paper’s (and the city’s) heritage in spite of parent-company pressure to cheapen and “modernize” the product. In spite of the Stranger’s constant ribbing about Berger’s official residence in the ‘burbs (a relic of his previous helming of the Weekly‘s former EastsideWeek edition), he remained loyal to the end to a particularly “Seattle” way of looking at the world—sincere and serious, but with a healthy sprig of wryness.

…and the only devil I saw was a certain ex-boss of mine, who showed up for the weekly session of Drinking Liberally. Mr. Savage sported a custom tee with the slogan CAN’T WE HAVE CRAIG KILLED?, in reference to the founder of a certain free-want-ads web site that’s put a wrench into print-media busines models across the country.

It’s been a decade and a half since Mr. Savage and co. were the new kids on the local-media block, with a surefire business plan that took ’em to the top. Now, newer outfits with newer surefire business plans are causing both “mainstream” and “alternative” newsprint publishers to run scared. Ah, the more things, well, you know…

…the fab June Belltown Messenger is now out. It’s got many fun features you read here first; plus food, fashion, fiction, and fun.

…has jumped all over a mini hype-bandwagon started a week and a half ago by KOMO-TV, which apparently just discovered that you can find escort ads on the Internet. So now we get P-I scribe Robert Jamieson pleading for a populist uprising against Craigslist.com for allowing said advertisers to use its URLs, without compensation.

Of course, this is pure anti-Internet FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt).

(Not to mention it’s attacking a victimless act performed by consenting adults in the privacy of their own blah-blah-blah.)

And, of course, these advertisers would simply find other online fora for their messages should Craigslist ever lock ’em out. Indeed, many of these advertisers are already using several other online “spaces,” including weekly papers’ sites, their own sites, and “review” message-board sites.

So why pick on Craigslist?

Could it be because Craigslist’s other ad categories are taking a big bite outta the daily papers’ want-ad revenue?

Naah. It couldn’t be that….

(via Arthur Marriott):

The piece in the P-I about the “white-ification” of the neighborhood surrounding the Jimi Hendrix memorial is rather coincidental with a photo in the Sunday Times accompanying an article about several local high-school jazz bands’ participation in the national “Essentially Ellington” competition. It showed the Garfield band, and except for Clarence Acox (the director) everyone on stage was white.

…a big front page story today about the rising power of political weblogs in local races; particularly the hefty positive words about Goldy of HorsesAss.Org.

In recent days, I’ve talked to two Post-Intelligencer staffers. One of them (I won’t say who) confided in me that the staff consensus is that the paper’s doomed. The joint operating agreement with the SeaTimes can’t go on indefinitely, not if the Times is itching to get out; and few if any P-I staffers can imagine a second daily paper competing on its own.

I, however, can imagine this.

Of course, I don’t have access to the P-I’s or the Times’s financial data. I don’t know how much the P-I spends a year, or how much ad revenue it would take to pay for that and a newly independent P-I sales and distro staff—particularly in today’s business climate where free want-ad Web sites threaten to drain one of the newspaper biz’s revenue mainstays.

I would deeply love to see the coolest newspaper name in America preserved. But if the Hearst management in NYC chooses to retire the P-I name if and when the JOA ever ends, let’s start an all-new paper to replace it.

It’ll take a lot more than just me to do this. (Goodness knows my track record at starting business ventures is less than spectacular.)

I’ve fantasized about this previously here, but let’s get the fantasy going to a level of a little more detail. Let’s imagine a local daily print newspaper for the Internet age. What would it have and not have? What would it emphasize and de-emphasize? Would it have a cover price? Who would advertise in it? How would it tie in with a Web presence? Would the online edition carry more or less content than the print edition?

Lemme know what you think.

Let’s do it!

Every few years or so, somebody comes up with a huge master plan for Seattle Center. The latest of these somebodies is a Mayor Nickels-appointed task force. They’d like to modernize Center House and the Fun Forest, and demolish the awkward, rickety High School Memorial Stadium.

Meanwhile, ex-Seattle Weekly mogul David Brewster has submitted a more extreme plan. In keeping with his lifelong ideology of baby-boomer bias, Brewster’s plan would eradicate all Center facilities that serve clienteles significantly younger or less affluent than himself.

Brewster would raze Memorial Stadium, Mercer Arena (formerly the Arena, formerly the Ice Arena), the Fun Forest, Center House (formerly the Food Circus, formerly a National Guard armory), the North Court meeting rooms (including the Snoqualmie Room, where the Vera Project’s all-ages rock shows will move later this year), and maybe even the new and popular Fisher Pavilion. And he apparently wouldn’t mind seeing the Sonics leave town so he could erase KeyArena (formerly the Coliseum) as well.

In the place of all these funky, un-slicked-up, well-used facilities, Brewster would like to see—nothing.

Albeit, it would be a lushly landscaped nothing, with lotsa grass and trees. Maybe there’d be some gourmet sidewalk cafes and used-book pushcarts. Maybe there’d be some outdoor ampitheater spaces, which would replace a few of the many indoor performance venues Bumbershoot and Folklife would lose.

Brewster’s Seattle Times essay notes that when Seattle Center was originally being planned to take over the 1962 World’s Fair grounds, it was made to accommodate many interest groups and population segments. He’d now like to replace that “cacophany” with a unified vision of a “glorious urban park.”

I happen to love the cacophany. And I want to keep it.

Too much of Seattle (hell, too much of America) has already been subsumed by the ultra-bland upscale monoculture. Publicly-owned treasures such as Seattle Center should resist this trend. They should always belong to everyone. They should always have a place for senior square-dancers, for working families, for teens, for minorities, for fast-food eaters, and for us Century 21 nostalgists who still want to believe in a festive future.

We can have contemplative green spaces, too. And we can have upscale dineries and theatrical venues. Just not only those.

So, I propose: Anything cut out from today’s Center gets put back into tomorrow’s Center. The only exception would be the high-school football games. They can move to some current school-district-owned property (such as one of those grade schools threatened with closure), or even to Husky Stadium or Qwest Field. Down in the Beaver State, Corvallis High has long played its football games at Oregon State’s stadium (and often had better winning records than OSU). The fact that neither Brewster nor the Nickels task force bothers to talk about where the high-school games would go just shows how ivory-tower (or condo-tower) their POVs are.

As for the rest: The Sonics, in their plea for another taxpayer-subsidized arena remodel, say they want a food court and an amusement arcade. Fine. Let ’em buy out the Fun Forest operators. An altered arena complex could incorporate replacements for the Fun Forest and the Center House food court. (These restaurants and arcades should be open to the general public, not only to arena event-goers.)

The arena should also be refitted to be more favorable to hockey. The NHL is dying in Sunbelt cities where it doesn’t belong; I’m convinced one of those southern-tier teams would fare far better in a northern town with major Canadian connections.

I’d keep Fisher Pavilion and its popular rooftop deck.

The empty lawn surrounding KCTS east of Mercer Arena could become a landscaped play area, replacing the wading pool north of KeyArena (and relocating the “atomic” neon lights from there).

The other Center House and Northwest Court functions (Vera, the Center School, the Seattle Children’s Museum, the square dances, the conferences, Bumbershoot’s visual arts) could go into new structures on the Center’s periphery, perhaps at the Mercer Arena site and retaining its facade. These new buildings could be included in the same funding package and construction schedule as the arena redo.

That would leave Center House available for implosion. In its hole might go some of the green spaces and outdoor amenities Brewster wants.

But, in my heart-O-hearts, I like Center House. I like the swords-into-plowshares idea of a bulky military warehouse now devoted to fun and games. It’s a grand old building, with a lot of life left in it. And besides, I like the Mongolian BBQ and the Pizza Haven.

Maybe Brewster would slag folk like me for not possessing a will to civic greatness. Too bad.

I don’t want a civic center with good taste. I want a civic center that tastes good.

For the second time, my ol’ UW Daily colleague Mike Lukovich has won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. Congrats.