first newsweek cover, 1933, via taylormarsh.com

So after 80 years, umpteen awards, hundreds of little insights and major scoops, and (particularly lately) a lot of dross, Newsweek magazine will fold in December. The name will live on as a section within the DailyBeast.com website; but we all know this is an ending, not a “transition.”

It’s a shame. But it’s been a while in coming.

The Washington Post Co. unloaded Newsweek a few years back, just to have one fewer money-losing journalistic enterprise on its books. It was propped up for a little while by audio-equipment tycoon Sidney Harman; but he died last year, and his family stopped subsidizing the mag.

That left Newsweek at the mercy of DailyBeast, the punditry and gossip site run by media mogul Barry Diller and serial failed magazine editor Tina Brown.

Circulation, at 3 million a decade ago, dropped by more than half. Brown imposed several sleaze cover stories this summer and autumn; these only led some former fans to wish it put out of its misery.

No one, except laid off employees and their kin, will mourn what Newsweek had become.

But many of us will mourn what it had been.

When News-Week: The Magazine of News Significance began in 1933, Henry Luce’s Time had been publishing for a decade. Many readers, particularly at the dawn of FDR’s New Deal era, had grown weary of Luce’s unabashed conservative slant. News-Week gave these readers a similar formula of digests and analysis, but with a nonpartisan, sometimes even pro-Dem POV.

The Washington Post Co. bought Newsweek in the 1950s, and beefed up its original reporting. It never overtook Time in circulation or revenue, but frequently outshone its rival in getting the biggest stories and the most insightful angles on the same stories.

These days, there are any dozens of websites and blogs and aggregator algorithms serving up customized, bubble-ized, non-threatening headlines and punditry and spin about the national political/economic sphere.

But there’s less and less original reporting for these sites to slice, dice, and interpret.

And there are fewer big places that serve a variety of points of view, challenging readers to think outside of their respective ideological boxes.

We need more of what Newsweek, at its peak, served up every seven days.

via fastcompany.com

• Dean of indie animators Bill Plympton offers a handy “Guide to Telling Animated Stories.” Lesson #1: “Having a great idea is more important than being a great artist.”
• The New York Post doesn’t like Dina Martina. Of course, they’ve been so wrong about so much so often….
• One reason the Republicans are running so scared this election: it could be the last election cycle to be dominated by TV ads, and hence by the megabucks they cost. Local news ratings around the country are teetering, especially among young adults. (And don’t expect 3D TV to save the business.)
• Buried in this story about Fender Guitars’ fiscal trouble in the techno era is the info that Fender’s biggest wholesale customer, Guitar Center (the 500 lb. gorilla of music-store chains) is controlled by Mitt Romney’s ol’ pals at Bain Capital.
• George W. Bush was kept far away from the GOP convention but is front n’ center at an “alternative investment summit” in the Cayman Islands.
• Seattle Weekly founder David Brewster looks back at his creation, now under semi-new ownership again. Brewster still seems not to understand why the Weekly had become vulnerable to the Stranger’s early-1990s rise. For 15 years, the Weekly had operated under the unbending assumption that its original target audience, the (formerly) young urban professionals of the Sixties Generation, were the absolute only people who mattered in this town or ever would matter. By ignoring the wants (or even the existence) of people born after 1952, Brewster left a huge hole for some underfunded entrepreneurs from the Midwest to fill.
• Jeremy M. Barker would like to remind you that, even when its performers appear nude on stage, “Contemporary Dance Is Not Stripping.” I agree. It’s infinitely sexier.

from the book 'mail order mysteries' via laughingsquid.com

• Oh we so wanted to believe the miracle products advertised in comic books really worked as advertised (or at least were as cool as the ads claimed).
• I might be in the minority even among local fans, but I believe the replacement refs made the right call in awarding Monday night’s final play (and hence the game) to the Seahawks.
• No, the Edmonton Oilers hockey team isn’t ever going to move to Seattle. The local visit by Oilers execs is only an exercise in “arena blackmail” toward Edmonton politicos.
• David Goldstein puts the blame for Washington’s regressive tax structure on a state Supreme Court ruling back in 1933.
• Pundits look at Washington state’s political “Cascade curtain.” Micah Cohen at the NYT‘s FiveThirtyEight sees the west/east divide in terms of women’s rights issues…
• …while Eli Sanders dissects how, in the last State Supreme Court race, an unqualified white candidate beat a highly qualified Hispanic candidate in Eastern Washington, even in 40-percent-Hispanic areas.
• Speaking of Eastern Washington, those bigass, electricity-hungry “server farm” computer installations there might not employ very many people once they’re built, but they still demand political clout.
• A judge refused to throw out a class-action suit by female Costco employees, alleging discrimination in promotions.
• TV ads for the gay marriage referendum don’t show any actual gay people. I’m reminded of the 1998 initiative to end affirmative action in the state. The anti-initiative ads showed, as their examples of affirmative action’s needy beneficiaries, only white little girls. The tactic didn’t work.
• The good folks at Seattle Indian Health Services claim the city, led by councilmember Nick Licata, is trying to take over their agency so it can sell the land on which their offices sit to a private developer.
• A national church mag calls Seattle’s own Mars Hill Church (home of “hip” misogyny/homophobia) America’s third fastest-growing church.
• The Northwest’s oil refining capital could also host the nation’s biggest bottled-water plant. What could possibly go wrong?
• The airline now calling itself United (a shotgun marriage of the original UAL with Continental) has posted a nice time lapse video of a Boeing 787 being put together. It’s enough to warm this Snohomish County guy’s heart.
• Andy Williams, 1928-2012: The seemingly ageless singer/TV host began as a child in a singing-brothers act, then jump-started the career of a similar act (the Osmonds). He was a quintessential icon of the square side of the 1960s, smooth and slick and pleasant and never ruffled. He was one of those personalities who seemed to inhabit a world of serenity that flowed all around him; which made his latter-day emergence as a right wingnut even stranger.
• Ben Adler at the Nation says the truly crazy wingnut conspiracy theories and insult “jokes” don’t start on radio or Fox “News”, but at obscure blogs and e-mail lists.
• Today’s Romney/Ryan bashings: Richard Eskow believes Ryan still believes his former Ayn Randian denunciations of Medicare and Social Security. Florida Republicans are up to their old voter-suppression tricks. Greg Palast claims Karl Rove’s ol’ election-stealing dirty tricks operations are still up and running. And Jonathan Chiat visits some extremely rich people who imagine themselves to be America’s most “persecuted” and overtaxed sector.
• Economic philosopher Angus Sibley has a highly lucid, step-by-step breakdown of what’s wrong with libertarian economics.
• If outsource manufacturers like Foxconn in China keep up their reputation for workplace horridness, western tech-hardware companies just might have to return production in-house just to avoid the bad PR.
• Victoria’s Secret has quietly discontinued its “Sexy Little Geisha” ensemble. Anti-racist bloggers claim credit.

zoo atlanta via king-tv

• Ivan, 1962-2012: In the postwar years, the biggest public attractions in both Seattle and Tacoma were caged gorillas. Seattle’s gorilla, Bobo, was kept at the Woodland Park Zoo. Tacoma’s Ivan was in the indie B&I discount store, which later evolved into a low-rent mall. There, he was kept in a cage with a back concrete wall painted to resemble a jungle. After years of public pressure, the mall’s owners finally donated Ivan to Woodland Park, which in turn sent him to Zoo Atlanta.
• Just when folks are getting used to the Space Needle in its retro original “Galaxy Gold” color scheme, its owners want to change it again.
• Thanks to the state’s “top two” election law and a Stranger-fueled write in campaign, the speaker of the State House of Representatives will be challenged this November by a socialist.
• Former City Councilmember Cheryl Chow (daughter of powerful local restaurateur Ruby Chow) has proclaimed that she is a lesbian; and also, as an aside, that she’s dying of cancer.
• The best thing left at Seattle Weekly, longform-essay reporter Rick Anderson, was just laid off and placed on freelance status. Will someone local please buy the paper back from the Arizonans and make it something to be proud of again?
• A tech news site visits the Bellevue company (run by ex-Microsoft top execs) that’s become infamous for buying up patents by the thousands for the purpose of suing other companies that didn’t know these patents existed.
• PopCap Games, the Seattle-based darling of the “social gaming” realm, is firing 50 people.
• Bookstore sales rose 3.8 percent in June compared to the previous year. Sorry, book snobs—you’re still not nearly as solitary as you believe/wish you were.
• Big national corporations have turned the art of finagling sweetheart deals from local governments into a precise science. Today’s examples: sporting-goods superstores.
• ABC’s Nightline, in its 34th year, is the #1 network show in its time slot, regularly outdrawing both Leno and Letterman. Right after the elections, it’ll be pushed up to 12:35 a.m. so Jimmy Kimmel can get the 11:35 slot. And you ask why total TV viewership is down these days, what with these total geniuses running the joints.
• Charles Kenny at Bloomberg Businessweek claims to know “the real reason America’s schools stink.” According to Kenny, it’s know-nothing, do-nothing parents.
• Let’s all “Do the Felix!“

seattle mariners via mynorthwest.com

geneticist.tumblr.com

• Artist Lisa Nillson creates elaborate human-body cross sections using “only pieces of rolled paper.”
• Here are links to the musical numbers left out of NBC’s Olympic closing-ceremony telecast, including Ray Davies.
• Magazine single-copy sales in the U.S. are down 10 percent from a year ago. Expect more stupid “stunt” covers as the desperation sinks in.
• Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin really dislikes voter suppression drives.
• Last Picture Show writer Larry McMurtry has become one of America’s biggest used-book superstore operators. Until now.
• Joe Kubert, 1927-2012: The master of gritty realistic comics and illustration was best known for war comics such as Sgt. Rock. He was equally adept at superhero titles (Hawkman), personal and autobiographical works, graphic journalism, and art-instruction courses. His impact on the art cannot be underestimated.

buzzfeed.com

• As we leave the mythical Mount Olympus, let us attempt to forget the particularly bizarre spectacle that is synchronized swimmers’ makeup.
• The first big motif of the Olympic closing ceremony: nostalgia for newspapers.
• By now you’ve heard all the deliciously inappropriate, wrong-for-America economic and social stances of would-be-veep Paul Ryan. And you know that Ryan is a rabid disciple of selfishness goddess Ayn Rand (as are so many right-wing operatives these days). What it all adds up to, according to Markos Moulitsas:

Democrats are campaigning with a swagger, having fun. They know they’ve got the advantage.… We need to embrace reality and shove reality down the GOP’s throats. Because yeah, we are ahead, objectively so. We’re winning and we’ve got to own it. They can whine about biased polls and biased media and biased everything that doesn’t conform to their little Fox News bubble world, all the while we do the work necessary to seal the deal.

• Meanwhile: “Decline of good jobs linked to workers’ decreased bargaining power.”
• Meanwhile, meanwhile: Kudos to Jon Talton for getting the phrase “depredations of the plutocrats” into the Seattle Times.
• Wash. Post pundit Aaron Blake feels GOP deliberate distortions and misquotes of Obama constitute exemplar horse-race style campaiging. Jay Rosen feels, well, differently.
• Harvard’s Steven Strauss explains why the 21st century was supposed to bring us techno-utopia but instead meagerly spits forth gimmicky social-media sites promoted as “revolutions.” In such an environment of “incremental innovations,” Strauss adds, corporate bureaucrats will be more valued than hotshot entrepreneurs.
• Mississippi has a county where school kids who get in even minor trouble are automatically sent to prison.
• A Las Vegas Denny’s is going to feature its own in-house wedding chapel. “With this onion ring….”
• Port of Seattle officials were for (or at least indifferent toward) the Sonics arena scheme before they were against it.
• One of the West Seattle Water Taxi boats caught on fire.
• An ex-UW pediatrics prof is accused of waterboarding his own daughter.
• Google’s making it harder to search for free downloads of copyrighted media. Finally: a market advantage for other search engines.
• Austrian archeologists, rummaging through an ancient castle, found some 15th-century vintage bras. No, they weren’t worn by (insert name of over-40 female celebrity here).
• I disagree with the Sight & Sound magazine poll putting Vertigo atop the greatest films of all time. But I understand why the poll’s “programmers, academics, and distributors” would pick it. Vertigo is eminently open to academic interpretation. It’s full of “meta” themes about identity and illusion; all within the context of a big-budget Hollywood thriller in luscious Technicolor and VistaVision (Paramount’s sideways-film process, a precursor to IMAX).

visual.ly

• According to the “Geek Zodiac,” I belong to the Year of the Astronaut. (I always liked astronauts.)
• Forbes.com freelancer Zach Slaton traces the roots of Seattle’s soccer mania back further than the 1974 NASL Sounders, to British and European immigrants who’d come here starting in the 1950s.
• A southwest Wash. man was recently discovered attempting to pass some particularly “high quality fake money.” Who says Americans have lost their manufacturing edge?
• More than 80 million Facebook accounts are really spambots or other varieties of fake, Facebook management admits.
• The Seattle Times (an old-school advertising medium) disses new-school advertising medium Yelp.com. The paper alleges that the “customer review” site promises to promote positive reviews of shops and eateries that buy ads on the site, and threatens to promote negative reviews of those that don’t buy ads on the site.
• It’s crop circle time again!
• Frank Elaison at Social Media Today would really like Net users to “focus on being positive,” and stop brutally insulting people they’ve never even met.
• The Onion (with which the Stranger has a shared pre-history) has found today’s third rail of bad-taste humor.
• Back in 2005-2006, a locally-owned small town daily in eastern Idaho (an area more heavily Mormon than Utah) ran an exposé of a boy-abuser within the adult leadership of the local Boy Scouts. The local business and governmental leadership quickly jelled their outspoken support—not around the victims or their families, but around the Scout leaders who’d conspired to cover up the crimes for years. It’s news now because one of the conspiracy’s most outspoken defenders, the head of the area’s biggest company, is now on Romney’s fundraising team. And he’s doing to Romney’s critics what he did to the newspaper back then—threaten to sue them into oblivion.

perfect sound forever, via furious.com

• It was my first real lesson in how to make a print periodical that was neither a corporate “slick” nor an amateur “zine.” It was my entree into several musical worlds, most importantly that of U.S. indie pop/rock. Let us remember the brief, glorious life of New York Rocker.
• Can Washington’s state parks really survive if they have to become self supporting?
• Correction of the day (NY Times):

An earlier version misstated the term Mr. Vidal called William F. Buckley Jr. in a debate. It was crypto-Nazi, not crypto-fascist.

• In the Matrix movies, identity is easily transmutable and fluid. Think about that when you learn that director Larry Wachowski now wants to be known as Lana.
• How do all those “rugged individualist,” “rebel” Tea Party operatives act and sound so much alike? They get special training in exactly what to say, do, and believe.
• Meanwhile, “Conservative Movement” operatives are finally starting to turn against one another, using the same tactics of loud lies they’ve always used against progressives and centrists.
• The latest winner of one of those dumb magazine declarations about “America’s coolest city”? Houston.
• If a Waterworld dystopia ever comes to be, expect the One Percenters to hole themselves up in fancy-as-all-heck “floating cities of the future.”
• Human waste off the Northwest coast, now with extra caffeine.
• The anti-“social media” backlash is fully underway. One disgruntled Facebook advertiser says it was charged for “clicks” on its ads that turned out to have been mostly generated by “bot” programs. And Ewan Morrison at the Guardian implores self-publishing authors to spend less time incessantly hawking their “brands” on Twitter, Facebook, et al., and more time actually, you know, writing.

Happy 7/11 everyone! And we’ve got a new place to get our free regular Slurpee® on this only-comes-but-once-a-year day. This brand new 7-Eleven franchise is on Virginia Street between 8th and 9th, in the cusp between Belltown, the retail core, South Lake Union, and the Cascade district. It’s got all your favorites—burritos, Big Bite® hot dogs, $1 pizza slices, bizarre potato-chip varieties, coffee lids with sliding plastic openings. It closes nightly at midnight, though (sorry, hungry Re-bar barflies at closing time).

• I can tell you that hate-filled, hyper-aggressive online “comment trolls” existed back in the 1980s days of bulletin board systems (BBSs) and 300-baud acoustic modems. Neil Steinberg at the Chicago Sun-Times sees their antecedents back even further. A lot further.
• There’s only one million-selling music album so far this year. It actually came out last year.
• Jon Talton explains how tax cuts are “the god that failed.”
• ACT Theatre will have the U.S. premiere of a play by Brit mega-playwright Alan Ayckbourn next year. And he’s personally coming over to direct it. This is just about the most establishment-prestige you can get in the play world.

'jseattle' at flickr, via capitohillseattle.com

Yes, it’s been nearly a week since I’ve posted any of these tender tidbits of randomosity. Since then, here’s some of what’s cropped up online and also in the allegedly “real” world:

• There’s still no official hint on what the proposed Sonics Arena might look like. But the wannabe developers of East Pine Street’s “Bauhaus block” have released a drawing of their proposed mixed use development. At least in its idealized-drawing form, it’s not as monstrous looking as some other recent structures in the area.
• In other preservation battles, Seattle’s people again rally around a thing about which the elites don’t give a darn. They’re striving to bring back the Waterfront Streetcar.
• Meanwhile, a study claims if the viaduct-replacement tunnel charges tolls high enough to pay for it, drivers will clog the surface streets rather than pay those tolls.
• Seattle Opera faces a $1 million shortfall, and will mount fewer new shows in future years. But don’t count ’em out yet, folks. It’s not over until, well, you know.
• The late writer-director Nora Ephron had many major achievements. Sleepless in Seattle, let us all admit, is among the least of them.
• Did you know there was a real hostelry in Fife called the “Norman Bates Motel“? Emphasis on the was.
• America’s cities: they’re back! (Of course, some of us knew this for some time.)
• In a pleasant surprise, one of the Supreme Court’s pro-one-percenter flank betrayed his masters and voted to uphold Obamacare. In response, some members of the Rabid Right’s noise machine claimed the great American Experiment was over and they’d hightail it to Canada (which, uh, has had universal health care in place for some time now).
• If you’re on liberal/progressive websites at all these days, you’ll find a lot of comment threads hijacked by folk who claim to be lefties disgusted by Obama’s centrist tactics, so much that they won’t vote this November, and want you to not vote either. At least some of these comment trolls turn out to be paid employees of right-wing dirty tricks outfits.
• Rupert Murdoch’s splitting his News Corp. into two companies. One will contain his print properties (including HarperCollins Books, The Wall St. Journal, the New York Post, and his besieged London tabloid operation), plus the iPad “newspaper” The Daily. The other will hold his “entertainment” properties. Yes, Fox “News” goes with the entertainment half.
• Paul Krugman tells the PBS NewsHour all about his “cartoon physics” theory of the American economy.
• Google’s putting out a tablet device with a 7-inch color screen, just like Amazon’s Kindle Fire. But the exciting part of this Wall St. Journal link is at the bottom, where they mention another forthcoming Google hardware product. It’s a streaming-media player that attaches to TV sets, and it’ll be made in the USA!
• Ann Althouse looks at a famous parody of trashy sex novels, and asks rhetorically if those who make and read such parodies are really bashing the potboilers’ readers (i.e., women).
• Nordstrom’s opening a branch in New York City. Make way for NYC media outlets to describe it as a brand new startup.
• Headline: “The media covers Kardashians, not climate change.” Comment: The media covers the-media-not-covering-climate-change more than it covers climate change.

fuckyeahtwinpeaksintro.tumblr.com

Something made more than 20 years ago can still spark creative responses. Cast in point: a whole blog devoted to “Things You Can Do During the Intro of Twin Peaks.” The intro sequence for the series episodes runs a full 1:32 (the pilot’s into was even longer). Compare that to modern network dramas that might barely flash a logo at you.

• Want more Eastern Washington-set dramatics? A year old but still vital, local author Jess Walter offers a funny/poignant “Statistical Abstract for My Home of Spokane, Washington.”
• Computing isn’t just gonna keep getting cheaper. It’s also gonna keep getting more energy efficient. That means the same hydro-power-eating server farms in Eastern Washington will carry ever-bigger data loads. And that’s gonna mean even more “creative disruption;” and not just in the businesses you think of as “high tech” either.
• Print Media Shrinkage Watch: The Los Angeles Times, once the wealthiest, most ad-laden daily paper in America, has taken a $1 million grant from the Ford Foundation to pay a few beat reporters’ salaries.
• Self Publishing Boom Watch: A single e-book middleman company, Smashwords, has put out over 127,000 titles by 44,000 authors thus far.
• Some of these have been on a few sites before, but here ‘s one site where you get a whole cafeteria menu’s worth of forgotten tech sounds, from the dial phone to the dot matrix printer.

• Gay marriage update: Now that the opponents of equality have filed enough petition signatures, Ref. 74 goes to the ballot in November. Pro-equality folks, who were asked to “decline to sign” the referendum petitions, will now have to vote “yes” on the referendum itself to keep marriage for all on our state’s books. (Too bad, though, about the “Approve R 74” campaign logo. It looks too much like a Hanford radiation leak.)
• Heads up, TV viewers in Comcast-less areas of Seattle. The full transition from the pathetic Broadstripe Cable to the much more promising Wave Broadband takes full effect on July 17. Soon to arrive at last: Current TV! IFC! Ovation! MLB Network! NFL Network! C-SPAN 2! And HD versions of HBO, TCM, CNN, MSNBC, Comedy Central, and Cartoon Network! (Still no Sundance or the French channel TV5, though.)
• In previous posts about the above topic, I’d called Wave Broadband “locally owned.” It’s now been sold to out-of-state private equity interests, but remains locally based.
• That Seattle Children’s Hospital patients’ lip-sync music video, based on the Kelly Clarkson song “Stronger?” The record label got it pulled from YouTube. You can still see it at the Huffington Post.
• CNN wants to pick a fight between Seattle and Portland, apparently in the name of regional bragging rights. Why bother?
• Some Shell Oil execs held a PR fest at the Space Needle, celebrating the opening of a new drilling platform in Alaska. Only the three-foot-tall “oil rig” drink dispenser malfunctioned, making a big mess. Lots of blogs snickered at the ill-timed fail. Except: It wasn’t real. It was all a hoax stunt, devised by anticorporate hoax-stunt devisers The Yes Men.
• We must say goodbye to Travelers Tea Co., the East Indian themed gift, food, and home-furnishings shop and cafe on East Pine, after 14 years. Travelers’ one-year-old second restaurant location on Beacon Hill remains.
• I haven’t seen ’em, but supposedly there are web-guru essays chastizing Pinterest for attracting a predominantly female user base; as if Grand Theft Auto discussion boards were valuable “mainstream” services but “girls’ stuff” was just too insubstantial for tech investors to put their money into.
• An ad man claims we’re heading into “the golden age of mobile.” He means media and advertising made for smartphones and tablets.
• Is an ex-Coca-Cola marketing exec really sincere about renouncing his junk-food-shilling past, or is he just trying to sell himself in a new shtick as a health-food marketing exec?
• The print magazine business has apparently stabilized, if you believe this account from, ahem, a print magazine.
• Colson Whitehead has a lovely memoir of his childhood as a horror movie fanatic.
• Black activist A. Phillip Randolph put out a short book in 1967 advocating A Freedom Budget for All Americans. Randolph and his co-authors claimed their plan, based on Federal economic incentive spending, would essentially end poverty in America within eight years. The whole document’s now online, and it’s full of economic-wonk language to support its claims.

east baton rouge parish library

The decline of newsprint has reached the point of the first proverbial dropping shoe.

A major U.S. city will be without a seven-day local printed newspaper.

Hurricane Katrina could not stop the 175-year-old New Orleans Times-Picayune from printing (or at least putting out an online .pdf edition). But the Newhouse/Advance Publications chain (which also owns the Oregonian and the Puget Sound Business Journal) just did.

Starting later this year, the Times-Picayune will only appear in print on Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday.

(Advance’s Alabama papers in Birmingham, Mobile, and Huntsville will also cut to three days.)

One third of the Times-Picayune’s remaining reporting staff (after several years of previous cuts) will be laid off.

The company’s official announcement says it will “significantly increase” its NOLA.com news site, augmented by “enhanced” print editions.

But if you believe that, then you’ve probably paraded too often with Krewe Delusion.

designboom.com

• The resurgent micro-car movement has a new achievement, the micro RV!
• Lightning, mudslides. Just another mid-spring day in Seattle.
• Gov. Gregoire takes the bold step of insisting Wash. state needs new tax revenue, now that she’s no longer running for anything.
• A (female) anti-choice activist was invited to speak at the UW by campus Catholics. The lecture’s deliberately provocative title: “Do Women Have Too Many Rights?”. Pro-choice women, naturally, showed up to protest and to put the truth to the speaker’s lies. Things did not go smoothly.
• Roger Valdez at the Seattle Transit Blog suggests citizens take control of preserving neighborhood landmarks by getting together to buy them.
• Developers of the big (175-foot) waterfront ferris wheel are making sure it’ll attract riders year round. Riders will be in “enclosed gondolas, equipped with heating and air conditioning.”
• Darn, those proposed new Amazon office towers would be mighty big n’ slick.
• Boeing’s Wash. state employment may peak this year at about 83,000, then dwindle.
• Health Scare of the Day: Wazzu researchers believe exposure to toxic chemicals might lead to a risk of ovarian cancer, a risk that could be passed on to your great-granddaughters.
• It’s the end of an era for non-NY/LA/SF based national media. Playboy is moving its last Chicago-based operations to LA. The Chicago Tribune even published an editorial about it.
• I don’t always follow ’em, but you might try blogger Barb Sawyers’ “15 Ways to Write Tight.”
• The Starz series Magic City is having a hard time finding actresses and extras in Miami who could pass for women living in 1959 (i.e., without implants).
• I was at the Prole Drift art gallery this past First Thursday. Saw a big painting of what looked a lot like a dead mall. A desolate exurban landscape. A big, nearly empty parking lot. Long, lo-rise buildings with neither windows nor signs. A main entrance at the center. I told the gallery owners I was in a Facebook group of dead mall enthusiasts. They quickly told me the painting was really of a modern prison.

buddy bunting, via prole drift gallery

The latest Audit Bureau of Circulation figures are in for the six months ending in March.

They show the Seattle Times‘ circulation continuing a steady decline, to 237,000 daily and 300,000 on Sunday. That’s 6.6 percent lower than one year ago.

What’s more, each figure includes about 30,000 paid subscribers to the Times‘ print-replica .pdf edition (the only paid online product the Times offers so far).

So the daily print Times is now beneath 206,000 buyers. That’s just a few thousand more than it had in 2009, when it added the P-I‘s former subscribers. (Back in 2000, the Times and P-I had a combined circulation of 400,000.)

Elsewhere in the report, the NY Times now has more paid online readers than print readers.