crosscut.com

• Ex Seattle First Brother Bob Royer looks back at one of the city’s first prominent newspaperwomen. Fun fact: In the late 1930s, the Seattle Times had six people working in the “society” section; an expense more than made up by the amount of “women’s” oriented advertising in the section. Speaking of which….
• The P-I globe will remain standing, somewhere. That’s nice. But it’s not just the globe that I’d wanted preserved. Speaking of which….
• Newspapers are losing $7 in print ad revenue for every $1 they gain in online ad revenue. This is from a Pew Research study. The study’s authors claim papers “need to prioritize digital ad revenues” in order to survive. But what if that’s still not nearly enough? The study cites a “success story” of a small paper (20,000 print circ.) that’s now making $670,000 a year online, compared to $8 million from print ads. That doesn’t look like a bright future to me.
• The new Miss Seattle used to be a Miss Phoenix. Last December she Tweeted® how she “Ugh can’t stand cold rainy Seattle and the annoying people.” She has since apologized.
• Could liquor privatization in Wash. state really get derailed by a court challenge on techinical issues in the original initiative?
• Repercussions continue from Friday night’s Republican coup in the state Senate. The all-cuts budget they rushed through, with the help of three turncoat conserva-Dems but with no public hearings, turns out to hurt K-12 education and devastate services for the neediest.
• Also, the GOP’s parliamentary trickery doomed about 20 non-budget bills from the state House, which died because the Senate didn’t take action on them by midnight Friday.
• Meanwhile, the national Republicans, becoming shriller and stupider every week, have firmly (and probably fatally) tied their fate to the aging, non-college-educated, white male demographic. And they’re “appealing” to this last remaining constituency by treating them like idiots.
• Oh, and the even more batshit-n’-bigoted than ever Limbaugh? He’s lost a third of his ratings in the last few years. (However, some of that loss can be attributed to more accurate means of measuring radio listenership.) But in any event, the right wing “outrage machine,” which includes Limbaugh and his many imitators, may have finally become too petty and brutal for its own good.
• Besides, there’s a problem with trying to bring sexuality and women’s lives back to what they were in the 1950s. It wasn’t working then either. As local author Stephanie Coontz points out, “Teenage childbearing peaked in the fabulous family-oriented 1950s.”
• The GOP-controlled U.S. House is pushing through a bill that would crack down on protests anywhere a federal official might be present. At least, that’s what a worst-case interpretation of its “imprecise language” might infer.
• We know the 9/11 bombers came from Saudi Arabia. But did the Saudi regime itself collude in the attack? Two former U.S. Senators say maybe.
• A megarich hedge fund manager write lucidly about the failures of capitalism in regard to preserving a sustainable society.
• What if crossword puzzle editors wrote poetry?
• Finally, here is a handy pie chart of “excuses conservatives make when facts prove them wrong“:

seattle times, nov. 24, 2001; 8 wide sections for 25 cents

The Seattle Times suddenly raised its cover price to $1 today. Retailers had been notified in advance, but readers hadn’t. Not even a bottom-front-page “To Our Readers” notice. The paper’s corporate website still lists a single copy price of $.75.

What does the extra quarter get you? Not more content. Tuesday’s paper was a recent record-low 24 pages. It had been this thin a few times in the past couple of years, but only on Mondays or post-holiday Tuesdays (i.e., days without stock listings). When you factor in today’s narrower page sizes, the SeaTimes hasn’t been this small since the days of WWII paper rationing.

I hadn’t noticed when it happened, but the Sunday Pacific Northwest Magazine section now appears to be printed on cheaper paper, the same kind of stock used by the Varsity Theater film calendar.

Meanwhile, the paper’s editorial staff has completed moving into the former furniture warehouse next to the 13 Coins restaurant. Other departments (ad sales, circulation, management) will move in as their new, smaller office spaces get installed. For now, the John Street front office and mailing address remain.

•

To try to quantify the paper’s shrinkage, I’ve been looking up its past online staff-directory pages, as maintained at the Wayback Machine site (web.archive.org).

But first, let’s review the page’s current incarnation. It lists 134 editorial employees (not counting a few executives listed twice). These include 35 local news reporters and columnists (including two listed as “on leave” (unpaid)), 35 reporters and writers in the paper’s other sections, and 12 photographers.

This is the same as the final Post-Intelligencer staff list from early 2009. (The P-I had a couple more people in some sections, a couple fewer in others; but the total’s alike.)

Remember, the print P-I didn’t put out a Sunday paper, and hadn’t since 1983. The same staffing level at today’s Times is thus spread more thinly. Especially since the Times continues to support long, research-heavy, Sunday “cover stories.”

On Jan. 15, 2009, near the time of the print P-I‘s end, the Times staff page listed 150 editorial staffers. These included 37 local news reporters/columnists, 45 writers in the other sections, and 15 photographers. The Times was about to decimate its weekday “living” section, a move planned before the P-I closure was announced.

In contrast, the Times staff page for Dec. 4, 2001 boasts a whopping 281 names.

But this difference seems even more drastic than it is.

That’s because the 2001 staff page lists several job categories that got dropped from the page in later years. They include 10 “news artists” (map makers and illustrators), plus a total of 80 copy editors, wire editors, page-layout designers, researchers, and other assistants.

The P-I‘s 2009 staff page listed four artists and 36 of these other assorted personnel. Today’s Times probably employs at least that many or more, what with all the Sunday and Sunday-preview pages to fill with wire and syndicated matter.

In an apples-to-apples comparison, the 2001 Times employed 53 local news reporters and columnists, 66 writers in the other sections, and 15 photographers.

Those included separate Eastside and Snohomish County bureaus.

They also included such now exotic sounding job titles as “home economist” (recipes editor), “assistant metro editor, metro growth,” and “director, brand and content development.”

Also remember that in a 2006 lawsuit, the P-I (which was then trying to stay in business, despite its unfortunate position in a Times-controlled Joint Operating Agreement) alleged that Times management employed more people than it had to, so the Times could claim it was losing money and thus legally kill the JOA (and with it, the P-I).

During the JOA, the Times had to share profits with the P-I.

Now the Times gets to shoulder its losses alone. (Be careful what you etc. etc.)

from three sheets northwest

• Well, whaddya know? Looks like gay marriage will pass the state Senate! (It’s always been expected to pass the state House.)
• Historic-preservation bad news #1: The Kalakala, currently docked in Tacoma, started listing to one side during Friday’s wind storm. The Army Corps of Engineers stepped in to prevent the legendary streamined ferry boat from sinking. Its current owner can’t afford to restore it, perhaps not even to fix it. The owner of the dock where it’s moored wants it out. It’s been offered for sale for as little as $1. If no repair plan, new owner, and/or new dock site emerge, the Corps of Engineers could seize and dismantle it.
• Historic-preservation bad news #2: Lawrence Kreisman from Historic Seattle blasts Sound Transit, because he agency plans to demolish the Standard Records storefront on NE 65th Street, as part of its Roosevelt light-rail station project. But few people seem to care that the same project would obliterate the original QFC store.
• Bellevue’s own Redbox is now the biggest video rental company in the nation (if you count physical discs, not streams or downloads).
• “Distressed homes.” That’s the term for sales of foreclosed homes, and for “short sales” of homes for less than what’s owed on them. They’re one-third of home sales in King County these days, and half of home sales in Pierce and Snohomish counties.
• State Rep. Reuven Carlyle is the latest to express his disgust at draconian all-cuts state budgets and the “tyranny of the minority” behind them.…
• …while Knute Berger ponders whether the reluctance to admit the need for public services, and for a reformed tax system to support them, is a sign that the social fabric of our city, state, and nation could be collapsing from within.
• The next bowling alley scheduled for demolition: Robin Hood Lanes in Edmonds, a fine place at which I have bowled (pathetically, as I always do).
• You know the sorry state of newspapers and big consumer magazines. But do you know what other print genre is “staggering along” on “geriatric legs”? Manga. For one thing, the biggest U.S. outlet for translated Japanese comic magazines and graphic novels (as much as one-third of total sales) was the now-imploded Borders Books. And the Japanese home-country market for the stuff is also shrinking and aging, partly due to Japan’s declining birth rate. (Thanx and a hat tip to Robert Boyd for the link.)
• Post-SOPA item #1: Could the Internet censorship dust-up drive a wedge between Democrats and one of the few big industries (entertainment) that mostly donates to Democratic campaigns?
• Post-SOPA item #2: Even in Denmark, the copyright industry loves to disguise its proposed Internet censorship laws as “crackdowns against child pornography.”
• Post-SOPA item #3: The MegaUpload bust has led several other file sharing sites to refuse access from U.S. users, or to restrict downloads of files to the same users who’d uploaded them. But would a complete end to noncommercial piracy really lead everybody into attaining all the same content commercially? Not bloody likely.
• Why are most computers, smartphones, HDTVs, etc. made in China and not here? It’s not really labor costs, not anymore. It’s China’s hyper-efficient supply chain, its masses of skilled engineers, and its sheer scale of industrial intrastructure. Oh, and perhaps the little fact that American workers “won’t be treated like zoo animals.” (The first-linked story is about Apple, but applies to most all consumer-electronics firms.)
• Attention, Coast to Coast A.M. listeners and techno-libertarians: Folks like me aren’t down on Ron Paul because we’re scared of his awesome disruptive super-goodness. We’re down on him because we despise his “small government” hypocrisy—the freedom to discriminate, the freedom to pollute, the freedom to pay slave wages, but no reproductive rights, no gay marriage, and no legal protections for “the little guy.” That, and the racist newsletters and his lame cop-out excuses for them.
• Two great tastes that absolutely don’t taste great together—Mickey Mouse and Joy Division. (Really.)