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.

…another 7 daze since I last posted. Excuses: Got none. (Except that a startup entrepreneurial venture I’d been involved with this past year seems to have gone “on hold.”)

In the nooze recently:

• That novelty Hillary Clinton nutcracker I told you about late last year? Somebody used one as the focus of a bomb scare at the Olympia state capitol. Unfunny.
• As you may have heard, the Clinton campaign’s “3 a.m.” TV commercial was assembled from purchased stock footage. The little girl in the footage is now grown up, she lives here in WashState, and, yep, she’s an Obama supporter.
• That most recent, well-funded save-the-Sonics drive heads toward a not-really-that-drastic deadline. While the plan for minimal KeyArena improvements (mostly a food court and new concourses; not that many new seats) would rely on private funding for half its cost, the would-be new owners want the state to chip in $75 million. It’d take some pushing n’ cajoling to get that request thru the Legislature’s current regular session, scheduled to wrap up darn soon. Some Legislative leaders, such as House Speaker Frank Chopp, have built their public images around the idea that they don’t cave in to such big-money demands, at least not right away. But Gov. Gregoire can still call a one-day special session to pass the funding (in my opinion, a reasonable investment for a reasonable reward). The hard part’s still persuading Clay Bennett to sell and persuading league boss David Stern to stop being Bennett’s toady.
• It’s a big night for all lovers of classic Tacoma power pop, as the Ventures get into the R n’ R Hall o’ Fame.
• The Sunday Times/P-I cut its total opinion pages (which, by contract, are alloted 50/50 to each paper) from six pages to four. When the joint Sunday edition launched, 24 and a half years ago, each paper got six pages to express its “editorial voice.”
• Boeing boosters blame McCain for that big Air Force tanker contract going to Airbus. So much for a GOP revival in this state this year.

…couple-O-daze for yr. o’b’d’n’t web-scribe. I did a marathon temp gig in exotic Renton. (It’s now ended.) I was there, methodically shoving pieces of paper through a machine, when my Evening Magazine segment aired. (They’d promised they’d tell me when it would run; damn.) You may be able to see it at this link.

Other things have happened as well.

• Wednesday started locally with P-I political writer Joel Connelly grousing that John McCain’s been getting a free ride from the mainstream media. The day ended with the NY Times regurgitating rumors that McCain allegedly had an affair, eight years ago, with a woman far younger than he, who worked as a lobbyist for telecom firms and broadcasters—including for Bud Paxson, of the “family friendly” Pax (now Ion) network. (Pax, you may recall, in 2004 was the chief TV conduit for the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,” the guys who were paid big bucks to tell lies about John Kerry’s Vietnam service.)Personally, I don’t care about his past affairs, just as I didn’t care about those of Bill Clinton (whose impeachment McCain supported). But I do care about the other half of the NYT allegations, that he’d bestowed legislative favors upon Paxson and other friends-of-friends whilst promoting himself as Mr. Let’s-Clean-Up-Government.
• In good, potentially great news, the Seattle Landmark Preservation Board decided to pursue saving Ballard’s beloved Manning’s/Denny’s building! And somebody’s already proposed a scheme to save the building, as a restaurant, while building complementary-looking housing on its parking lot.
• Discover U, the longstanding for-profit offerer of reasonably priced self-help classes and group events, has suddenly shut its doors. Now, where will Seattleites learn how to cleanse their colons, find love at any age, or start an eBay business?
• HD DVD, RIP.

• First the bus tunnel, now the Space Needle fireworks show suffers from a software glitch.
• Music industry wants UW students to pay big bucks for alleged file sharing. UW administration runs interference.
• While the Sea. Times has added the NYT crossword, the P-I, thankfully, hasn’t had to drop it. Thank heavens for non-exclusive contracts.
• A McDonald’s customer in Vancouver, USA suddenly felt strange and had to sit down. No, it wasn’t from the food. Turns out she was giving premature birth without heretofore knowing she was preggers. The boy’s first words will probably not be “Supersize me.”

• Fret not about Bill Gates’s pending retirement from MS’s day-to-day operations. The whole joint’s hardwired around his mindset. MS will continue to produce and market just as it’s been doing.
• Starting tomorrow, you’ll be able to read/solve the NY Times crossword in the Seattle Times. No word on whether it’ll continue in the P-I.
• One more reason to quit smoking: A guy asks two Belltown lowlifes if they’ve got a light, gets robbed.
• Wash. state will boldly go where Greyhound no longer bothers to go, bringing intercity bus service to the state’s small towns.

Tacoma’s own Ventures, kings of instro surf-pop lo all these years, have got their totally deserved berth in the Rock n’ Roll Hall O’ Fame.

• Also from T-Town, somebody wants to replace part of the historic ex-Heidelberg brewery with a hotel. Yep, preservationists don’t like the idea.
• Columbia Winery will move its winemaking and bottling operation from Woodinville to eastern Washington. Its retail and “hospitality” operations, which employ more people than its wine production does, will stay on this side of the mountains.
• And the old Olympia brewery might be “sold on the courthouse steps” if a bankruptcy trustee, representing the bottled-water venture that tried to buy it, can’t negotiate a sale.
• In allegedly healthier drinkies, a big Colorado agribiz operation has been selling “organic” milk in several states. Health-food advocates call foul, claiming the big agribiz operation’s breaking or bending the rules on what can be called organic.
• Mayor Nickels’s son Jacob was sentenced for his role in a casino scam operation. Insert your own “Nickels slots” joke here.
• As you might have already heard, twelve ex-Mariners are on the Mitchell Report list of baseballers who’ve allegedly used or trafficked in steroids. Meanwhile, P-I columnist Art Thiel compares the whole scandal to “a look through the keyhole at a ballroom full of elderly, naked dancers. Something exotic is going on, but exactly what isn’t clear, and few are in any trouble aside from embarrassment. At least the line for the keyhole is short.”
• A GOP state legislator from the Eastside decides he’d rather be a Democrat.
• Another urban church is thinking of selling its historic building. University Baptist, a local leader in diversity and social-justice causes for more than two decades, hasn’t decided what to do yet, but has decided to offer up the building and see what offers show up.
• Gov. Gregoire’s latest plan to end the worn-out-ferry-boat crisis: Build three new boats ASAP (insert newsreel footage of the Kaiser shipyards in WWII here), lease one boat from Pierce County immediately, and run special foot boats from Seattle to Pt. Townsend. (I’m holding a group excursion on one of these boats in the next week or two; keep watching this space for details.)
• Sound Transit showed off its plans for an elaborate University transit station. In keeping with the current UW pecking order, the light-rail stop would be close to the football stadium and the medical center, farther from the upper-campus liberal arts buildings.

• Seattle’s first snow scare of the season was, as I’d expected, a bust, but here comes another.
• What the P-I calls “affordable-housing developers” (what, you didn’t know there were any of those?) rant that the City of Seattle doesn’t provide enough zoning and other incentives to let ’em profitably build more units for folks closer to “median” income levels. Of course, with the few megarich driving “median” income levels ever higher, the definition of for-profit “affordable” housing inches further away from what working families can afford.
• Meanwhile, Bellevue officials ponder regulations to deal with suburban “megahomes” that flaunt their materialistic corpulence over their neighbors.
• The last of the four Pine-and-Belmont bars has closed prior to condos taking over the half-block. Manray’s demise ends a tradition that goes back nearly 20 years, when Squid Row took over what had been a dive-bar space called Glynn’s Cove. Squid Row begat Tugs Belmont, which begat Kincora. Then came Bimbo’s/Cha Cha, Manray, and the Bus Stop (which begat Pony). The strip’s demise got the expected long mega-coverage in The Stranger; the Cha Cha had been the longtime favorite watering hole of several Stranger staffers.
• The P-I catches on to a story first iterated a year or more, I believe, by the Weekly, that Costco treats its workers nicer than the Wall St. investment community thinks it should, resulting in greater sales and profits. Why, if word of this leaks out, the whole economic excuse for screwing the masses could collapse!
• You don’t have to go to Wash. DC to see Democrats cowering in submission. They’re right here, ramrodding an emergency session of the State Legislature to appease Tim Eyman.

The media biz is finding less money to pay for content, says an unpaid “reader blogger” on the P-I site.