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.

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.

Meanwhile, here are links to national-media coverage of the P-I debacle, as aggregated at Crosscut and at the P-I itself.

Ex-P-I columnist Jon Hahn remembers when “bright-orange P-I delivery boxes were everywhere as you drove through the rolling hills of the Palouse, along the hardtop roads in the San Juan Island group and the wheat country in eastern Washington.”

Ex-P-I assistant managing editor Neal Pattison remembers that the paper “possessed a ragamuffin toughness. Like a two-fisted street kid, it earned its share of battle scars and wore them proudly.”

Some guy named Larry Kramer believes the online-only remnant of the P-I “could be the catalyst behind a new era in the news business.”

Elsewhere in saving-the-news, Time‘s Michael Scherer sees the future of online news as an incessant barrage of Twitter-size headlines, with the same event covered in as many as nine different angles with different leads to appeal to the tastes of different readers and aggregator sites.

Sara Catania sees two online news formats rising. The first is that of Talking Points Memo, a national site for hardcore politics geeks, and a for-profit entity that still accepts donations. The other is that of Voice of San Diego, a local site for anybody who cares about its city, and a not-for-profit entity that still sells ads.

Spent a couple hours at tonight’s big P-I employee wake at Buckley’s on lower Queen Anne. At least half the staff had drifted in while I was there. Hugs and toasts and loud Blethen-bashing all around.

Rick Anderson reports the post-print seattlepi.com will include unpaid contributions by ex-Mayor Rice and Congressman McDermott, among others. Brian Miller, meanwhile, snarkily suggests a surefire substitute for professional reporting—more cute kitten pictures.

Meanwhile, here’s how the NY Times, Bloomberg.com, and the Puget Sound Business Journal reported the grim news.

Slog keeps adding additional views on the disaster. Included: P-I art critic Regina Hackett (who’s moving on to ArtsJournal.com) taking one last potshot at “the we-precious-few tone of the Times, which rubs itself against the legs of the comfortably middle-class like a cat looking for a handout,” and a commenter who scoffs at the Times’ continuing plight: “The only problem with newspapers is that they are run by newspapermen. You’re the poster child. You guys pretty much fucked-up a monopoly by trying to defend it, instead of trying to leverage it.”

P-I business columnist “the 40 year old” Bill Virgin blames his bosses for not being nice enough to conservatives and for ignoring a lot of suburban issues. (The latter point may be valid; the P-I traditionally had more out-of-town readers than the Times, but lost that advantage in the past decade.)

The Times has confirmed that it’s keeping all of both papers’ subscribers. (Expect a lot of cancellation calls.) It’s also adding five P-I comic strips, including Pearls Before Swine and 9 Chickweed Lane; but it’s not adding any P-I writers, at least not yet.

It’s here. The announcement we’ve been dreading but expecting these past nine weeks was made shortly after 10 this morning. The last print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer will appear Tuesday. That’s one day sooner than the earliest closing date offered during Hearst’s Jan. 9 announcement.

Other than the date of the final edition, the winding down of Washington state’s oldest business enterprise has gone according to rumor.

Yes, Hearst’s keeping the P-I brand, and the globe.

Yes, there’s be a Web site, run by a tiny subset of the existing P-I staff (20 editorial staffers compared to 150 previously). Only a few of these surviving staffers have been announced; cartoonist David Horsey’s one of them.

Yes, nobody came forward with a solid offer to buy the paper and keep it in print. (What, nobody wanted the chance to lose $1 million a month as the junior partner in a JOA with the also-failing Seattle Times?)

Yes, the final announcement came when P-I columnist Joel Connelly was out of town, and local news-biz analyst Chuck Taylor had just gotten back into town.

The Stranger’s Eli Sanders was in town, and he noted that the P-I site went to a text-only “disaster” mode around 10:30 Sunday nite. When the full site reappeared an hour and a half later, its non-ad pages were bereft of the “nwsource.com” domain name. That’s the domain run by the Times under the 1999-revised terms of the JOA. As of this morning, seattlepi.com is its own freestanding thang. (Ads now appearing on the site were sold by the Times, but an in-house sales staff is being assembled.)

Newspaper people, everywhere, are fond of romanticizing their own. They’ll note that the Obama inauguration was the last big national story in P-I print; the December snowstorm and Washington Mutual’s collapse were its last big local stories.

Ken Griffey’s return to the Mariners, the launch of Seattle Sounders FC, the Husky men’s basketball team’s NCAA tournament run—not to be commemorated in a printed P-I. The opening of Sound Transit light rail, the final fate of the Alaskan Way Viaduct, this year’s mayoral race—all things we’ll have to read about elsewhere.

The P-I staff had already been preparing a big goodbye special section. That’ll show up Tuesday. Expect a huge wrap party/wake tonight at Buckley’s on lower Queen Anne.

This past Thursday, I spent a couple hours in the central library looking at microfilmed P-I issues from significant dates in my life—my birth date, the day the Sonics won the NBA title, the day Mt. St. Helens blew, etc.

The first thing I noticed: Monochrome microfilm just isn’t paper; novelist Nicholson Baker was right when he pleaded for libraries to hold on to printed newspapers.

The second thing I noticed: Papers sure had a lot more ads back then. Ten pages of classifieds at the minimum. Multiple ads for supermarket and department-store chains within the paper, not as separate inserts.

The third thing I noticed: The words describing major events can evoke memories just as strong as, or stronger than, the audio-visual memories of the events themselves.

But that’s what newspaper people do. They create what an old cliche calls “the first draft of history.”

And now, the Post-Intelligencer, as a tangible product and as a fully-staffed newsroom, is history.

Meanwhile, the various assorted attempts to jump-start a competitive post-P-I news site continue.

As will the pontificatin’, here and elsewhere, about what online news should be and how it could be funded.

…to succinctly explain what I meant a few posts back as “microbrew journalism.”

Essentially, it’s the idea that, like the beer biz, the news biz needs to decentralize.

It needs to move from a few big makers toward many smaller organizations.

And it needs to expand from bland, singular, everything-to-everybody products toward more compelling tastes that consumers will actively seek out and loyally support.

This means more than just shoveling newsprint-style text online.

And it means more than just adding blogs and comment threads and RSS feeds and tweets.

It means involving your readers in the daily churn of your reporting beats. Not just the big stories (big crimes, big elections, big layoff announcements) but the eternal ebb and flow of events, the “inside baseball,” the amassing of little events and little facts that add up to an ongoing sense of community.

It’s easy to see this approach taken to sports, business, lifestyles, and arts coverage. Those content genres already have built-in hardcore audiences. There are already people out there who really care about the Mariners, the tech biz, the music scene, and the cost of food.

It takes an extra leap of imagination to see how it could apply to what the Seattle Times used to call “General News.”

But it can be done.

It takes great research, great storytelling, and great networking. All these are skills journalists are already supposed to know about.

But instead of working all week to prepare a couple placid little he-said-she-said analysis pieces or brazen ambulance-chasing gorefests, use the Web’s unlimited space to add both depth and breadth. Let stories breathe with the details that add personality and narrative. Spread out beyond the headlines to show the daily drama ofthe courts, the city council, the schools, etc.

You can do this and still be fair to the various sides of a political debate or a court case. Indeed, with more room online, you can fully explore an issue from all angles.

And you can have background stories about particular issues, stories that stay up on the site, updated when needed.

The online transition can mean both more and better local news coverage. Coverage that can draw in readers at a higher level of involvement.

That’s the sort of audience that can command higher online ad rates.

And it’s the sort of audience that could be sold premium-tier content—stats, alerts, and detailed reports for people who need to know what local and state governments are up to on a professional-wonk level.

There won’t be a P-I fate announcement until sometime next week.

P-I deathwatchers patiently wait to see if and when the shredders and recycling boxes might show up.