I’m not the only one who’s noticed that local news is but a small piece of those fiscally endangered local newspapers.

Alex Jones, author of the book Losing the News: The Future of the News that Feeds Democracy, calls original local news content the “iron core” of a newspaper’s info-wares. To use an ’80s ad metaphor, that’s “The Beef;” with sports, comics, wire copy, opinions, and all other non-ad material as the “Big Bun.”

Clay Shirky uses this concept to conclude his old hometown paper in Columbia, MO has, at most, a dozen employees providing the really essential reportage. Therefore, Shirky continues, any nonprofit news entity for a Columbia-sized metro area (in print and/or online) need only subsidize that dozen people’s work. The rest of a newspaper’s product (including local commentary, local arts, and local sports) could be left to live or die by the whim of the free market or the passion of unpaid bloggers.

I, as you might expect, disagree.

As a reader and a scholar of journalism, I believe in the full meal deal. We need the protein of objective reportage, but we also need the fiber of larger cultural/community coverage. We need the starches of punditry and the greens of the arts. And, yes, we need the dessert of humor and entertainment.

(from KIRO-TV): “The pastor of Fircrest’s Liberty Baptist Church pleaded guilty to repeatedly making obscene phone calls to female baristas at a coffee stand near his church. The father of four girls, 41-year-old Randy Brock, entered the plea on Sept. 30.”

As long as the weather holds (reasonably) dry, I’m out researching potential local walking routes nearly every day. Today, I’ll be wandering in search of a good west Capitol Hill route.

Images from these walks will appear on this site once I get it moved back to the original URL.

The new design has been tweaked a bit over the past month, and will be tweaked further, probably repeatedly. Ads on the site: Yes, there will be some, once the permanent URL is restored.

Look, Everett police: If “bikini baristas” shed their tops and squirt one another with Reddi-Wip inside the glass confines of a drive-thru espresso stand, with no customer contact whatsoever, it is not prostitution.

At worst, it’s an unlicensed peep show. That’s a “victimless crime” if I ever saw one—and no, I haven’t personally seen this. (I prefer indoor, sit-down coffee shops.)

In the ultimate fiscal irony of fiscal ironies, the SeaTimes’ “Battle to Survive” is the topic of a special series of reports this week on KCPQ—itself owned by another troubled media empire, the Tribune Co. (Tribune only recently ponied up the bucks to let KCPQ convert local production to HDTV.)

A few days ago, we pondered how the Internet might be influencing the evolution of the human brain. Dennis Baron, a U of Illinois linguistics prof, has pondered the same topic. His conclusion: Online communication’s making us better writers and more active social creatures.

An international convention of policewomen came to town last weekend. Festivities included Sunday brunch outside the Westin, followed by a dress-uniform parade to Town Hall.

All 400-some attendees from around the world displayed their strength, fitness, discipline, intelligence, steady nerves, keen eyes, and devotion to service and justice. And they also clearly had a lot of fun.

Certain lesbians and male fetishists would also have loved it.

A self described “brain scientist and entrepreneur” has got a book out called Wired For Thought: How the Brain Is Shaping the Future of the Internet.

But what I want to know is whether the Internet is shaping the future of the brain.

Add another name to the roster of cogent, lucid MSNBC pundits. Dylan Ratigan explains how Wall Street and the speculation industry have “taken Americans hostage.”

The UW football team won a game today, the first time that’s happened since ’07. Wasn’t that long ago that the Huskies went undefeated.

My subscription is up. I might not renew. There are cheaper ways to get the NYT crossword (online). The only other thing I need the print SeaTimes for is for chronicling, week by week, its continued descent into flimsimess.

Through this procedure I’ve discerned that the average local content of a daily SeaTimes, not counting sports or the Thu./Fri. tab sections, is now between 10,000 and 15,000 words.

Sports adds 3,000 to 8,500 words to this count (mind you, this is the time of the year when baseball, football, and soccer are all active). The Thursday (getaways) and Friday (entertainment) tabloid supplements add another 4,000 to 8,500 words each.

(As a baseline comparison, a regular issue of Time or Newsweek contains about 50,000 words.)

The Sunday paper is increasingly reliant on wire copy, particularly in the almost all-wire-copy business section. The most local content’s in sports, followed by “Arts and Life,” and then by whatever relatively-timeless feature items were saved for the local news section.

What this means to you, the home reader, is that if the paper totally misses out on covering something you think is important, such as a huge pro-health-care-reform rally in Westlake Park, you can console yourself with the certainty that a lot of other big stuff isn’t making the paper these days either.

This also means the SeaTimes is almost small enough that a startup venture could compete with, and even out-cover, it on many beats and topics.

That’s what Af-Am lesbian activist Monica Roberts alleges.

Her charge is based on Savage’s apparent willingness to believe that black voters helped pass California’s antigay Proposition 8 last November. Roberts, you might guess, claims Savage and his “vanilla flavored privileged behind” are wrong about this.

And as you might guess, Roberts’s piece has a long, flaming trail of comment threads.

I don’t think Savage is consciously racist. I have known him to be less-than-PC about racial stuff. (During a Stranger office chat one time about violence at hiphop shows, he flippantly said something to the effect that they should simply stop shooting guns at each other, as if gang violence was as easily discouraged as unprotected sex.)

The bigger issue, to Roberts and to me, is that, yes, there are homophobic blacks AND racist gay whites. It’s tragic, but it’s to be expected.

What did in the Boeing 787 Dreamliner? It wasn’t the local union workers. They’re the ones who are saving the project. It’s the big sections of the plane that were outsourced to other manufacturers throughout the world, sections that don’t all fit together properly and that sometimes don’t pass performance/safety tests.

…about to disappear in town: The Georgetown Pharmacy, with its elegant neon sign and its selection of outdated greeting cards.