I took a bunch of pictures. Twelve of them, with quasi-philosophical captions, are now up at Seattle PostGlobe.

I hope to create more of these slice-O-life photo pieces for PostGlobe. If you like this, you could consider a donation to that fledgling nonprofit news site.

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.

Seattle’s own Pizzeria Pagliacci has its 30th anniversary today, with 95-cent slices. I had two, at the original location on University Way. (Yes, I’d been there in its opening week.) Both of today’s slices were right out of the oven. They were slick, sloppy, greasy, gooey, and utterly satisfying.

French photographer Eric Tabuchi offers haunting, lonesome images of “Twenty-Six Abandoned Gasoline Stations.”

ICELANDIC WRITER Iris Erlingsdottir, meanwhile, wishes to remind you that merely having a female leader won’t, by itself, save her speculator-trashed country: “Estrogen Will Not Cure Greed and Stupidity.”

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS wants you to “Save the Words.” Simply mouse over the obscure word of your choice (the words will shout out “pick me” and “no, me”), learn its definition, and promise to use it in daily speech.

…from the handsome Seattle City Council chambers. The room, and the new City Hall it’s in, may go down in history as among the last huge publicly-funded examples of New Seattle world-class-osity before economic conditions made such statements fiscally obsolete.

Today’s meeting is of the council’s Culture, Civil Rights, Health and Personnel Committee. (I wouldn’t have put all those functions in one heap, but what do I know?)

Nick Licata heads this committee. Jean Godden and Tom Rasmussen are also here. Right now, they’re going through regular committee business, to wit interviewing potential members of a LGBT health task force. The item I’m here for, a panel discussion on saving daily newspapers, will follow later in the meeting.

So let me give you a verbal image of the chambers, since many of you haven’t been here. It’s a big, bright, uber-clean room finished in light wood tones, glass, polished steel, and black vinyl seat covers.

Now the newspaper panel’s being seated.

Your panelists are:

• Roger Simpson and Doug Underwood, UW communications profs.
• Liz Brown, Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild.
• Tracey Record, West Seattle Blog.
• Anne Bremner, co-chair of Committee for a Two-Newspaper Town.
• David Brewster, founder of Crosscut and Seattle Weekly.
• Jennifer Towney, Peoria (IL) Newspaper Guild (by phone).
• Beth Hester, station manager, Seattle Channel.

Licata’s now reading from Jim McDermott’s P-I guest op-ed. I’ll post a link to it later. (Update: Here it is.)

Now, Licata’s reciting statistics about the Huffington Post. It’s more popular than all but eight newspaper sites. He didn’t mention that HuffPo still doesn’t pay its bloggers.

Licata sez he loves reading print, but acknowledges “we may all have to adopt to our changing ways.”

Prof. Roger Simpson tells of his long career working for newspapers and being a scholar about them. We’ve had daily newspapers for 220 years. Presently 1,400 dailies in the US, down 200 from 20 years ago. Total readership’s steadily declined also. In 1900, most households got 2-3 papers a day. Now, less than half even get one. “The newspaper though has always been the center for the consciousness of a community.”

The government, Simpson notes, has been wary of regulating this industry from an antitrust standpoint, until joint operating agreements were OK’d in 1972. Twenty-nine JOAs eventually formed. Today there are only nine JOAs left, including Seattle’s.

Prof. Underwood continues the talk about the industry’s changes. The newspaper we know is a product of an industrial era, and is subject to changes in technologies. JOAs, he says, were undermined when the Feds allowed the second papers in St. Louis and Miami to shut down but continue to share profits with the surviving papers of their towns.

Underwood says local-monopoly papers have become stodgy, and are having a hard time transforming themselves. Sites like HuffPo draw readers more effectively than papers’ sites with personalities and panache. But sites like HuffPo “depend on existing news companies to provide the product they riff off of.” In Norway the govt. subsidizes second newspapers in major cities. Should we?

Bremner: We started the Committee for a Two-Newspaper Town [CTNT] in ’03. Every citizen has a public responsibility. There’s so many important issues for us in having two newspapers in this town. We were pleased to be involved all the way in preserving the P-I for a while.

Bremner introduces Kathy George, one of her committee colleagues (and a onetime P-I reporter). She says they’re considering all options. A few ideas people are kicking around: Finding a civic-minded buyer or group to buy the P-I. The city council could provide leadership in guiding a purchase. Creating an endowment or non-profit to support in-depth reporting on local government and other community interests. Creating an employee-owned newspaper, such as the one in Omaha. You’ve read in local blogs about the possibility of creating a local public development authority. An online-only P-I is better than no P-I. But CTNT calls on Hearst to reveal its intentions as soon as possible, and to publicly reveal whether Hearst is making its annual, required $1 million payment to reserve its first right to buy the Seattle Times, should the latter be offered for sale. The public’s help in seeking these answers is invited.

Godden asks if an online-only P-I would still be part of a JOA. Kathy says the terms of the JOA are ambiguous about this.

Jane (sorry, no last name recorded here), another CTNT associate, asks Underwood about Norway’s subsidized papers. Underwood says there are official barriers keeping governments from influencing editorial content in these papers.

Licata asks Brown about Hearst announcing it may fire all the P-I staff. Brown mentions the Rocky Mountain News, Detroit News, and Chicago Sun-Times facing potential demise. The Baltimore Sun and Minneapolis Star-Tribune are in bankruptcy.

Newspaper Guild membership has gone from 820 to 420 members locally since ’00. Unionized press workers have gone from 140 to 43. Some 120 P-I jobs may be lost.

Brown says the Guild’s negotiating severance conditions with the P-I. She says Hearst said they didn’t know whether they’ll keep the option to buy the Times. “You don’t hear a lot of journalists out there talking about what’s happening… I don’t think they feel empowered to talk about the conditions of their industry.”

Towney, on the phone from Illinois, expresses her alarm about Starbucks’ layoffs. “Coffee and newspapers go together.” She lauds the value of reporters who have the time/money for long term research. Models she’s explored: Employee ownership, co-op ownership (“serving members over profits, in this case readers”), and non-profit ownership, a la NPR. She notes four papers in the US are owned by charitable trusts, but the papers themselves are still organized as for-profit entities. Her Peoria group opted to explore a hybrid of the three models. It would have both employee and community stockholders, and would be tied somehow to a subsidized non-profit. The Peoria paper had been employee-owned in the 1980s, then sold to a chain for $175 million. But that chain put it up for sale in 2006. The staff looked to the community for help. The paper was bought by another chain instead. The Peoria Guild held a public meeting to gather support. “The only thing stopping us from putting it out to the community is we don’t have a credible [business] model if we run a paper the way papers are run the way they’ve been run.”

Towney continues: They next explored an “L3C” organization. “Low profit limited liability corporation.” A foundation can invest in it. Its charter says community service comes before profit. Companies under it must create jobs and provide vital social benefits. “It opens up new funding channels.” The IRS, though, has consistently denied non-profit status to newspapers. Congress is now about to introduce a bill to allow L3Cs nationally.

Record: When you talk about saving newspapers, you really talk about saving journalism. Newspapers as a product and an organizational model may be becoming obsolete.

There are new ways of news gathering and dissemination coming up. In some ways they may be better than newsprint. Her site and similar ones around town have 100,000 regular readers; specifically in neighborhood-specific info. “We are serving our neighborhoods on a granular level to a greater extent than may have ever been done before.” Don’t be afraid of the future necessarily. Find ways to support journalism, the people who do the incredible work. This may be in blogs and smaller online operations. Her site is finally paying its way. Also: More discussion should be put into increasing information access to seniors and low-income people who don’t have computers.

Brewster: The news industry needs to find other bases of revenue other than advertising. The promise of flow of advertising revenue to the web is still a promise but it has slowed down. There are six other local web-only news sites around the country. In San Diego, Dallas, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Vancouver. The ones that are doing well are non-profit. Crosscut has converted into a non-profit corporation, Crosscut Public Media. It goes from one revenue stream, advertising, to three. The others are membership, as in public radio, and grants.

“Allow these web developments to flourish instead of planting new big oak trees to overshadow them.” Good stuff will grow underneath that if you let them and don’t impose solutions.

Young readers are very adept at navigating this [online] landscape. It doesn’t take the kind of mediation and paternalism these older models have provided.

Relax a bit. Allow the creativity, the ingenuity to figure what are good ways this will come about. It probably won’t be the Twin Peaks model of two equally large newspapers. It will probably be something with one large peak and 14 smaller peaks.
Licata asks Brewster, are these web projects hobbies for their contributors or real careers? Brewster: about three quarters of Crosscut’s writers are reimbursed, some at wages that can get you through life, some below that. The model is definitely to pay writers. Record: Our writers are paid, and we expect pro journalism standards from them.

Hester: Our footprint is local. While we don’t have great numbers of viewers on cable, online our numbers have grown tremendously; 5 million hits last year, twice the year before. We’re definitely trying to accommodate the transition to online. I don’t mean just taking our television product and putting it online, but providing additional information and interaction.

I don’t have the answer for print, other than this: We’ve actually been the beneficiary of corporate media downsizing. We’ve been able to use the resources of very talented people who’ve worked here in print and TV.

Yet we certainly don’t have the capacity to make up for the loss of talent in investigative reporting that comes from print journalism.

Underwood talks about the need for “the public sphere.” The Super Bowl’s the only place anymore where you can run ads that everyone will see. For many years, our democracy has thrived despite horrible coverage by the newspapers. Our UW interns provide half the Olympia press corps of the entire state. There are ways to do better journalism than has been done by the dailies. But where do we re-create the “public sphere,” some viable place which carries a sense of importance.
Someone in the audience asks via a notecard if the P-I could become a regional insert in the NY Times. Underwood remarks that we’d have to see it the NYT remains viable.

Brewster lauds the cooperation and “coop-etition” among online news sites/blogs.
Bremner: It’s not blogs or papers. It’s both. But there’s civic pride at stake here. We’re losing a part of Seattle.
Godden asks Simpson about the role of universities in supporting an independent voice in local journalism. Simpson notes the UW’s intern programs and other ways the U connects to the community. Underwood notes the Univ. of Missouri runs the “second paper” in Columbia MO. Serious journalists in all these areas will need to get together and figure out what the new model is.

Record notes corporate ownership of media isn’t necessarily something to save at all costs.

Licata asks how these new models will allow people the time for investigative reporting, and jokingly states, “the city of Seattle is not going to buy the P-I.” Yet he’d like to play a role in finding a solution. “I think at least we helped in this event to raise awareness.”

I’m back home now. What did we learn from this?

We learned about L3C corporations. A quick online search seems to imply these currently exist only in Vermont. And we heard a lot of people give general ideas on how the journalism profession as a whole may be going in the next few years, or how they wished it would be going.

We didn’t hear any concrete schemes to save the printed P-I and/or seattlepi.com.

But then again, it’s still Hearst’s thang, to sell or scrap as it wishes.

I wish there was some real civic leadership around here, to herd and announce a big group of civic-minded investors to first take the P-I local, then to mold the product and the organization into something with staying power.

(Based on a rough draft written in a packed Spitfire bar this morning): I never saw so many people in a bar prior to 9 a.m. since the last soccer World Cup. It’s now 10:37 a.m. and the place is still quite full, just not to standing room only. According to reports, the scene was just as packed and festive at the other viewing parties around town and around the country. Lots of hugging and kissing and clapping and cheering. A spontaneous chorus of “Na Na Na Na, Hey Hey, Goodbye” ensued when the Bushes boarded the helicopter. A lot of people, including myself, seem not to want this moment to end. Yet it must.

Or must it?

What if the joy, the celebratory spirit, carries over into people’s everyday lives? To work, school, commuting, recreation, family, lovemaking, feeding, grooming, worshipping, checkbook balancing, and all the other things normal American humans do in their normal lives?

I’ve never known such a world. The many corporate attempts to create all-positive spaces (Disneyland, malls, casinos, porn) invariably reveal a heap of sadness, a face of tragedy glaring from behind the comedy mask.

But Obama’s positive thinking is a very different flavor from an incessant/manic corporate positive thinking—and from the neocons’ bullyish swagger.

It’s a positivity that recognizes the negative, while vowing to overcome it. Not to hide troubles behind slogans and forced smiles, but to solve them. To create a new reality the hard way, the only way that ultimately works.

Thus the call to begin the real work, invoked by Obama during the eat-your-vegetables passages of his inauguration speech.

How far will he, and we, get about rescuing the economy, health care, education, and the planet?

One thing we do know: That incessantly repeated Pepsi commercial with the song “My Generation” totally blows.

Yet the fact that one of the world’s most aggressive marketing companies wants to hop on the hope bandwagon reveals something. I don’t know what exactly, but something.

So we’ve finally had it. The Big One. The Perfect Storm (Western Washington version). The utter catastrophe the TV stations breathlessly threatened/promised every fall and winter since at least 1991.

I won’t disparge the impact this has had on the homeless (who deserve a better lot in life year round).

And the big snow’s timing has left thousands unable to leave or enter the area for holiday reunions; not to mention leaving already-troubled retailers bereft of holiday shoppers.

And, no matter what week it occurs, a snow like this will be tough for car commuters and truck shippers. This time, it also hit bus and train travelers hard.

But damn if it isn’t the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

And the most joyous.

The first non-sticky flakes of Saturday the 13th were all the “white Christmas” miracle I’d come to expect here in the ol’ Puget Sound convergence zone. It was lite; it was white; it went away.

The local newscasts (which, like their counterparts on stations across the country, are built and budgeted exactly for these huge visual-crisis moments) promised/threatened an even huger blast the following Wednesday.

It didn’t happen.

Those of us who’d been through this in the past figured, “Ah, of course. They’ll always threaten but not deliver.”

Then, in the predawn hours of Thursday, the big snow came.

And came.

And came some more.

For four days.

Without getting into crude sexual puns, let me simply state how much I’ve loved it.

As I’ve written here in the past, snow in Seattle is a rare treat. It turns us all into children. Most of us can’t do our normal daily dreary work lives. All we can do is play, and coccoon, and enjoy the company of whoever’s closest to us, and reconnect with those in our most immediate vicinity.

And enjoy the blanket of pure precipitory wonder.

But by this point, even a Snow Miser like me feels a little melancholy while walking through the winter wonderland.

Can there be such a thing as too much beauty, too much joy?

When does it turn into, as the cliche goes, a “great and terrible beauty”?

Sooner for many other people than for me, that’s for sure.

But now, I’m starting to feel the ten-day itch.

At some point, any holiday from the ordinary must conclude.

Lovers who’ve ignored the world beyond one another’s arms must resume doing whatever they do to stay fed. Children must return to school. Trucks must be able to get stuff to and from us. The wheels of commerce must turn again.

But the visceral memories remain—of street sledding on flattened cardboard boxes, of mugs of cocoa or Irish coffee thawing frozen fingers, of strangers becoming instant allies inthe great adventure, of our normal wintery dim grey turned blinding white.

A final thought: It just so happened that this snowapalooza occurred around and on the solstice, the day after which everything becomes just a little brighter. This has been the last winter solstice of the Bush era; the economy’s in the undisputed dumps, the nation’s civic fabric is in tatters, but the hope of better times already beckons.

If anyone has a reasonable explanation for this, please tell me.

It took trekkin’ to seven stores, but I now have my yummy centennial Hydrox pack. Yay!

Kress IGA, that is, as of 7 a.m. this morning. I’m happy.

The “Save Our Sonics” rally outside the new Federal Courthouse on Stewart Street was far more exhilarating than anything seen on the KeyArena floor this past year (except the Obama rally).

The organizers scheduled it to coincide with the start of the city’s lawsuit trial inside the courthouse and with game 6 of the NBA finals. With the help of the local sports media, they drew more than 3,000 people to the courthouse steps.

Sonics legends were there (Gary Payton, Xavier McDaniel) to spur on the shouting. So were several men, and at least one boy, in Slick Watts getup.

As per the organizers’ permit, the 4:30 p.m. rally lasted just over half an hour, long enough to be covered live for the 5 p.m. local news. It served to drive home a crucial point in the city’s case against Clay Bennett and co.: We don’t want a settlement. We don’t want to be bought out of the team’s arena lease, at any price. We want our team. Period.

…blogged about Friday’s huge Obamapalooza at KeyArena. Allow me to interject a few thoughts of my own.

First, it was a spectacularly attended event. Here are about half of the people who didn’t get in. KeyArena was filled above its official capacity, far surpassing any SubSonics crowd this season. They’d said the doors would open at 11. I’d shown up at 10:15 a.m. The line was still snaking around the Seattle Center grounds. I barely made it into the upper nosebleed seats.

They all showed up for what turned out to be a simple, direct spectacle. The Obama campaign showed some of its commercials on the DiamondVision screens. Local musician Jake Bergevin showed off the pro-Obama music video he’d made with Pat Wright and Matt Cameron.

Warm-up speakers were kept to a brief, all-local lineup of Mayor Nickels, Rep. Adam Smith, and Gov. Gregoire.

The Sen. Obama gave the 50-minute version of his current stump speech. No podium, no graphic “slides,” only a few strategic banners. He essentially said what he’s been saying these past months: “It’s easy to be against something. But people want to be FOR something.”

You already know what he says he’s for: Peace, prosperity, affordable health care (sans mandates), unions, civil rights, competent government, choice, economic fairness, eco-sanity, gay rights (though perhaps not gay marriage), people coming together to work for a better tomorrow.

Some pundits have claimed the biggest differences between Sens. Obama and Clinton right now are their personalities and their brand images. If so, the question then is which of these personalities, which of these brand images, is most capable of trouncing Sen. McCain and the walking ghosts of the Bushies.

The Moore Theatre threw a delightfully casual centennial party Monday evening. It was a textbook lesson in how to mount a fun, populist gala. It hewed to the spirit of the Moore’s original purpose as a vaudeville palace.

The above view is from the now seldom-used top balcony. Originally, this was the only part where black patrons could sit; it was accessed from a separate side entrance.

Theater personnel gave informal tours of backstage areas. Buskers performed outside and throughout the lobbies. Free drinkies and snackies abounded. Original posters and playbills hung everywhere.

Civilians were invited to consume wine and popcorn on stage, while one act after another appeared: Operetta, tap dancing, trapeze, burlesque, modern dance, standup comedy, folk music, soul music.

The night started with an old-time theater organist. It closed with a pick-up rock band, including guitarist Kurt Bloch and singer Kim Virant.

Would that all theatrical parties were this much fun. (Hint hint, Seattle Repertory Organization.)

With a high “five” from John Curley to the big ‘KING Mike’ balloon/float, the downtown holiday shopping season is among us.

I know I’m not the only one who saw something subliminally S/M-like about the real woman locked up inside a giant snow globe.

Then, at the Black Friday parade’s conclusion, always comes the fake snow shot out from TSFKATBM (that’s “the store formerly known as The Bon Marche”).