• The exodus of established stars from the decaying music industry continues, with Madonna signing a concert management company, not a record company, to distribute her next few CDs. Other artists, including space-heater heir Trent Reznor, are going further and selling direct to fans.
• That quintessential “legacy media” company, NBC, is buying up Oxygen (one of the last big non-conglomerate-owned cable channels) and vacating its historic studios in Beautiful Downtown Burbank. Under California laws intended to preserve media-biz jobs, the network has to offer the lot to a buyer that’ll keep it operating.The Tonight Show will move to the Universal Pictures lot, which NBC also now owns; the NBC News bureau, the KNBC-TV local news, and Access Hollywood will move to a new building nearby. The other network show still made on the Burbank lot, Days of Our Lives, is rumored to be ending in ’09.

  But by that time, the whole company might be sold off.

• Get ready for more Letterman “Network Time Killer” segments: The movie and TV industries are bracing for the first writers’ strike since 1988. The difference this time: The networks and cable channels might let a strike go on for a while, running a bunch of cheap reality shows instead of scripted fare.
• Our pal Sherman Alexie is in the running for a National Book Award. It’s for The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, a “young adult” novel about a Spokane Reservation teen who finds himself an outsider everywhere he goes.It’s also got fabulous illustrations by another of our ol’ pals, the one-n’-only Ellen Forney. It couldn’t have happened to two nicer folks.
• Looking for an industry even more moribund than recorded music? Try mass-market beer. Miller has already merged with South African Breweries; Coors has merged with Molson. Now both seek to merge their respective U.S. operations.The deal would turn the once competitive domestic swill market into a duopoly between “MillerCoors” and Anheuser-Busch. (The Pabst brands are now owned by a marketing company that contracts out its production to Miller.)

  I can still remember when there were five mass-production breweries in the Northwest alone, each operated by a different company.

  Fortunately, we now have a wealth of microbreweries, whose broad range of tasty product has long since rendered superfluous the likes of “Colorado Kool-Aid.”

• As the world gets hotter, it also gets humid-er.
• Ann Coulter inanity of the day: Now sez she wishes all Jews to “perfect” themselves, by becoming Christians.
• Office whoopee? Go right ahead, say many companies. Just don’t try to cover up the aroma by burning microwave popcorn in the break room.
• While other commentators wax nostalgic about the fiftieth anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, P-I business columnist Bill Virgin gushes undeserved laurels on the semicentennial of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (that other favorite novel of male virgins everywhere).Let’s compare n’ contrast, shall we?

  Both Kerouac and Rand are better known today for their celebrity and their ideas than for their prose stylings.

  But both authors’ rambling self-indulgences actually serve their respective egotisms.

  Both liked to hype themselves as daring rebels, valiantly crusading against the stifling anti-individualism of grey-flannel-suit America.

  Kerouac helped provide an ideological excuse for generations of self-centered dropouts and anarchists to proclaim themselves above the petty rules of mainstream society.

  Rand helped provide an ideological excuse for generations of self-cenetered tech-geeks and neocons to proclaim themselves above the petty rules of civil society and rule of law.

  But at least Kerouac’s devotees don’t go around declaring that the oil companies and the drug companies somehow don’t have enough power.

  (P.S.: Digby has much more lucent thoughts than mine i/r/t Randmania.)

…who still read printed newspapers for the daily ritual, and were perturbed whenever one aspect of that ritual goes missing, here’s today’s Tank McNamara strip. (If you’re reading this after Oct. 1, set the “Current” box on the linked page to Oct. 1.)

The P-I has made no explanation for the strip’s Monday absence. In the past, the P-I has run comic strip episodes from which other papers around the country have demurred (in such series as Non Sequitur and the late, lamented Boondocks). So I wouldn’t expect the paper to shy away from a Tank episode that compares athletes who don’t give a darn about other athletes’ health problems to “neo-cons.”

My book title Vanishing Seattle (actually thought up by my Arcadia Publishing editor, Julie Albright) is fast becoming a catch phrase for the accelerating corporatization of our once-modest burg. Witness this entry in the P-I’s real estate blog, mentioning the now-shuttered Central Pawn Shop on First Avenue in relation to the 1974 John Wayne action film McQ. I’d written some detailed notes a couple years back about the locations used in that film, as part of an aborted book project for Clear Cut Press. I agree with the blog post’s author, Marlow Harris (see a couple items below this one on this page), that McQ remains, if not a great movie, a great time capsule of the city as it once was.

…that couldn’t be saved has been saved. In a stunning victory for the Hearst Corp. and print-media-diversity lovers, the P-I and the Seattle Times have settled, suddenly ending four years of litigation over the papers’ joint operating agreement.

Apparently, the lightly-substantiated “expose” of Times anti-P-I business practices posted on the first day of Crosscut.com may have been at least somewhat accurate. The terms of the settlement seem to imply that the Times feared losing big when the dispute reached binding arbitration, which would have begun this week.

Under the terms, the Times promises to beef up P-I promotion, and to treat the P-I equally in production/printing/delivery infrastructure. Hearst gives up a JOA provision that would allow it to a share of Times profits if the P-I closes.

The new pact runs for the next nine years. By that time, online news-consumption might become so dominant that the manufacturing and shipping of printed newspapers won’t matter.

Let’s not judge Crosscut, the new local-affairs site run by Seattle Weekly refugees, on the basis of its day-one product. Presumably, like many Web ventures, this is a “soft launch,” a live test of the systems and features before a fuller site rolls out.

Given that caveat, the thing’s pretty colorless and shallow at its debut.

The “big expose” piece, about the still-churning legal case between the Times and P-I, is a mealy-mouthed treatise whose allegations (of Times management actions to bury the P-I) are wonky and obscure. It doesn’t help that the writing itself is wonky and obscure.

Then there’s Knute Berger’s piece charging the Seattle School District with not kowtowing enough to the demands of upscale white families….

…the Ides-O-March this year my thanking the P-I’s Bill Virgin for a really nice Vanishing Seattle book plug in his column today. Virgin’s topic: The past and future, if there is one, of that once ubiquitous institution, the gas station.

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.

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…

Both the Vanishing Seattle book and the September Belltown Messenger are outta here and on their way to your adoring eyes. So I can now resume this here corner of what used to be euphemistically called “Cyberspace.”

Among the things I haven’t gotten the time to write about these past almost two weeks:

• The 25th anniversary of the first IBM PC. Personal computers had already been around a half decade. IBM saw the character-generating on the wall and realized it had to be in that market, before its own sub-mainframe workstation computers were obsolete. An “Entry Level Systems Division” was set up in Florida, far from IBM’s mainframe designers in upstate New York. A workable and expandable machine was swiftly designed, mostly from off-the-shelf parts. Corporate schmoozing between IBM bigwigs and UW Regent Mary Gates got Mary’s son Bill the chance to bid on the operating system contract. He bought the existing QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from a couple of Seattle nerds. His then-small staff made two variants, PC-DOS (for IBM) and MS-DOS (which, under the MS/IBM contract, Gates & co. could sell to anybody). From this one deal arose the Puget Sound country’s new #1 economic force, the driver of real-estate hyperinflation and the flow of money into local “alternative” culture.
• 
  The first sign of hope for saving the Sonics and Storm. The Okie owners say they’d be perfectly happy with staying in Seattle Center, as long as it’s not in KeyArena. They suggested the Memorial Stadium land, already set to be cleared under a blue-ribbon committee’s master plan for the Center grounds. That’d be perfect with me. The high school football games can go to Husky Stadium or even Qwest Field. KeyArena can be re-remodeled as a concert and convention facility. We can get an indoor arena big enough for a National Hockey League team, plus the food-court and amusement-arcade sections the Okies want. I may be the only one I know who believes this deal can indeed be worked out without excessively draining local tax coffers, but I do believe it.
• 
  Safeco Insurance plans to leave the U District; the UW plans to buy the Safeco Tower. Let’s just make sure the U keeps the IHOP, next to the tower on Safeco-owned land.
• 
  A dog-days lull in the Seattle Times/Post-Intelligencer soap opera. I’ve been talking with others who, like me, would like to be involved in starting a new local-news venture should the P-I call it a day. Should this project progress, and should I become a real part of it, I’ll wind up saying less and less about it due to the ol’ non-disclosure falderal.

Weeks after art critic Regina Hackett quoted Dale Chihuly saying “pig shit,” theater critic Joe Adcock quotes playwright Ki Gottberg referring to two of her characters as “hairy muthafuckas.”

…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.

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!

• “The Star Wars Guy” succumbs to his own personal demons.
• The Belltown Messenger‘s own Ronald Holden wrote a letter to the P-I thanking its editors for their recent anti-censorship statement. His letter got censored.
• Now that China’s prez has moved on to the Other Washington, here are all the “Hu” puns you’ll ever need.
• The ’05-’06 Sonics season was softball on the court, hardball at City Hall. (How I’d resolve this: Let the Sonics buy out the Fun Forest’s operators, move those attractions to the west and north sides of KeyArena (though preserving the Snoqualmie Room for the Vera Project’s all-ages rock shows), and have the city revamp the current Fun Forest indoor amusement arcade into new meeting and exhibition rooms.)

As longtime readers know, I’ve never been a huge fan of Dale Chihuly’s art. But today he’s done something I can appreciate and applaud. He got the phrase “pig shit” printed, unbleeped, on the front page of a major daily paper!