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?

As we’d known for almost six months, Guiding Light shone for the last time on Friday, after 72 years on radio and TV.

The show’s finale, and the dozen or so episodes leading to it, comprised a relative whirlwind of happy-ending stories, salted only by the sudden death of one of the show’s villains and the unresolved fate of one of its heroes (last seen in a high-noon shootout with another villain). This spate of happily-ever-afters, while out of keeping with the show’s tradition of complicated tragedy, was still in keeping with the show’s (and the genre’s) other tradition of deux ex machina improbabilities.

As overall TV viewership drifts downward, and the old-line networks’ market share is further eroded by cable and other alternatives, we’re reaching a point when original scripted dramas for one-time, daytime-only airing become fiscally unfeasible. As I’ve written here before, this would result in losing the only U.S. TV genre to feature open-ended storylines with no season breaks. The only other products in this country to offer that type of storytelling are certain comic books and comic strips. Online “webisode” dramas could adopt open-ended formats, but so far none have.

Mount Holyoke College prof Douglas J. Amy insists that “Government is Good,” and has a whole detailed site all about why.

Cenk Uygur, meanwhile, explores the other side of this ideological divide, and decides today’s big business power-grabbers aren’t interested in democracy or even capitalism; but that’s only to be expected from “corporatists.”

Political PR maven Jonah Sachs insists progressives have gotta stop being so damned rational. He argues that public opinion in this country isn’t swayed by analytical arguments but by emotional appeals.

Guess who uses social-media sites the most? That long-neglected demographic caste, the stay-home moms.

Paul Krugman wrote it weeks ago, but I’m still trying to get to the end of his long essay asking the musical question, How Did Economists Get It So Wrong? The answer to his query’s easy, really. Economics is either the most or second-most fraudulant “science” out there (competing with sociology). Economic theory has less to do with the world most of us live in and more in common with the virtual worlds created by or for role-playing gamers

Henry Gibson, who passed away Monday, had a long and solid acting career ranging from Nashville to Magnolia and Boston Legal. But he’ll always be known as “the Poet” on the original Laugh-In. Gibson was a prime example of that show’s basic premise. Laugh-In was suit-and-tie guys (what we’d now call the Mad Men generation) looking gently askew at Those Darned Hippies. Saturday Night Live, by contrast, WAS Those Darned Hippies.

At least Gibson died without the tragic career footnote faced by Peter, Paul and Mary co-singer Mary Travers. She faced her cancer-ridden final months with the indignity of having one of her group’s hit songs reworked into the unauthorized political hatched-job “Barack the Magic Negro.”

…sees the mess that big money (or big potential money) has made out of health care, news, and other essential services, and declares that “Not Everything in America Has to Make a Profit.”

Maher cites a past time when the network news was a loss-leader division, medicine was small and personal, and “war profiteer” was an insult.

Of course, those were also the days before any TV channels charged subscription fees, but that’s beside the point.

The point being: Wall Street’s been vampirizing the nation’s lifeblood. And not just during the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble.

Earlier this year, I met an IT consultant whose clients have included a huge HMO provider. She insisted the health insurance companies aren’t to blame for America’s health-care cost crisis; it’s just the system that’s gone haywire.

I think it’s a little more personal than that. I believe the insurance companies (some avidly, some more reluctantly) sold out to the profiteers over the past three decades, as the ultimate American financial icon ceased to be the Almighty Dollar and instead became the Almighty Stock Price. Whole industries that weren’t intrinsically set up to reap windfall profits were retooled for just that purpose, just so they’d be considered great investments.

This year’s financial meltdown is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to realign not just health care but the whole unstable superstructure of the economy.

WIll Futurama replace its entire voice cast, or is it just a publicity stunt?

…which I’m not, might claim MSNBC keeps Pat Buchanan on precisely because he makes conservatives look soooooo archaic, bigoted, and just plain dumb.

…makes films. He also collects films. Here’s a full hour culled from his vault of vintage toy commercials—Batteries Not Included.

Celebrity can be a fickle thing. So can typecasting. Fawcett was only on Charlie’s Angels for one season, 22 episodes (plus a three-episode return in the show’s fourth season). Yet that one role, and the accompanying glamour-image marketing, established her celebrity persona for life. From serious film roles to two Playboy appearances, nothing she did since overcame that initial inconography of the nipples, the teeth, and especially the hair. Only her slow, very public death did that.

…And, one guy claims, the TV business will soon follow.

…ends in 19 minutes from the time I start writing this. I’m watching KING-TV (the first analog telecaster in our corner of the world) as its original transmission ends after nearly 61 years. Right now, it’s transmitting a Today show segment about how to find the right-size bra.

KING’s sister station KONG just ran a segment on its local morning news about the big digital switchover. They said KCTS (the local PBS affiliate) has already shut off its analog signal.

KOMO’s been running a Good Morning America outdoor concert segment with the Jonas Brothers.

Back on KING, Today‘s got the Black Eyed Peas, with some backup dancers in black-and-white striped full body suits. How appropriate, for some of the last signals to be carried on the ol’ 525 horizontal lines.

The segment ended with the 57-year-old station-break cue: “This is Today on NBC.”

On KIRO, The Early Show offers Lionel Richie (now mostly known as a reality-show star’s dad) on the deck of a Navy ship, presumably at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The onscreen program guide says I missed a segment with Betty White, that living TV legend.

KOMO’s local news break has a predawn car crash and the arrest of a male suburban YMCA employee for allegedly abusing a 13 year old girl, plus traffic, weather, and one more warning about the death of analog.

KING’s last analog commercials: Eastside Vascular Vein Center and the Village Theater. KOMO’s last analog commercial: The Jewelry Exchange in Renton.

KING has now switched to an infomercial about the big switch, in Spanish with English subtitles. It was preceded by an announcement, in English, by KING 5 News dude Glenn Farley, saying the Anglophone version of the infomercial will follow.

KOMO’s analog signal, beamed since 1954, is now dead.

KIRO’s analog signal, beamed since 1958, is also now dead.

KSTW’s analog signal continues, for now, with Divorce Court. Not what I’d have chosen to close out an era in American communications technology.

Update, 10:54 a.m.: Just called the receptionist dude at KSTW. They’re keeping their analog signal on until noon today. This means the official last analog telecasts in Seattle will be reruns of judge shows.

Update, 12:27 p.m.: The final switch came at high noon. At the end of “Family Court,” a pretaped announcement said, “KSTW 11 is now ending its analog signal. Please stand by.” Then static.

…ends this Friday. Does anyone care? This guy does.

…what the odd temporary readerboard sign for a Hal Ashby film festival was doing up outside the Showbox one day last week, we now know. It was part of a Target TV commercial with Pearl Jam. Really.

…to Greg Palmer, the witty and endearing KING-TV arts and culture commentator and film critic, later a creator of always intriguing PBS documentaries. He proved what television could become.

As promised last week, here are my thoughts about the potential end of daytime TV mainstay Guiding Light.

When I’ve told people I’d become a GL viewer, they’ve scoffed. Some of them could imagine me watching Days, One Life, GH sure enough, but Guiding Light? Really?

Yes, really.

I’ve known about the show all my life, but only tuned in to it sporadically until last February. That’s when GL abruptly switched to what its PR called a “new production model.” It was an effort to cut costs and gain youth appeal in one fell swoop. Hand-held minicams replaced the big studio cameras. Twangy alt-country guitars replaced the syrupy synth-string background music. Four-walled studio rooms and real outdoor locations replaced the flimsy old sets. The show’s characters were the same, but its whole audio-visual vocabulary completely changed.

Daytime’s oldest, squarest show became an immediate mess.

Which made it a lot more fun.

At first, the crew’s unfamiliarity with the new format made for some of the clumsiest scripted drama this side of the Canadian network CTV (or the dialogue scenes on “Skinemax” late-night cable shows). Because they were making five one-hour episodes a week, they had to leave in a lot of imperfect takes.

It didn’t help that the new GL’s launch coincided with the first “scab scripts,” written anonymously during the 14-week writers’ strike.

After the strike, the show’s writing staff was reshuffled. The “handheld” cameras got attached to mini-tripods and Steadicam-type devices. The lighting and the sound gradually improved. GL again became a competently made show.

None of this affected the ratings, which continued to drift downward along with the rest of the oldline networks’ fare.

The new format had made the show profitable again, chiefly because it needed far fewer crew people. But if the ratings wouldn’t turn around, that profitability wouldn’t last.

At the end of last year, the producers speeded up the show’s plot pace and brought back several fan-favorite actors. The ratings stabilized. The gossip on GL message boards implied the show might make it to another year’s renewal by the network.

It didn’t.

Procter & Gamble, which has owned and sponsored the show all this time, says it’s shopping GL around to any other broadcast/cable channel that might be persuaded take it. P&G is U.S. television’s biggest single adversiser, so it’s got more than a little clout in that department.

At TV Guide (the magazine, not the online listings service no longer affiliated with the magazine), an exec with Telenext (the ad-agency-owned production company that produces GL and As the World Turns under contract to P&G) says they really are working to find GL a new broadcast or cable home. Fans on online message boards are trying to make their own voices heard in this regard.

The thing is, daytime soaps have a business model that’s just as last-century as that of daily newspapers. Talk shows, judge shows, game shows, and “reality” shows can be made for as much or as little money as a channel’s got. Daily soaps are different.

GL’s on-screen credits list 127 names, including those of several veteran (and presumably well-paid) actors. Anything resembling “fat” in its budget was excised with the new format. GL can’t be made much cheaper and still maintain both its stars and its staggering productivity.

GL produced 253 episodes last year, with only one rerun episode (at Christmas). Until the Internet, there was no domestic aftermarket for these episodes. New episodes now stream on CBS’s site. Past installments from before the full switch to the new production model are on Hulu.

If you look at these older GL episodes (and the many more posted by fans on YouTube), you can see how much slower and duller they were before the new format.

The new GL looks and moves a lot more like my all-time favorite soap, the British workhorse Coronation Street. The look is more naturalistic (when characters are outside in the snow, it’s the real outsides and real snow!). The dialogue is more intimate, less histrionic.

It’s still an American soap with your basic American soap plot themes–treachery, betrayal, crime, adultery, emotional turmoil, and the lot. But it’s been evolving a new approach to these formulae, an approach more suited to modern TV/film tropes.

That’s a feat for the world’s longest continuously running dramatic production. Then again, it’s continually reinvented itself since it began on radio 72 years ago. There were several total cast turnovers even before the switch to TV in 1952. (GL was on KIRO-TV’s first-day schedule in 1958.)

With a new home, and perhaps a more rerun-friendly production schedule, GL could shine the way toward a new future for drama on TV.

My big Guiding Light essay will show up here Friday. But for now, some other televisual content. It’s my Vanishing Seattle plug segment on KING-TV’s Evening Magazine.