The Seattle Times has affirmed something I’ve known personally for a while now.

The only jobs to be had in this town are for software programmers.

Can I learn to program at my stage of life?

And if so, any recommendations where/how?

And would it even be worth it?

I’d rather not go through a whole costly course of study, only to find the companies still want only to hire the young and/or already employed.

And I don’t want to study technologies that will cease to be in demand after I’ve started studying them.

oh, NOW they get customers.

• SeattlePI.com is moving, away from what had been the Post-Intelligencer building on Elliott Ave. The new office space is said to be “larger” than the space the news site had been occupying. (Let’s hope that means the site’s going to add staff, to get at least slightly closer to a comprehensive local news source.) The P-I globe’s staying put, for now.
• The Seattle weekly that’s not Seattle Weekly gets the big fawning establishment treatment as it approaches its 20th anniversary in September.
• The alleged Norwegian mass murderer (mostly of teenagers) is shaping up to be a right wing “Christian,” a virulent racist and anti-Muslim, and a member of at least one nationalist cell group. None of this has stopped right wingers in other countries from falsely attributing the murders to Muslim terrorists.
• Looks like the ’04 Presidential election may have been just as rigged as the ’00 election may have been, though with operational differences.
• Fans descended on a low-key charity basketball event to proclaim their unflagging desire to see men’s pro b-ball back in town. I also want the Seattle Supersonics back, and I want them in Seattle.
• Amy Winehouse, R.I.P.: Let’s put this succinctly as possible. Drugs suck.

• The city’s looking into bringing back the soda tax, repealed in a state initiative last year.
• And our desperate-for-quarters city leaders have decided to extend paid-parking hours until 8 p.m. in just about all of greater downtown, including Belltown and the ID, plus the U District.
• But drivers in Seattle will get $3 million worth of pothole-fixin’, funded by the city selling a vacant lot on lower Aurora Avenue to the state.
• Another day, another 787 Dreamliner delay.
• AddictingInfo.com has a list of popular public services that anybody who claims to hate “socialism” should detest, in order not to be hypocritical—the post office, public schools, parks, etc. The thing is, some of the purist libertarians infiltrating the GOP do overtly hate these things.
• The Atlantic Monthly, that reliable source on all things rockin’, proclaims the new way for bands to become famous—remain as anonymous and obscure as possible.
• Michele Bachmann’s “doctor” hubby: He’s not an MD, just an unlicensed “therapist.”

This department hasn’t been updated in a while. During those past months, the SeaTimes has pretty much stabilized at a probably unprofitable level.

Circulation dropped another 5 percent in the past year.

The paper’s Wednesday and Friday editorial sections have gone back to single pages.

Actual “this happened yesterday” news items are decreasing, especially early in the week, in favor of prewritten features (easier to plan and to budget for).

Display advertising in the daily paper continues to be nearly nonexistent, with the four page Fry’s section on Fridays as the only consistent exception. If not for that, the paid obits, and the car and real-estate ads on Friday and Saturday, the daily SeaTimes would essentially exist (as a business venture) only as a wraparound for the Bartell’s and supermarket inserts.

The Sunday paper still has 30 to 40 pages of ads, not counting the inserts. And now the Sunday TV section (12 full-page equivalents with almost no ads) is gone. It’s been replaced by something called TV Weekly, a separate listings magazine for which subscribers have to pay extra.

And the paper’s planning to vacate its handsome 1930 art deco HQ on Fairview Ave. by the end of the year. Remaining employees will move into the nearby 1000 Denny (née Seattle Furniture Mart) building, which the company has sold and partly leased back. The historic-landmark SeaTimes building dates back to when almost all newspapers had their newsrooms and printing presses on the same site. (The SeaTimes is now printed at an increasingly under-capacity facility out in Mill Creek.) The old building will be mothballed pending a development scheme; such a plan would need city Landmarks Board approval.

In past installments of this department, I’d speculated that the Blethen family’s final endgame might be to turn the paper into an even smaller nonprofit operation, designed to live on the kind support of corporate benefactors. Now, as David Goldstein speculates on the basis of a recent editorial, the Blethens could be contemplating just such a scenario, and may be pushing for Federal help to make it so.

I know a LOT of people who are spending this day and upcoming night wishing a good riddance to this epic fail of a year we’ve had.

The economy in much of the world (for non-zillionaires) just continued to sluggishly sputter and cough. Thousands more lost jobs, homes, 401Ks, etc.

The implosion of the national Republican Party organization cleared the way (though not in this state) for a wave of pseudo-populist demagogue candidates who only appeared in right-wing media, because those were the only places where their nonsensical worldviews made pseudo-sense. Enough of these candidates made enough of a stir to take control of the US House of Reps., which they have already turned back over to their mega-corporate masters.

And we had the BP spill, continuing mideast/Afghan turmoils, violent drug-turf wars in several countries, floods in Pakistan, a bad quake in Haiti, the deaths of a lot of good people, and a hundred channels of stupid “reality” shows.

Locally, a number of ballot measures were introduced to at least stem the state’s horrid tax unfairness, while staving off the worst public-service budget cuts. They all failed.

And the South Park bridge was removed without a clear replacement schedule, the Deeply Boring Tunnel project continued apace, the Seattle Times got ever crankier (though it stopped getting thinner), and our major men’s sports teams were mediocre as ever. Seattle Center bosses chose to replace a populist for-profit concession (the Fun Forest) with an upscale-kitsch for-profit concession (Chihuly).

Alleviating factors: (Most) American troops are out of Iraq. Something approximating health care reform, and something approximating the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, both passed. Conan O’Brien resurfaced; Jon and Stephen worked to restore sanity and/or fear. The Storm won another title. The football Huskies had a triumphant last hurrah; the Seahawks might get the same. Cool thingamajigs like the iPad and Kinect showed up. Seattle has emerged as the fulcrum of the ebook industry, America’s fastest growing media genre. The Boeing 787’s continued hangups have proven some technologies just can’t be outsourced.

My personal resolution in 1/1/11 and days beyond: To find myself a post-freelance, post-journalism career.

I thought this department was perhaps due for retirement. After all, the SeaTimes hasn’t run a 24- or 26-page minipaper in several weeks. Even Monday and Tuesday editions regularly run to 32-36 pages, with 8-12 pages of paid advertising.

However, as Goldy at HorsesAss points out, these looks can be deceiving.

The paper’s offering drastically discounted ad rates for in-state political advertisers.

And some of the SeaTimes‘ other ads, particularly in Mon.-Thurs. issues, seem to be for mail-order merchandisers of the type you’d normally see in late night TV infomercials. I don’t know what rates these firms are being charged, but I suspect they might also be less than they used to be.

Just weeks after I said the SeaTimes‘ current three-section format had a 26-page minimum size, I’m proven wrong. Tuesday’s paper was a flimsy 24 pages, including less than three pages of paid advertising. (Monday was an “observed” holiday, which meant little new political pronouncements and no stock listings.)

Last Sunday’s SeaTimes was the first I could remember (and I’m old) to have as few as 74 pages (not counting comics, TV section, magazine sections, and ad flyers).

If business at John and Fairview fails to pick up and stay picked up, management might have to impose further draconian cuts. Not to pare back to a profitable size, but to a subsidizeable size. That’s a scenario in which what’s left of the local conservative business community can prop up the paper with vanity ads, or with direct donations.

Following Tuesday’s minimal 26-page edition, Wednesday’s SeaTimes grew to a slightly less pathetic 34 pages. Still only six and a half pages of paid advertising, though.

At least they’re restoring a full op-ed page on Wednesday now, as well as Friday and Sunday. The Wednesday op-eds will, through the election season, carry electoral-themed material under the rubric “Reset 2010.” It’s all billed as a forum for strong advocacy pieces about changing the direction of local/state government.

Of course, when the SeaTimes talks about changing the direction of government, it means dumping them pesky libruhls wherever possible, and instilling the backers of “common sense,” “realistic” solutions. Said solutions, in Blethenland, invariably involve slashing gov’t. payrolls, busting unions, and generally reducing the public sphere to little more than cops and firefighters and big-business “support” schemes.

As if the Blethens and their hirelings still controlled the voice of the regional business community. Or even knew what that voice was saying.

After several weeks of rarely dipping below 32 pages, Tuesday’s SeaTimes descended again to 26 pages, the current bare-bones minimum in the paper’s current format. What’s worse, the issue contained less than three pages of paid advertising.

And, local bloggers allege, what we do get within our last local broadsheet daily is increasingly weak in whole areas of coverage.

Jeff Reifman has noted online about the SeaTimes‘ avoiding any mention of Microsoft’s successful rerouting of software sales to Nevada for tax purposes.

Effin’ Unsound and Horses Ass, meanwhile, cry foul about the paper’s total silence i/r/t a boiling-over jurisdictional dispute between state attorney general Rob McKenna and commissioner of public lands Peter Goldmark.

It’s a fascinating unfolding saga, more complex than I can do justice to here. Essentially, the Okanogan PUD wants to condemn some Methow Valley land, owned by a state trust that supports schools. Goldmark, whose department oversees the trust, doesn’t want this. McKenna, despite a job description requiring him to represent the state in disputes such as this, refuses to pursue a suit. Goldmark has gone to the State Supreme Court to force McKenna to do McKenna’s job.

The SeaTimes still finds space, however, to run a glowing human interest feature about every sparsely attended tea party rally. And, starting Wednesday, it promises a new weekly commentary special all about why state government should do everything big business wants, or something along those lines.

Our pals at Seattle PostGlobe, one of the nonprofit online ventures started by Post-Intelligencer vets, have their own view of the still gaping hole left in this city by the print P-I’s demise.

Today, or yesterday, or the day before (however you wish to count it) is the one-year anniversary of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s disappearance from area newsstands and vending boxes and doorsteps. The final edition was edited on 3/16/09 and distributed on 3/17/09.

That made 3/18/09 the first day since the print P-I stopped. That’s why tonight, 3/18/10, is the one-year anniversary of seattlepi.com as a stand-alone Web site. The site’s “producers” (they were careful to avoid Newspaper Guild-recognized job titles) are holding what they bill as an evening of celebration at the Crocodile.

It’ll still seem like a wake to me.

PI.com officials say the site now gets as many “hits” and readers as it did when it had a newspaper feeding it content. They’ve scraped and scrambled to get to that level, using every trick in the old Hearst playbook–canned gossip items, comics, cute animal pictures, fashion pictures, basically all the soft sides of Wm. Randolph Hearst Sr.’s old circulation-building formula. (The hard side of that formula, the scandals and exposés, would require more person-hours of research than the site’s minimal staff can muster.)

Most days, there’s at least one significant local news story on the site. Its sports commentary and tech-biz coverage have steadily improved. Local entertainment coverage disappeared from the site altogether when it went web-only; now at least there’s some.

The site’s design is still too cluttered, but it’s better than it was.

But it’s not the depth-and-breadth news source that the print P-I had been at its best, and that today’s Seattle Times sometimes tries, but usually fails, to be.

To become that, PI.com would need to bulk up from its current 20-person core staff to at least double that.

Even if online advertising rebounds from the current all-around business slump, it’s unlikely to generate enough revenue to support that. (PI.com, from all accounts, is inching toward profitability as is.)

It’ll need some other, or additional, revenue model.  (An iPad paper? A print weekly?)

Until then, or until some other new venture or set of ventures shows up, Seattle’s information landscape will still have a P-I sized hole needing to be filled.

We haven’t discussed this topic since before the Xmas advertising season, during which the SeaTimes looked almost like a profitable venture again.

Then came the post-holiday letdown. SeaTimes ad volume dropped back toward their mid-’09 nadir. Skimpy 26-page Mon.-Wed. papers were the norm again.

The local news content of these editions also steadily shrank, particularly once the mayoral election was done. A typical day’s story lineup would consist of little more than a couple of politician press conferences, some new rant against the Seattle School District by an irate parent, a few crimes and fires, a couple of human-interest photos, and at least one long obituary.

Which brings us to this Sunday’s paper.

We get a reprise of the paper’s big shocking story from last December, that most Olympics tickets went to the rich and the well-connected (gasp!).

We get the 100th anniversary of the 1910 Stevens Pass avalanche, which killed more people than any other natural disaster of its specific type.

And, in the editorializing-disguised-as-coverage department, we get an upbeat, spin-ful ode to  a far-right political rally outside Northgate Mall. The story gleefully depicted the anti-choice, anti-health-reform gang as daring rebels against the “liberal establishment.”

A couple weeks ago, the SeaTimes only gave a couple paragraphs to a much larger anti-budget-cut rally in Olympia, and only referred to it in passing as a counter-demonstration to an anti-tax-cut rally held the same day.

At least today we get columnist Danny Westneat, respectfully calling his paper’s editorial page to task for deliberately misinterpreting opinion polls about health reform. Citizens in the poll said they thought the current national health reform scheme doesn’t go far enough; the SeaTimes editorialized that that meant “the people” don’t want any reform at all.

That’s nice on Westneat’s part, but it isn’t enough.

And neither is this.

We need more than some online media sites that take the conservative paper to task for its failings.

We need a real “mainstream” news source that depicts our city and region as they really are.

I’ve finally let my Seattle Times subscription lapse, after seven months with SeaTimes and 31 prior years with the now-discontinued print P-I. The only thing I’d still used the print paper for, that couldn’t be done online, was to methodically study how much smaller the SeaTimes was getting.

As a print subscriber, I was hardly supporting the newsroom. Subscription fees barely pay for the manufacture and delivery of the physical product. What I was doing was adding to the aggregate eyeballs the SeaTimes could sell to advertisers. That company’s done a lousy job at selling ads the past several years. Even before the Internet killed want ads and the Great Recession decimated home and car sales, they’d already been losing huge accounts to direct mail.

Supporting “newspaper style journalism,” and transitioning from it to something better, is a topic I’ve long written about.

Online ads earn far less income per reader than print ads. This is unlikely to change any time soon. SeattlePI.com has the potential to become profitable once the general economy improves, but won’t likely ever support anything near the news staff the print P-I had.

I currently see three potential scenarios:

1) Print papers continue to shrink, not to oblivion but to the point that they become vulnerable to startup competitors (who suddenly don’t have to pour in $30 million a year in costs and who can target niche audiences in a way old-line dailies can’t).

2) Print papers continue to shrink, to the point where they’re small enough to become subsidized by their big-business community friends (either through contributions or vanity ads).

3) New ebook-esque consumer devices (the long-rumored Apple tablet?) finally make true online publications with paid subscriptions not only feasible but popular.

Another viewpoint: Doug Morrison sees the Incredible Shrinking Newspaper as an issue affecting the exchange of ideas, the flow of facts, and even the future of democracy itself, and wonders if there could be a political solution.

I was in the downtown library yesterday with my MacBook (which doesn’t get out much anymore, now that I have an iPod Touch).

Some dude I’d never met before came up and started talking to me. At the downtown library, this happens rather often. But this guy wasn’t trying to sell me a bus pass or tell me a long story that would start by asking for directions and end by asking for money.

He just wanted to alert me to something he’d seen on an Apple rumors site. It was another variant of the long-rumored Apple tablet device. “It’s like a MacBook without the keyboard, or a big iPod Touch. It looks great!”

Now I’ve seen one of these new rumor articles. And I must say I like the specs the article mentions. This is almost exactly the device I’d dreamed of earlier this year, when I speculated that the future of the online written word (including journalism) lay in .pdf documents formatted for tablets and netbooks.

(My caveat: While I’m intrigued by the concept of an Apple tablet as a full-page-size iPod Touch, I suspect many users will also want to use it for more traditional home-computer functions, including functions at which the iPhone OS and its available apps are still insufficient.)

Meanwhile, closer to home, other tech rumor sites are spreading an internal Microsoft video, demonstrating the features of what might be that company’s next-gen tablet computer concept, code named “Courier.” Like the rumored Apple device, the rumored MS device wouldn’t run a regular home-computer operating system. Instead, it would operate its own integrated suite of apps, based on the metaphor of an “infinite journal” where the user could clip and paste anything from/to anywhere.

The warning here is that MS has whole teams of “futurists” and conceptual designers working full-time on the personal-tech version of “concept cars”—items that, in their initial iterations, will never see a sales shelf, but which are used to work out ideas that may eventually find their way into real products. Courier might be one of these.

Thanks to the kind Lori at Espresso To Go in Fremont, I recently got a look at the SeaTimes’ Washington Territorial Centennial supplement.

This was an eight-section addition to a Sunday paper in the summer of 1953. Each section ran twenty pages or more. (Remember, newspaper pages then were one-third wider than they are now.)

There’s little to no content about the state’s pre-Statehood past. Instead, what little “editorial” content there is consists of puff pieces for the advertisers.

Most of these advertisers aren’t companies selling consumer goods. They’re construction firms, timber giants, commercial truck dealerships, shipyards, cement plants, fishing-rig outfitters, metals processors, agribusinesses, restaurant-supply companies, etc. Their common, simple message: They’re proud to be part of the Evergreen State’s great industrial infrastructure.

OK, there is one huge ad for Fisher Flouring Mills and its about-to-launch subsidiary operation, KOMO-TV. The ad juxtaposes a drawing of the big Fisher plant on Harbor Island with a glamour image of that fresh, new television talent Betty White, who could be seen in her sprightly comedy series Life With Elizabeth once KOMO-TV started telecasting later that year.

Can you imagine today’s SeaTimes managing to sell even a fraction of all that ad space to local companies that have nothing to sell to a mass audience?