POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST JOHN LEVESQUE points out the central irony of the P-I‘s strategy in trying to preserve the joint operating agreement with the Seattle Times: “The paper that wants to put the Post-Intelligencer out of business is responsible for selling ads in the Post-Intelligencer.“

To restate the obvious: This marriage cannot be saved.

Last month, the P-I won the first round of courtroom battles over keeping the JOA. The Times wants to kill the agreement and, at the same time, the P-I. The P-I claims it can’t survive without the JOA, in which its printing, sales, delivery, and PR functions (everything except the paper’s editorial content) is contracted to the Times. Given the lousy job the Times has done (deliberately or otherwise) at maintaining the P-I‘s ad volume and subscriber base, I’d say the P-I can’t survive with the JOA.

Seattle still needs two dailies. It needs two separate dailies.

The best-case scenario for settling this flap would be a compromise court settlement, in which the P-I gets its own sales force again, while the Times still prints and delivers both papers until new arrangements are made (such as the Times selling its job-printing subsidiary in Tukwila, Rotary Offset Press, to the P-I). But don’t expect such a rational move from a Times management out for blood.

Underlying the whole dispute, but not overtly mentioned by either party to it: The fact that the traditional big American daily paper is an industrial-age anachronism. As I mentioned around the time the Seattle dailies went on strike three years ago, I believe there is a way for newspapers to become more competitive, with one another and with other info/advertising media–if they became leaner and more specialized, and established a more direct rapport with their readership (without necessarily turning to Fox-esque sleaze).

If the P-I does succumb to the current courtroom wars, and even if it doesn’t, there’s a great opportunity to create a new kind of newspaper for a new media age. Nothing like this has been tried in the U.S. since USA Today was first formulated 20 years ago.

Wanna help create it? Lemme know.

YOU MIGHT’VE READ a little op-ed piece in the tiny P-I-edited section of the local Sunday paper, in which one Renana Brooks, billed as a “clinical psychologist,” claimed George W. Bush isn’t really a verbal stumbler but a master communicator of fear, dependency, and “empty language.”

On the site of her Sommet Institute for the Study of Power and Persuasion, Brooks goes on to condemn Bush further. She claims he’s “the hero in his own fairy tale fantasies that are passed off as a vision for the rest of the country.” She even compares his rhetorical stance with “the communication structure of an abusive personality”:

“The hallmark of the abusive personality is the need to cast itself as the savior though personalization, creating a dependency dynamic. In order to present himself as the only man for the job, Bush uses personalization to contrast his positive ‘optimistic personality with the difficult times at hand. Bush openly identifies himself as the only person capable of producing positive outcomes, even when the actions required are vaguely understood. Contrast Bush’s signature line in his speech to Congress ,’I will not falter, I will not tire, I will not fail..’ with Kennedy’s signature line “ask not what your country can do for you, ask rather what you can do for your country.”

And she accuses him of deliberately “governing by crisis,” to keep people despondent and dependent:

“Bush uses crisis ‘empty language” statements to place himself in a “one up” position vis a vis the American people. [He may have learned this both as a younger brother in a home driven by as domineering mother and an absent father, and honed it as a response to the pressures of needing to succeed in a world where he felt that it was necessary to build a persona that avoided difficult truths in relationships with more driven people than himself.] Whatever its ultimate root, Bush has become a master at using empty language to succeed.

“Even his many malapropisms may be explained as areas where empty language is being used to grapple with uncomfortable or unknown subjects, and that these malapropisms disappear as Bush grows more familiar and powerful in the subjects.

“This relentless pessimism coupled with repeated depictions of himself in a positive light by means of empty language is suggestive of the dynamics that occur in spousal abuse. There the abuser copes with underlying feelings of helplessness or anxiety and maintains dominance and control by consistently describing his partner as deficient and inadequate with no hope of improving. In cases of spousal abuse the more that the abused spouse is criticized the more she ‘appreciates’ her spouse even while disagreeing within.

“This may explain why the President’s poll ratings remain high despite the fact that people express disagreement with specific policies.”

For once, somebody’s finally put linguistic “deconstruction” analysis to a useful purpose. Now, if enough people would listen, so’s we can get started on the biz of re-constructing democracy.

Among the seminar speeches and dry-research releases put forth at the recent newspaper-biz convention in Seattle was one study that claimed the elusive youth market started reading daily papers more often during the Iraq war, but didn’t stick with the habit. The trade mag Editor & Publisher quoted the survey company’s boss John Lavine as saying:

“Coffee in a can is a dead ringer for where newspapers were: It was a mature product, it was dying, everybody said its time was over — and then Starbucks came along.”

We’ve already written that the current push by the Seattle Times to kill its joint operating agreement with the Post-Intelligencer, and by extension to kill the P-I itself, could instead be an opportunity to reinvigorate the P-I as a truly independent paper, and by extension to revive the newspaper biz.

I’m convinced it can be done. Yes, a JOA-less P-I would need to get its own ad sellers and delivery vans, and either buy or hire printing presses. Getting the financing for such a venture just might be easier if it were for a new paper for a new era, something this country hasn’t really seen since USA Today first targeted the everywhere/nowhere of shopping malls and airports 21 years ago.

A post-JOA P-I, or an all-new paper that could be launched in the wake of the current JOA mess, could be a paper devised from scratch to meet the ink-on-paper needs of the Internet age. It could be neither old-American-journalism boredom nor Murdoch sleaze, but something lively and forward-looking and written to be read.

I’ve freelanced in the past for the Seattle Times, and hope to do so again. But that doesn’t mean I want it to succeed at its current drive to become a true monopoly paper.

I opposed the original joint operating agreement between the Times and the Post-Intelligencer, which took effect 20 years ago this month. Unlike the JOAs in some two-paper towns, which set up a joint-venture agency to handle the papers’ non-news operations (sales, printing, distro, promotion, etc.), the Seattle JOA put both papers’ fates squarely under the Times’ control. The Times was free to undersell the P-I to subscribers and advertisers alike, or to be laggardly about trucking the P-I off to outlying corners of the region. All of which it’s been accused of doing at one time or another.

The 1999 revision to the JOA only increased the Times’ capacity for mischief. When the World Wide Web came along, the Times ruled that a P-I website would fall under the promotional duties ascribed under the original JOA’s terms to the Times. In other words, the Times got to choose what kind of website the P-I could have, and naturally chose a bare-bones PR page without any actual news items. In return for the right to put its full text online (and a slightly higher share of the JOA’s proceeds), the P-I agreed to a revised JOA that would allow the Times to (1) come out in the morning, and (2) invoke an escape clause should it report three consecutive money-losing years.

The latter clause, in retrospect, was a lot like the escape clause former Mariners owner George Argyros demanded from King County in the mid-’80s. Argyros claimed, and the Times and P-I editorially agreed, that the only way to keep the M’s in Seattle was to rewrite the team’s Kingdome lease so Argyros could more easily move the team to Tampa. (Really!) Argyros got his new lease, then promptly attempted to invoke his bug-out option at his first contractual opportunity; the team’s future wasn’t secured until the 1992 sale to the Nintendo-led group that still owns it today.

Similarly, the Times took an agreement that was ostensibly meant to keep both papers in business, and has reconfigured, interpreted, and exploited it in order to try to kill the P-I. The Hearst Corp., which has owned the P-I since 1921 while allowing so many of its other once-mighty dailies to die over the decades, is taking the whole mess to court.

It could end up in any number of ways. Times bossman Frank Blethen says he wants the Times to emerge alone from the fray, and he insists it’ll do so with his family still in charge. But there could conceivably also be a full merger of the papers into one lumbering goliath, or a Hearst buyout of the Times.

What nobody’s openly considering is a return to full competition, with Hearst or some future P-I owner amassing a separate load of presses, trucks, and ad sellers.

But that’s what I’d like to see.

It’d be a perfect opportunity to try and re-invent daily newspapers for the Internet age, when the tiny-print items that have continued to make dailies essential for urban society are more handily available online (movie times, stock prices, sports stats, want ads). In the TV age, dailies survived (albeit in consolidated, monopolized forms in most cities) as the only place you could get such data. With that advantage gone, what would a paper need? Perhaps a strong aesthetic, a sense of the zeitgeist, a coherent package of articles and pictures that at least pretends to try and make sense of a crazy world.

That’s where the P-I, the closest thing the Northwest has to a progressive daily, shines best. Its livelier copywriting and more aggressive feature coverage make it a more intriguing read than the Times has ever been (though both papers were sufficiently compliant suckers for the Bushies’ propaganda massages this past year).

I prefer the P-I as a news product, but I want both papers to live. Any industry that can’t figure out how to make that happen ain’t much of an industry.

…since I last wrote to y’all. First, thanx to the dozen or so who saw my lovely photo show last Saturday. It’ll be open again this Saturday, 1-4, at Nico Gallery, 619 Western Ave., Second Floor. After the show closes, I may try to put some of it online for print-sales purposes.

The previous Friday evening, I attended the annual birthday bash at the legendary Interbay-neighborhood live-work shack of hippie musician, videographer, and arts-entrepreneur Buddy Foley. The next day, the P-I mapped Foley’s landmark building right smack in the heart of a newly-announced strip mall development. The development would also knock out the Utilikilts office-showroom and a Vespa dealership. The resulting rising property values would threaten all the remaining industrial and arts spaces on the 15th Avenue NW strip between Queen Anne and Magnolia.

Interbay has quietly been one of those districts every city needs but which pro-development politicians see only as empty space waiting to be filled. It’s the only large area north of downtown and south of the Ship Canal that’s still providing manufacturing jobs, not to mention affordable space for certain fringe creative endeavors. We should be working to keep these areas as they are.

…Dead Souls, the protagonist tours the feudal countryside, buying the title deeds to big landowners’ dead serfs, so he could amass enough “property” to force his way into the privileged classes.

Now, instead of buying dead people, the relentless arm of Marketing wants to sell things to them. P-I columnist Joel Connelly has written about the commercial junk mail that still comes addressed to his recently-deceased ladylove. That piece generated many responses from bereaved citizens with similar tackiness to report. In the story linked here, these include an old UW Daily colleague of mine, Joel VanEtta, who lost a brother but can’t convince mailing-list compilers of this.

ONE OF THE MOST-OFTEN-WRITTEN RULES of online discussions that you know a discussion board/newsgroup/chat room’s become useless once the guys in it start calling one another Nazis.

This is essentially what a P-I freelancer did in a scathing review of Dennis Miller’s current touring comedy act.

It’s too bad the reviewer stooped so low. The once-creative Miller’s current routine, all full of pro-war blather and the kind of aggressively bigoted “attitude” found in the worst “morning zoo” radio talk hosts, could have easily been effectively denounced without such a tactic. After all, if you’re complaining about Miller’s cheap shots and name-calling, it’s not wise to resort to cheap shots and name-calling yourself.

UNLIKE APPARENTLY MANY OF YOU, I still believe in reading local newspapers. Sure, the NY Times has lotsa pretty real-estate ads for fantasy palatial mansions, but there’s still tons to be said for reading up about your own place.

There’s also the fun tea-leaf-gazing ritual of discerning what gets into the paper and why. F’rinstance, the Sunday SeaTimes’s virulent anti-monorail editorial and the accompanying, heavily inane, editorial cartoon by the paper’s new staff art-hack Eric Devericks. Devericks, like his P-I counterpart David Horsey, can be sort-of amusing when attacking some targets, but astoundingly unfunny and uncreative when called upon to visualize an editorial stance dictated by the publisher, who in turn probably got his marching orders from the Downtown Seattle Association and/or Washington Alliance for Business.

In this case, Devericks’s drawing portrays a quartet (actual) nuts, spouting the anti-monorail campaign’s shameless distortions of the pro-monorail campaign’s arguments. Being mere nuts, they have no facial expressions or body language. There’s no personality, no artistry, not even any vitriol.

The Oregonian once had an even duller cartoonist, an old guy with the perfectly geezeroid name of Art Bimrose. His idea of illustrating an idea was invariably to depict a seersucker-suited guy pointing to a newspaper headline and either smiling or frowning.

But Bimrose was consistently dull, day after day. Horsey and Devericks are selectively mediocre. When they draw a dud, you can be fairly sure they’re following orders—even, just perhaps, attempting to sabotage their assigned opinions by depicting them as opinions with which only a witless geezer would agree.

Elsewhere in that same edition, human-interest columnist Jerry Large ran selected, edited letters responding to a prior piece of his, which pondered whether Seattle was a good place for African-Americans to move to.

Large cleverly didn’t ask whether the town was merely “tolerant of diversity,” a phrase which usually refers to upscale white people’s images of their own smug perfection. No, Large wanted to hear from actual black people about their own actual experiences across the whole spectrum of life’s needs (love, career, family, community, finding a decent BBQ place, etc.).

Either by his own drive to be fair-n’-balanced or by his editors’ wish to preserve the “tolerant” civic image, Large made sure to include several letters from people who liked it here. These letters tended to list safe, “tolerance”-type reasons. The negative letters were more passionate. Their arguments tended toward a few main areas:

• The “this town completely sucks, man” argument I often hear from white art-hacks, and which I’ve attempted to refute prevously;
• the “where’s the rest of me?” argument, bemoaning the relative paucity of Af-Am individuals and related community institutions in a town with more Asians than blacks; and
• the “what tolerance?” argument, referencing icy social receptions, public stares, and racist remarks. (Trigger-happy cops weren’t mentioned in the letters Large chose to print.)

In my prior refutation of white “this town sucks” whiners, I’d said Seattle indeed is a real city, with lots to offer. But it’d have even more to offer with more Af-Ams around, what with all their immeasurable-contributions-to-the-American-milieu etc. etc.

For those Af-Ams reading this (and I know at least a few are), please consider becoming part of our city. We’re northern but not freezingly so. We’ve only got two or three indirect-race-baiting politicians, none of whom currently hold elective office. We’re awfully white, but not in a Boondocks extreme. You can find hiphop recordings here (though it is easier to find stores selling obscure German techno CDs). We’ve got our gosh-durn own African Heritage festivals, breakdancing contests, and typo-abundant black newspapers. While our local economy’s become the nation’s worst, there’s a new source of minority venture capital in the form of families who sold their city houses to rich white people at the peak of the market.

And all my dorky white brethern & cistern can do more to be fully welcoming toward (not just “tolerant” of) these neighbors. A good place to start is to start realizing black people aren’t always like what white people think they’re like (so leave those stereotypes behind). If you’re an employer, start hiring some (and not just as janitors and receptionists). And don’t think you’ll automatically become their friend if you start acting like some dorky white person pretending to be black. Just be the most honest, life-loving, gracious dorky white person you can be.

A REAL ANGEL OUT THERE should consider investing in my dream travel book project, in which I’d go to all the places I’ve always wished to go–including America’s wildest museums.

MEANWHILE CLOSER TO HOME, execs at the company that built Fremont’s gargantuan waterfront office park defended it Friday, after an architect wrote in the P-I that the place was just too big for the neighborhood and too gentrifying to boot. The execs argued that Fremont’s a cleaner, upscalier, and more wholesome place with the offices:

“To appreciate Lake Union Center now, it is helpful to reflect back to 1986, the starting point for redevelopment efforts in Fremont: The Red Door Ale House was the Fremont Tavern, not a place for families….”

I dunno ’bout you, but to me the word “tavern” (or the phrase “ale house”) would imply “not a place for families.”

IN OTHER BOOZE NOOZE: Buried in an article about the fact that there’s at lest one winery in every state nowadays is the fact that Wash. state “has added a winery every 20 days since 1997,” and surpassed N.Y. state as the nation’s #2 wine producer and probably its biggest per capita. But can we scarf down enough brie and Breton crackers to go with it?

Seems like everybody in the civic establishment, and in the just-outside groups lobbying the civic establishment, wants to get rid of the Alaskan Way Viaduct. The Seattle Times wants it gone. The P-I wants it gone. Allied Arts of Seattle wants it gone. And most influentually, Paul Allen wants it gone.

I want it to stay.

By far, it’s Seattle’s most scenic and romantic higher-speed roadway. Driving north on it at night is a visual definition of coming home to Seattle–the office towers shining to your right, Elliott Bay peacefully slumbering to your left. (And that sudden off-ramp onto Marion Street is always a mini thrill ride.) On the few days a year pedestrians can use it, it becomes a heaven of undiscovered angles and photographic possibilities.

Of course, I know the 51-year-old Viaduct can’t stay, at least not in its current incarnation. It’s not earthquake-safe, it’s built on unstable landfill, and the seawall holding up the landfill is itself old and decaying.

This provides the civic-builder clique with the perfect excuse to demand the viaduct’s replacement–not with another elevated scenic drive but with a tunnel. And on the ground level above the tunnel, the parking lots and low-rent storefronts of today’s Alaskan Way would be tossed aside as an unwanted memory of a working-class past the city’s elite would rather forget. In its place: What Times guest writer and architect Karen DeLucas calls “a great urban oasis” comprising “a rich dynamic series of urban places linked together by a pedestrian promenade that stretches the entire length of the Seattle waterfront.”

Feel free to read that as Seattle Commons II: A squeaky-clean, hyper-bland, fantasy playplace for the upscale and the tourists, openly intended to drive up surrounding property values and drive out any remaining outposts of the non-affluent.

Or, as Times columnist James Vesely writes of today’s waterfront, “The cheesy tourist strip was OK for a different Seattle, but there are grander things that could be done, and why not dream them?”

Well, I’ve got my own dreams on what to do with the waterfront. And keeping the cheesy tourist strip, even expanding it, is #2 or #3 on my list.

The rise of containerized cargo and shipboard fish processing means we can’t return the old stevedore docks to their original uses. But we can preserve their current uses–unpretentiously entertaining the citizenry with fish n’ chips under radiant heating units, ferry rides, ice cream cones, street vendors, sea-otter displays, Imax movies, souvenir-plate stores, Sylvester the Mummy, and the occasional tugboat race or Flaming Lips concert. These fine attractions could be enhanced with selective additions, which might include an amusement park with a kickass roller coaster, a summer-long “street fair,” some more exotic-import shops, some nighttime hot spots, fire eaters, stilt walkers, cabaret acts, and, of course, the Kalakala.

Just up from the water, Alaskan Way and its immediate environs between Spokane and Seneca Streets would become, in my dream, a covered (though not fully rain-protected) year-round anything-goes zone. Bars in this zone would have no mandated closing times. Pedestrians (though not drivers) would be permitted to carry open containers along what would be an all-night party place.

Beneath the street and above a traffic tunnel, a new “underground Seattle” would let grownups play safely out of sight from the family-values types: Casinos, strip clubs, rave clubs, odd performance-art venues, etc. South of Washington Street, it would turn into an “Amsterdam West” district offering red-light experiences for consenting adults of all persuasions.

Above the street, a new and seismically-correct viaduct would offer three or four lanes of slow, scenic traffic on its top tier (everyday traffic would be encouraged to take the tunnel). The new viaduct’s lower tier would be a covered pedestrian and bicycle way, with P-Patch planting boxes and art installations, alongside a monorail branch line.

Yeah, it’d all cost money. (Although my plan has more potentially rentable and taxable aspects than the plan the Times likes.) Yeah, it’d need rezoning. Yeah, it’d face political opposition.

But Vesely says we’ve gotta have big dreams if we want this city to become a better place. And my dreams are bigger, and more fun, than his will ever be.

THE NEW YEAR opened with almost exactly the same Space Needle fireworks routine (seen here from halfway up Queen Anne Hill) that began the last year.

It’s as good a time as any for a year-in-review. In 2001, this region faced:

• A spectacularly horrific mass-murder-suicide attack back East, leading to the U.S.-led overthrow of a particularly odious Third World dictatorship.
• A massive economic slump.
• Skyrocketing electricity prices.
• The loss of Boeing’s HQ, thanks to a CEO who thought he could re-image the company to stock buyers as a financial-services company that also happened to make stuff.
• A daily-newspaper strike that ended with few employee gains.
• A Mardi Gras riot, followed hours later by a massive yet fatality-free earthquake.
• The closure of the OK Hotel (to the earthquake), Tower Books, Pistil Books, the Frontier Room, the Speakeasy Cafe (to a spectacular fire), the Rendezvous Bar/Jewel Box Theater, the Ditto Tavern, the Korean-owned gangsta rap T-shirt store at 3rd and Pine, the Washington Film and Video Office, assorted dot-coms (including HomeGrocer, Kozmo, MyLackey, and MediaPassage), and a couple of upscale mags intended toward the dot-com crowd.
• The deaths of journalist-historian extraordinaire Emmett Watson and Two Bells Tavern owner Patricia Ryan.
• Tenth-anniversary-of-Nirvana hype in the national media.

On the at-least-somewhat brighter side:

• The Mariners had a once-in-a-lifetime regular season. (We’ll forget about the AL Championship Series.)
• The UW football team won the 2000-2001 Rose Bowl (we’ll forget about the 2001-2002 Holiday Bowl).
• Evictions and demolitions of funky old buildings slowed down, thanks to a collapsed market for shoddy-yet-costly condos.
• Our own delicious print MISC mag blossomed into an even tastier broadsheet with nearly two dozen contributing writers and artists (thanks, cats and chicks!).

P-I COLUMNIST TED VAN DYK recognizes Seattle’s change into a polarized rich-vs.-poor place. Then he goes ahead and endorses mayoral candidate Mark Sidran, whose entire career has been spent callously exploiting these divisions on behalf of the rich.

…that’s been blindingly obvious for years to those of us who don’t work for upscale-obsessed media: That it’s mighty tough to afford to live in Seattle if you’re not among the Demographically Correct.

…the P-I ran a long feature story on how you can preserve your newspapers for future reading and reminiscing (as if anyone really wants to remember that day). We could repeat some of those hints here, so you can keep your copies of the print edition of MISC printer-fresh, but we really don’t want to.

Here at MISC, you see, we consider the half-life of newsprint to be a vital aspect of your Total Ownership Experience, right along with the friendly ink smudges on your fingers. This publication WILL fade, yellow, and get brittle. Put it away for a while after you’ve enjoyed its contents, then retrieve it from storage weeks later. See how its natural ripening process has begun. Eventually, your MISC wil become a wrinkled but memory-filled old relic. Just like you.

A UGANDA-BASED relief site offers a list of “Ways to Help America.”

AN EMAIL CORRESPONDENT passed along a quotation from David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest, concerning things one can learn in rehab:

“No single moment is in and of itself unendurable.”

P-I COLUMNIST ANTHONY ROBINSON WRITES:

“In the longer term, nobility and morality shall be found in restraint rather than in simply unleashing American power and violence in retaliation or retribution.”

OFFICIAL NOTICE: As of Monday, it’s officially OK to complain about Bush again.

PHOTO-REPORTAGE DEPT.: At Friday’s bombing memorial at Westlake, a man made and brought a matchstick model of the towers…

…while a woman took a ball-point pen to the manila envelope she was holding, and made an impromptu sign reading “AN EYE FOR AN EYE WILL MAKE THE WORLD BLIND.”

Later that afternoon, a bagpiper serenaded the people placing flowers at Alki Beach’s Statue of Liberty replica…

…where someone had left a desktop-published plea to “move forward and live well.”

At the firefighters’ memorial in Pioneer Square, more flowers honor the fallen NYC firefighters.

At the memorial floral display in the Seattle Center International Fountain, where hundreds brought flowers and displays, someone placed a homemade flag with the American Airlines logo…

…while a chalk artist made a plea to move beyond calls for vengeance.