It’s here. The announcement we’ve been dreading but expecting these past nine weeks was made shortly after 10 this morning. The last print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer will appear Tuesday. That’s one day sooner than the earliest closing date offered during Hearst’s Jan. 9 announcement.

Other than the date of the final edition, the winding down of Washington state’s oldest business enterprise has gone according to rumor.

Yes, Hearst’s keeping the P-I brand, and the globe.

Yes, there’s be a Web site, run by a tiny subset of the existing P-I staff (20 editorial staffers compared to 150 previously). Only a few of these surviving staffers have been announced; cartoonist David Horsey’s one of them.

Yes, nobody came forward with a solid offer to buy the paper and keep it in print. (What, nobody wanted the chance to lose $1 million a month as the junior partner in a JOA with the also-failing Seattle Times?)

Yes, the final announcement came when P-I columnist Joel Connelly was out of town, and local news-biz analyst Chuck Taylor had just gotten back into town.

The Stranger’s Eli Sanders was in town, and he noted that the P-I site went to a text-only “disaster” mode around 10:30 Sunday nite. When the full site reappeared an hour and a half later, its non-ad pages were bereft of the “nwsource.com” domain name. That’s the domain run by the Times under the 1999-revised terms of the JOA. As of this morning, seattlepi.com is its own freestanding thang. (Ads now appearing on the site were sold by the Times, but an in-house sales staff is being assembled.)

Newspaper people, everywhere, are fond of romanticizing their own. They’ll note that the Obama inauguration was the last big national story in P-I print; the December snowstorm and Washington Mutual’s collapse were its last big local stories.

Ken Griffey’s return to the Mariners, the launch of Seattle Sounders FC, the Husky men’s basketball team’s NCAA tournament run—not to be commemorated in a printed P-I. The opening of Sound Transit light rail, the final fate of the Alaskan Way Viaduct, this year’s mayoral race—all things we’ll have to read about elsewhere.

The P-I staff had already been preparing a big goodbye special section. That’ll show up Tuesday. Expect a huge wrap party/wake tonight at Buckley’s on lower Queen Anne.

This past Thursday, I spent a couple hours in the central library looking at microfilmed P-I issues from significant dates in my life—my birth date, the day the Sonics won the NBA title, the day Mt. St. Helens blew, etc.

The first thing I noticed: Monochrome microfilm just isn’t paper; novelist Nicholson Baker was right when he pleaded for libraries to hold on to printed newspapers.

The second thing I noticed: Papers sure had a lot more ads back then. Ten pages of classifieds at the minimum. Multiple ads for supermarket and department-store chains within the paper, not as separate inserts.

The third thing I noticed: The words describing major events can evoke memories just as strong as, or stronger than, the audio-visual memories of the events themselves.

But that’s what newspaper people do. They create what an old cliche calls “the first draft of history.”

And now, the Post-Intelligencer, as a tangible product and as a fully-staffed newsroom, is history.

Meanwhile, the various assorted attempts to jump-start a competitive post-P-I news site continue.

As will the pontificatin’, here and elsewhere, about what online news should be and how it could be funded.

…to succinctly explain what I meant a few posts back as “microbrew journalism.”

Essentially, it’s the idea that, like the beer biz, the news biz needs to decentralize.

It needs to move from a few big makers toward many smaller organizations.

And it needs to expand from bland, singular, everything-to-everybody products toward more compelling tastes that consumers will actively seek out and loyally support.

This means more than just shoveling newsprint-style text online.

And it means more than just adding blogs and comment threads and RSS feeds and tweets.

It means involving your readers in the daily churn of your reporting beats. Not just the big stories (big crimes, big elections, big layoff announcements) but the eternal ebb and flow of events, the “inside baseball,” the amassing of little events and little facts that add up to an ongoing sense of community.

It’s easy to see this approach taken to sports, business, lifestyles, and arts coverage. Those content genres already have built-in hardcore audiences. There are already people out there who really care about the Mariners, the tech biz, the music scene, and the cost of food.

It takes an extra leap of imagination to see how it could apply to what the Seattle Times used to call “General News.”

But it can be done.

It takes great research, great storytelling, and great networking. All these are skills journalists are already supposed to know about.

But instead of working all week to prepare a couple placid little he-said-she-said analysis pieces or brazen ambulance-chasing gorefests, use the Web’s unlimited space to add both depth and breadth. Let stories breathe with the details that add personality and narrative. Spread out beyond the headlines to show the daily drama ofthe courts, the city council, the schools, etc.

You can do this and still be fair to the various sides of a political debate or a court case. Indeed, with more room online, you can fully explore an issue from all angles.

And you can have background stories about particular issues, stories that stay up on the site, updated when needed.

The online transition can mean both more and better local news coverage. Coverage that can draw in readers at a higher level of involvement.

That’s the sort of audience that can command higher online ad rates.

And it’s the sort of audience that could be sold premium-tier content—stats, alerts, and detailed reports for people who need to know what local and state governments are up to on a professional-wonk level.

Hearst is leaking a few hints about a potential online-only P-I. As many of us had feared, it’s shaping up as a barer-than-bare-bones operation, with few of the original-reporting positions that we in the save-the-news crowd are trying to save.

The SeaTimes notes two limited experiments in print newspapers going online-only, and finds them both relatively low-budget efforts relying on subsidies from larger organizations.

The NYT remembers that nonprofit journalistic endeavors have been around since before the Web. One of these, Mother Jones, is hanging in there fiscally, but is not immune to the larger economy’s ebbs and flows.

Chuck Taylor concludes his own “Life in a Zero-Newspaper Town” series with his own answer to funding the new news: There is no one answer. Instead, news Web sites will need what the motivational coaching industry calls “multiple streams of income.”

Nathan Richardson offers some simple things the big Web portals could do to help news sites. One suggestion: Google, etc. could vow to link directly to original-reporting sites, rather than to all those slice-n’-dice aggregation sites. (How would that affect a site like this, which offers both original prose and linkage?)

Alan Mutter believes news sites can indeed charge for online content. The trick: Have some content people will want enough to pay for. That’s not rewritten press releases, human-interest homilies, or ambulance chasing. It’s comprehensive news-you-can-use coverage of consumer, business/financial, and governmental topics.

That’s another ingredient in what I’m calling microbrew news—stuff people really care about reading, stuff people will go out of their way to get.

Earlier this week, I complained about the Seattle Post-Intelligencer dropping the Zippy comic strip. Now, according to unconfirmed rumor, there might not much longer be a P-I to carry or not carry the strip.

KING-TV claimed Thursday night that the Hearst Corp. will put the Post-Intelligencer up for sale, as a formality under the Joint Operating Agreement with the Times toward shutting down the P-I within months. P-I and Times bosses all claimed they haven’t heard yet of any such move. However, it would seem a plausible possibility. The owners of Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, also the junior partner in a JOA, have made just such a move. And both the Times and P-I severely cut their page counts following pathetic holiday-season ad sales.

We, and the papers’ staffs, will learn the degree of truth of this telecast rumor sometime Friday. (There likely won’t be an official announcement in the papers themselves until at least Saturday.)

Needless to say, I’ve not wanted this to happen. I’ve supported the efforts of the Committee for a Two-Newspaper Town, which put public pressure on the Times to keep the JOA alive. I’ve long preferred the P-I, which long ago shed its last vestiges of William Randolph Hearst Jr.’s right-wing squareness to become the region’s dominant center-left editorial voice.

Yet few people, especially within the newspaper biz, quite expected industry-wide ad revenues to plummet so far so fast. Recent Times and P-I issues have had fewer than four pages of display ads and fewer than two pages of classifieds.

And you can’t expect the papers’ owners to just eat these declines. The Times’ majority owners, the Blethens, have tried to sell some of their other properties with no takers. The Times’ minority owners, the McClatchy chain, allegedly wants to sell its most prestigious possession, the Miami Herald, also with no apparent takers.

And the P-I owning, family-held Hearst Corp. is notoriously private in its business dealings; but it’s clear that its major income-earning properties (Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Esquire) also carry far fewer ad pages these days.

I’ll talk more about this when I know more, which will be after anyone else in the business here knows more.

…and the whole greed/corruption/warmongerin’ Bush era dept.: Saturday’s Sunday-preview Seattle Times will have its editors’ choices for the top local news stories of the year. Here’s mine:

1. Washington Mutual goes pffft.

2. The Sonics go blort.

3. Safeco goes doink.

4. General economic and real-estate kerplunk-ness.

5. Obamamania a huge hit locally; Democrats win just about everything except the 8th Congressional District.

6. December’s Snowtopia brings beauty, wonder, photogenic bus wipeouts, and the sudden discovery that not everyone loves the Nickels administration.

7. Seattle music rules again (Fleet Foxes, Grand Archives, Saturday Knights, the Dutchess and the Duke, Team Gina, Mono in VCF).

8. The incredible shrinking newspapers.

9. We learn just how corrupt the Port of Seattle’s been.

10. Northwest Afternoon goes twok.

Some runner-up stories, in no particular order: Whooped-up nonsense over an atheist billboard at the state capitol; all major local sports teams have pathetic seasons at once; the local news media discover gang violence when it strikes in white neighborhoods; Twilight mania; Amazon Kindle a hit; Alaskan Way Viaduct and SR 520 replacement choices drag on; another round of school-closure threats.

We’ll miss ’em: Edward “Tuba Man” McMichael; politicians Ruby Chow, Jeanette Williams, and Ellen Craswell; sculptor/video artist Doris Chase; sports promoter Dick Vertlieb; Ellensburg installation artist Richard Elliott; DJ/jazz promoter Norm Bobrow; Blue Moon Tavern co-owner Bob Morrison.

And Su Job. The fiber artist, arts promoter-advocate, and 619 Western studio landlady passed peacefully at 7 p.m. Christmas night.

Sometimes the Mariners win. Sometimes that perfect song comes on the radio just as you’re about to make your move. Sometimes the bus comes right on time, right when you’ve stepped out for it.

And sometimes the Seattle Times editorial board endorses the better candidate.

…to my longtime pals Garth Brandenburg and Tor Mitskog. They’re in a big Seattle Times color pic. It’s due to their participation in a house rock band at the Perkins Coie law firm, which goes off to a “Battle of the Corporate Bands” contest in L.A. this weekend. Knock ’em dead!

There was once a time when the Seattle Times wouldn’t run ads such as the following, at least not in a quarter-page size in the middle of the A Section. (OK, sure, they ran those scary “bed wetting” therapy ads back in the day, and those all-text ads for “The Lazy Man’s Way to Riches.” But not this.)

…another 7 daze since I last posted. Excuses: Got none. (Except that a startup entrepreneurial venture I’d been involved with this past year seems to have gone “on hold.”)

In the nooze recently:

• That novelty Hillary Clinton nutcracker I told you about late last year? Somebody used one as the focus of a bomb scare at the Olympia state capitol. Unfunny.
• As you may have heard, the Clinton campaign’s “3 a.m.” TV commercial was assembled from purchased stock footage. The little girl in the footage is now grown up, she lives here in WashState, and, yep, she’s an Obama supporter.
• That most recent, well-funded save-the-Sonics drive heads toward a not-really-that-drastic deadline. While the plan for minimal KeyArena improvements (mostly a food court and new concourses; not that many new seats) would rely on private funding for half its cost, the would-be new owners want the state to chip in $75 million. It’d take some pushing n’ cajoling to get that request thru the Legislature’s current regular session, scheduled to wrap up darn soon. Some Legislative leaders, such as House Speaker Frank Chopp, have built their public images around the idea that they don’t cave in to such big-money demands, at least not right away. But Gov. Gregoire can still call a one-day special session to pass the funding (in my opinion, a reasonable investment for a reasonable reward). The hard part’s still persuading Clay Bennett to sell and persuading league boss David Stern to stop being Bennett’s toady.
• It’s a big night for all lovers of classic Tacoma power pop, as the Ventures get into the R n’ R Hall o’ Fame.
• The Sunday Times/P-I cut its total opinion pages (which, by contract, are alloted 50/50 to each paper) from six pages to four. When the joint Sunday edition launched, 24 and a half years ago, each paper got six pages to express its “editorial voice.”
• Boeing boosters blame McCain for that big Air Force tanker contract going to Airbus. So much for a GOP revival in this state this year.

…a few days since we last met. But here are some recent events in the nooze:

• A plan’s been announced to keep the Sonics, or move in some other NBA team to replace ’em. Yeah, it involves public arena subsidies. But the arena in question would still be our good ol’ KeyArena/Coliseum. And private interests would pick up a huger share of the tab than in any previous scheme. Of course, there’s the li’l matter of convincing current owner Clay Bennett and NBA commissioner David Stern (who hates Seattle even more than the Seattle Times editorial board does).
• No matter how much money the UW raises in its many assorted fundraising/begging programs, it just keeps on making tuition ever-less affordable. Congress doesn’t like it.
• Some self-styled radical environmentalists want to preserve exurban forest lands from sprawl. Their solution: Set fire to an unoccupied cul-de-sac, a fire which, if set at some other time of the year, could conceivably spread and burn said forest land.
• The first televised Mariners game of the pre-season is on local cable at noon today (Monday). I know it’s a game that doesn’t “count,” but hey, neither did the Ms’ last 20 or so games last season.
• Once you start looking into Port o’ Seattle corruption, it can truly become a bottomless pit.
• How to get high school kids interestedin reading newspapers: Run sensational surveys of students’ oral-sex experiences. (Hey, it’s the taste sensation that’s sweeping the nation!)
• Airbus, with a domestic company fronting for it, got the Air Force tanker plane contract Boeing really really wanted. Next stop: litigation.
• Here’s what to do the next time you see a bus with an unconscious driver heading your way.
• Since certain right-wing radio guys have no qualms about using or misusing people’s names in order to make character-assassination implications, let’s compare Vladmir Putin’s handpicked successor/flunky Dimitry Medvedev with the locally based GOP-talk spewer Michael Medved: One is a sniveling, butt-kissing toady to a ruthless, anti-democratic despot with delusions of godhood. And one is the new President of Russia.

…endorsed Obama as the Democratic candidate of choice in the Washington caucus/primary combo. As David Goldstein sez, it’d be more impressive if they didn’t endorse a Republican.

And these are among the stories you might discuss at work, on the bus, or in chatrooms:

• A “person of interest” is in custody in the New Year’s Eve stabbing on Capitol Hill.
• A stage musical based on the Shrek movies premieres in Seattle this fall. As you all remember, the plot of the first Shrek film involved an egomaniacal feudal lord who wanted to banish from his realm anything funky, funny, strange, or otherwise less than upscale. Seattle will be a perfect place to retell this. Speaking of which…
• Will any arts groups be left at the Capitol Hill Odd Fellows hall after the new landlord’s done raising the rents?
• Bush decreed the Navy doesn’t have to follow environmental regulations; allowing sonar transmissions no matter what they do to whales. Remember: The military is here to protect.
• The SeaTimes points with pride to a volunteer patrol that’s helping drive the hookers away from Aurora Avenue. Of course, without the hookers, all Aurora has to offer is the Beth’s Cafe 12-egg omelet.
• Reversing past trends, the developers of a partially-built condo project in Lower Queen Anne will instead convert the building to rentals.
• The Seattle Monorail Project will soon settle its affairs and shut down; while vague plans for an Eastside commuter rail line begin to take shape.
• The revised date on a city hearing to discuss preserving the endangered Manning’s/Denny’s building in Ballard: Feb. 20.
• State Sen. Eric Oemig, D-Kirkland, would like the Legislature to go on record supporting Bush’s impeachment.
• Not so painless: The anesthesiology staff at Northwest Hospital asked for a pay raise. Instead, the hospital’s CEO fired them all.

…a fountain of snowflakes descend upon the frozen tundra of Green Bay, I knew the gods would be with the other team, not with ours.

In other Sunday nooze:

• I’m briefly quoted in a SeaTimes obit for Gunther Woerne, who ran Woerne’s European Pastry Shop in the U District for several decades.
• How’s historic preservation going here these days? Eh, so-so.
• Could “social networking” dot-commers save the Crocodile?
• Damn, there was more gunfire outside a Belltown bar; this time the Spitfire Sports Bar.
• So-what’s-new dept.: A state ferry’s been drydocked for some needed fixing.

• First the bus tunnel, now the Space Needle fireworks show suffers from a software glitch.
• Music industry wants UW students to pay big bucks for alleged file sharing. UW administration runs interference.
• While the Sea. Times has added the NYT crossword, the P-I, thankfully, hasn’t had to drop it. Thank heavens for non-exclusive contracts.
• A McDonald’s customer in Vancouver, USA suddenly felt strange and had to sit down. No, it wasn’t from the food. Turns out she was giving premature birth without heretofore knowing she was preggers. The boy’s first words will probably not be “Supersize me.”

• Fret not about Bill Gates’s pending retirement from MS’s day-to-day operations. The whole joint’s hardwired around his mindset. MS will continue to produce and market just as it’s been doing.
• Starting tomorrow, you’ll be able to read/solve the NY Times crossword in the Seattle Times. No word on whether it’ll continue in the P-I.
• One more reason to quit smoking: A guy asks two Belltown lowlifes if they’ve got a light, gets robbed.
• Wash. state will boldly go where Greyhound no longer bothers to go, bringing intercity bus service to the state’s small towns.