• We’ve got the indie alcohol entrepreneurs. We’ve got the apples (though perhaps not the right kinds). So let’s get a bigtime hard cider industry going in Wash. state already!
• The Central Cinema, which insists it needs to serve beer and wine to adult patrons at screenings, to survive, will apparently get to keep doing so. Even during all-ages screenings.
• Dept. of Just Sayin’: In three years, it will be a novelty to find a new hiphop artist who’s not white. Like with jazz after 1965, or with soul after 1985.
• Death Cab for Cutie (you know, the quasi-local band whose singer now lives in L.A. (until recently with Zoey Deschanel)) has entitled its spring 2012 tour “Return to Bellingham.” The tour does not actually include a show in Bellingham.
• Does current Seattle zoning need to be revised, to require more off-street parking in new developments? The Seattle Transit Blog apparently doesn’t think so, at least in one instance.
• Knute Berger looks at Seattle Center development schemes and would really like someone to explain them in non-buzzword-talk.
• If you know them, you love them, and you just can’t get enough of George Tsutakawa’s fountain sculptures. Seattle gallery owner John Braseth tracked one down in Indiana, and is arranging to have it fixed up and placed somewhere in town.
• There are a few non-Deja Vu strip clubs left in the region. Just not many.
• Oliver Willis wants more real progressives running for office, and wants them to actually “stand for something“…
• …while Chris Mooney at AlterNet thinks he’s figured a way progs could successfully appeal to “the right-wing brain.”
• The Economist notes that divorce, abortion, unwed pregnancy, and violent crime are all way down in the U.S. these days. So, the essay asks, why are Republicans still exhorting about “moral decline“? Perhaps because U.S. church attendance is also way down.
• Naomi Wolf insists elite private K-12 schools are bad for America and even bad for the kids who get sent there…
• …while Adam Levin at HuffPost suggests the Feds consider ordering a cap on public-college tuition, so taxpayer-supported universities don’t become only for the 1 percenters.
• Blogger “Angry Black Lady” really doesn’t like the Republican woman who claims the Democrats are just making up the whole “Republican war on women” meme.
• It wasn’t just Marx. Keynesians and other macroeconomists are also often guilty of forgetting the human factor in their systems constructs.

benjamin day's new york sun, one of the original 19th century 'penny press' papers; via ricardoread.wordpress.com

Even before the online news “revolution” (that looks more and more like “creative destruction” without the “creative” part), newspapers and TV/radio stations, and especially local slick magazines and “alt” weeklies, had begun to ignore whole swaths of their communities, all in the name of the dreaded “upscale demographics.”

That means wanting only wealthy (or at least really affluent) people in your audience, the audience you sell to advertisers. (The original Seattle Weekly was particularly notorious at this. Its rate cards proclaimed, “Who are the Weekly’s readers? In a word, rich.”)

The age of dot-com media has only exacerbated this trend. AOL’s “Patch” sites deliberately only cover wealthy communities. The West Seattle Blog is apparently pulling in a lot more ad revenue than the Rainier Valley Post.

And the “future of news” bloggers, who demand that all news orgs conform to their formula of unfettered-access, ad- and pageview-dependent standard websites, sometimes seem to believe the entire nation is made up of people exactly like them—18-34-year-old, college-educated white males, with home broadband, smartphones, and techie jobs that let them browse the web throughout the day.

And now a Pew Research study claims “fewer than half of Americans who make under $75K a year go online for news.” If the online realm, as we now know it, becomes the only place to get written short-form journalism, a lot of Americans are going to be informationally shut out.

That last stat came from the page for “A Penny Press for the Digital Age.” That was a panel discussion at the digital media section of the SXSW music/media convention last week. You can hear it here.

Its aim: to explore “how low-income and working-class people–the majority of Americans–can be included in the future of online news.”

(Hint: Most of the solutions offered by the panelists involve non-profit, cooperative, and/or volunteer operations.)

It’s just one of more than a dozen “future of news” panels at SXSW you can hear at this link. They’re all full of “cutting edge” new-media concepts.

Indeed, the new-media world these days has more cutting edges than a blister pack of Bic razors (most of which will prove just as enduring).

•

Elsewhere in journalistic doom-n’-gloom land, Eric Alterman at HuffPost has collected a whole boatload of depressing industry statistics. Perhaps the most depressing of them all:

Newspaper revenue fell to its lowest level since 1984, although adjusted for inflation the income is actually worth half of what papers earned back then.

Many of these stats come from media-biz blogger Alan Mutter. Mutter also notes that retailers are putting up more “advertorial” content—and even ads for other stores—on their own sites (which would help negate the need for these stores to advertise in news-media outlets).

•

Meanwhile, the entertainment side of the media biz (at least the movie and TV entertainment side) continue to hold its ground against the “open web” demanders.

By continuing to insist on affiliate rights fees from cable providers and streaming websites alike, the big media giants have largely kept themselves surviving, if not thriving.

Could the news biz, including the news sides of some of these same companies, learn something from this?

Thursday’s Oregonian has a rather complex story of violence and desperation, set at a Goodwill outlet store.

It seems the subculture of “professional thrifters,” shopping for stuff to resell on eBay, Amazon and elsewhere, has gotten more extreme, and even brutal, during the Great Recession. Folks are spending all day in the bigger thrift stores, pawing over everything and even pushing other shoppers out of their way.

The story particularly mentions one used-book reseller named Pedro Rolando Reynaud Erazo. Along with his brother and an entourage of assistants, he spent his days grabbing books by the armful at Goodwill outlets (the bigger warehouse stores, where stuff that doesn’t sell in the regular Goodwills gets sent). They used portable bar-code scanners to help find the few volumes with resale value, then tossed all the rest. During these day-long sieges, they’d push other shoppers and even store employees out of their way.

A female shopper charged Erazo with following her around the Hillsboro Goodwill outlet store, yelling and calling her names. And more:

He pushed her on 10 occasions. He punched her. He even warned her: “(y)ou should be afraid of me. They’re not going to stop me. I can do whatever I want.”

The woman applied for, and received, a “stalking” (restraining) order against the aggressive entrepreneur.

But an appeals court reversed the ruling; claiming that…

she hadn’t proven that Erazo subjected her to at least two “contacts” that would cause her to fear for her own safety. The court ruled that while the punch qualified as one contact, the 10 shoves weren’t truly dangerous. What’s more, Erazo’s reported threat didn’t instill “a fear of imminent and serious personal violence.”

Anyway, the article continues, Erazo is no longer a threat to this particular woman, as he’s left the state of Oregon.

He now lives in the Seattle area.

And his organization has reportedly operated the same “hoarding” and “scooping” tactics at thrift stores and used-book sales around here since at least 2010.

One thing this ongoing grossness proves is something I’ve been saying for some time: books really are a big business.

(Note: There are other online pieces about Erazo. But I’m not linking to them because they veer off into stupid racist tirades, under the excuse that he was born in Honduras. His aggression and his attitude problem would be just as icky and dangerous if he were a WASP fratboy.)

existing blue tree in vancouver bc; konstantin dimopoulos via kplu.org

• Get ready to see some blue trees next month, in Westlake Park and along the Burke-Gilman Trail. The tree-painting art project is part of a public awareness campaign about global deforestation.
• The first big tunnel digging machine finally broke through at the Capitol Hill light-rail station site, hours too late to make the late TV news.
• Microsoft tries the self-deprecating “we’ve learned from our past mistakes” funny commercial schtick, and it doesn’t even seem awkward or forced at all.
• At least 40 percent of all post-traumatic stress disorder patients at Joint Base Lewis-McChord found their diagnoses later “reversed.” That means they were declared not PTSD-stricken after all, and therefore eligible to be sent right back into combat duty.
• Couldn’t happen to nicer guys: A Goldman Sachs affiliate may be about to default on 11 Seattle and Bellevue office buildings, which the firm bought for nearly $1 billion five years ago.
• Sara Robinson at AlterNet blames “conservative bullying” for making America into “a broken, dysfunctional family.”
• Sixty years ago this week, the first live event billed as a “rock n’ roll concert” ended in riots on the streets of Cleveland. The reason: The ticket printers accidentally printed tickets to two different shows as if they were the same show on the same date.
• A handy rule-O-thumb: Any previously unheard-of singer performing mechanical rote versions of black musical styles from 20 years or more ago is probably white.
• As Danny Westneat insists “art is no excuse” for Mike Daisey to make stuff up about Chinese tech-gadget factories, blogger “La Bohrer” concludes that the late beloved fiction author David Foster Wallace also stretched the facts in at least a couple of his “nonfiction” essays.

early 'new yorker' writer janet flanner photographed by bernice abbott; tacoma art museum

• Tacoma’s getting what was too hot for the Smithsonian, a photo exhibit of 150 years of gays in America.
• There’s an art vending machine in Ballard now! But, despite what this story says, it’s not the first in town. There’s already one at the Hideout bar on Boren and Madison.
• Local animator Drew Christie asks your sympathy for the poor, put-upon Nutria.
• The Voice of America (yes, they’re still around) reports about beloved local artist Ginny Ruffner and her courageous comeback from a horrific car crash.
• The UW men’s basketball team has won “the championship of the West” and is still in the running for U.S. sports’ most famous consolation prize.
• Folks are still trying to bring Dennis Kucinich to run for Congress in Wash. State.
• Auto racing in King County has apparently been saved.
• Who’s profiting from America’s health care system and its runaway costs? Not Swedish Hospital. They’re losing a quarter million a day.
• Microsoft’s giving police departments a software tool to create “digital fingerprints” for any online image. They say it can be useful in tracking down the sharers of child porn. But as we’ve learned, “cracking down on child porn” can be invoked as an excuse for every creepy Big Brother tactic.
• Will the Florida teen shot for apparently no other reason than walking while black ever get real justice?
• This Raw Story piece about an FCC decision, setting aside hundreds of new low-power radio frequencies for actual local stations instead of mere repeater transmitters, exaggerates when it says the move represents “a critical blow to right wing radio dominance.” After all, these new local stations could host their own homegrown right-wingers.
• A Bloomberg Businessweek reporter who wrote about what he calls “the real Foxconn” insists the massive Chinese high-tech subcontractor is actually a pretty good employer, considering.
• Dyske Suematsu asks rhetorically why more Americans don’t like jazz. Suematsu’s rhetorical answer is just standard square-bashing elitist yawn city. Look: Advanced, specialty versions of ANYTHING are going to mainly appeal to niche audiences. Light aircraft. Eighteenth-century history. Foreign film. French wrought-iron sconces from the 1930s. And so on.
• UK author China Mieville wants you to frustrate and “unsatisfy” him. Preferably now.

The cherry blossoms agree with the calendar that spring has arrived. Why does the weather argue?

• Today (Tuesday 3/20) is half price Amazon gift card day.
• Seattle’s apparently on the cutting edge of privacy-free office interiors.
• Who wouldn’t love a local art exhibit of classic electric mixers, model cars, and miniature Space Needles? Nobody, that’s who.
• Who still supports Mike Daisey’s not-entirely-true “exposé” of Apple’s subcontracted Chinese gadget factories? Would you believe Steve Wozniak?
• More bad news for everybody who thinks web ads could eventually support professional online news. Turns out that 68 percent of all online ad spending goes to Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft, and AOL. Only the latter two employ any journalists (Microsoft through its half interest in MSNBC.com; AOL through HuffPost, Patch, and other sites).
• Meanwhile in Maine, one of the most aggressively hyped “digital first/print last,” “hyperlocal,” “new media business model” companies has crashed, taking some almost 200-year-old weekly papers with it.
• Jonathan Chait at New York mag insists that Obama’s aborted budget compromise with John Boehner’s House Republicans last year was an attempt “to sell out liberalism,” which only failed because Boehner was “too crazy” to go along. I have a different interpretation. I believe Obama made a show of offering Boehner almost everything the latter wanted, knowing full well the latter would reject it anyway, as a part of the grand strategy of rendering the GOP utterly irrelevant on the national level and turning the Democrats into the new “party of business.” (Which could still be seen as “selling out liberalism,” if you want to see it that way.)
• Meanwhile, said House Republicans are desperate to keep the 1 percent’s loyalty by proposing a near total re-deregulation of Wall St. funny-money practices.
• To end on a fun note, here’s some animated “3D .gifs” by local artist Dain Fagerholm.

p-i carriers, 1942; mohai/seattlehistory.org

Three years ago Saturday, the print Seattle Post-Intelligencer published its last issue.

There’s still a P-I sized hole in the regional info-scape.

SeattlePI.com doesn’t even partly fill it.

What’s worse, that site is shrinking when it should be growing.

From 20 journalists and “producers” at its launch as a stand-alone operation, it’s now down to 12.

•

The way I figure it, a local mainstream news operation here would need about 40 editorial full-timers to come close to comprehensively covering the community and to producing a thorough, compelling daily product:

• 12 general news reporters;
• 2 opinion columnists/guest-column editors;
• 4 business reporters;
• 7 arts and entertainment reporters;
• 7 sports reporters;
• 3 photographers;
• 4 shift editors (“producers” in web-speak); and
• 1 editor in chief (“executive producer”).

This also happens to be close to the reporting staff numbers of today’s Tacoma News Tribune.

•

I can say it would be nice to have a bigger, fuller PI.com site.

But can I reasonably ask Hearst New Media to front that kind of money, considering the site’s probably not profitable at its current budget (and considering the money Hearst’s probably losing at its still-extant newspaper and magazine properties)?

I believe I can.

Even though I believe web ads will never come close to supporting a local site of the size I’m talking about (or, really, much professional journalism period).

That’s because online content won’t always be tied to the ugly, inefficient, insufficient genre known as the commercial website.

I’m talking about tablet apps, Kindle/Nook editions, HTML 5-based web apps.

Products that bring back the concept of the “newspaper” as a whole unified thing, not just individual text and directory pages.

Products whose ad space can be sold on the basis of their entire readership, not just individual page views.

Products that could even command a subscription price.

A renewed P-I would be the perfect vehicle to test and refine this concept.

And Seattle is the perfect place to do it.

And if Hearst doesn’t want to, let’s get together some of our own town’s best n’ brightest to do it instead.

Let’s make a news org that wouldn’t just be a “corrective” to the Seattle Times‘ square suburban worldview, but would present a fully expressed alternative worldview.

A site that lives and breathes Seattle.

That tells the city’s stories to itself.

That shows how this could be done in other towns and cities.

• The demise of the (print) Encyclopedia Britannica has led the Best Week Ever site to recall the books’ still famous 1990s TV commercials. The site doesn’t mention it, but the spots were created by comedy/commercials genius Stan Freberg and star his son Donavan (he later ran a porn site, but now photographs actors’ and wannabe actors’ portfolio shots).
• What if they gave a shopping mall and nobody came?
• Goldy reminds you that you can’t support essential public services like education from state sales taxes (and little else) anymore.
• Ex-Seattleite Mike Daisey’s monologue show rallying against the labor practices of Apple’s Chinese subcontractors? It turns out to have been full of distortions and “dramatic license.”
• Nobody’s actually trying to move the Portland TrailBlazers to Seattle. Some guy at the Weekly simply thinks it would be a good idea.
• A self proclaimed Libertarian (you know, the dudes who think the oil companies and Wall Street don’t have enough power) says we must protect porn’s right to exist, because the next industry to be cracked down on would be advertising.
• Robert Reich reminds you that America’s “moral rot” isn’t gays and abortion, but rather “the public behavior of people who control our economy and are turning our democracy into a financial slush pump.”

washington beer blog via seattlepi.com

First, thanks to the more than 50 people who crowded Roy St. Coffee and Tea for the History Cafe presentation on old Seattle restaurant menus Thursday evening. And thanks to my fellow panelists Hanna Raskin and Taylor Bowie for making it easy for me. Each of them had so many insights about the old restaurants, their menu designs, their food items, and their respective places in cultural history, that I didn’t have to say much.

• Seattle’s newest microbrewery has a gimmick. It puts out its pilsner in old fashioned steel cans that need a can opener. The company’s appropriate name: Churchkey Can Company.
• Annie Lowrey at Slate has the strange tale of a true “computer hacker” in the old, non-criminal definition of the term. He was a programming genius who supplied his innovations to, and supported the goals of, the open-source software movement. Before he abruptly and completely withdrew from public life.
• At least half the traffic on the Internet isn’t supplied by human computer users, but by automated spambots, information-stealing “scrapers,” and search engines.
• America’s most progressive-leaning broadcaster (or at least the outfit with that reputation) has just hired a union-buster consulting firm.
• Branding consultants Susan Lee and Jenny Laing claim the Occupy movement represents a great new opportunity to sell stuff.
• “The world’s most annoying song,” according to one Jason Richards, is not “Paradise City.” I see no reason to believe anything this Richards person says.

Harper’s Magazine publisher/subsidizer John R. MacArthur has always kept his mag’s online version behind a paywall.

In a recent speech at Columbia University, transcribed at the Providence Journal’s site, MacArthur insists that Harper’s is making more money this way than it would if all the content were free and management scratched n’ scrambled to somehow sell enough web ads.

But he doesn’t stop there.

In the speech, he accuses “Internet con men” (i.e., the dot-com and Web 2.0 propagandists and evangelists) of “ravaging” publishing.

He denounces “Internet huckster/philosophers” as “first cousins—in both their ideology and their sales tactics—to the present-day promoters of “free trade.” Just as unfettered imports destroy working-class communities through low-wage outsourcing, MacArthur avows, so has the Internet driven writers, artists, and editors “into penury by Internet wages—in most cases, no wages.”

With web ads incapable of supporting living wages for content makers, MacArthur insists online readers will have to learn to pay “if they want to see anything more complex than a blog, a classified ad or a sex act.”

•

Immediately, defenders of online business-as-usual stepped up to denounce MacArthur’s remarks.

Some, like Mike Masnick at TechDirt, settled for simplistic name-calling. MacArthur, Masnick insists, represents the “Platonic ideal specimen of the ‘I’m an old fogey elitist Internet Luddite.'” Masnick’s “rebuttal” piece goes on to call MacArthur at least 20 more varieties of out-of-it, while not bothering to actually rebut any of his points.

(OK, Mesnick does counter MacArthur’s claim that freelancers are being forced into poverty by online freebie sites, by citing a single example of one writer who says he’s offered more work than he can take.)

A more lucid response comes from Alexis Madrigal at Harper’s age-old arch rival The Atlantic (which not only has a free website but posts a lot of web-only material). Madrigal insists his mag’s “doing just fine thank you,” with equal amounts of print and web ad revenue.

Madrigal and Mensick both assert infinite, if intangible, benefits to having one’s writing part of the “open web” where it can be linked to, commented upon, and become part of the big meta-conversation.

But does that have to come at the expense of adequate research, thorough editing, and living wages for writers/editors?

And does everything really have to be on the open web?

If MacArthur wants to keep his paywall up, and if he believes his little nonprofit highbrow mag can support itself better that way, let him.

The old fogey might actually be on to something.

After you’ve had your Caesar salad to celebrate the Ides of March, join me in celebrating the ghosts of meals past.

I’m participating in a History Cafe session about old Seattle restaurant menus. It’s 7 p.m. Thursday at Roy Street Coffee (the off-brand Starbucks), Broadway and East Roy on crunchy Capitol Hill. It’s sponsored by KCTS, HistoryLink.org, MOHAI, and the Seattle Public Library.

• Good News Dept.: It looks like the Volunteer Park Conservatory is a lot closer to being fiscally preserved than was implied in previous reports.
• The Husky men’s basketball team had to settle for playing in the NIT, despite winning its conference’s regular season title. But that wasn’t as demeaning as the team’s ultra-lousy attendance at its first round NIT game.
• Whatever patina of respectability the megabanks had is peeling off in the late-winter rains. There’s the blistering breakup letter by the ex Goldman Sachs exec. And there’s Matt Taibbi’s even more blistering exposé of BankAmericrap as “a hypergluttonous ward of the state whose limitless fraud and criminal conspiracies we’ll all be paying for until the end of time.” And yet Megan McArdle at the Atlantic insists what we really need is a “massive deregulation” of banking. What?
• Meanwhile, here’s another good-riddance letter by a techie who left Google for Microsoft, claiming the former had devolved from “an innovation factory” into just another “advertising company.”
• The copyright police have convinced U.K. authorities to ship a Brit college kid to the U.S. for prosecution, all for the supposedly heinous crime of running a TV-episodes linking site.
• Some Catholic bishops in Missouri have decided the best way to respond to continued exposés of child-abusing priests is to mount vicious legal attacks against the exposers.
• To end this batch on an upbeat note, here are four illustration books and a comic-strip collection based on classic literature.

stephen crowe via brainpickings.org

Today, go out and celebrate Pi Day (3/14). Tomorrow, learn about pies of the past.

I’m participating in a History Cafe session about old Seattle restaurant menus. It’s 7 p.m. Thursday at Roy Street Coffee (the off-brand Starbucks), Broadway and East Roy on cantilevered Capitol Hill. It’s sponsored by KCTS, HistoryLink.org, MOHAI, and the Seattle Public Library.

• We now know what’s going in where the parking garage on Second north of Stewart had been until last weekend. It’s (wait for it) a beyond-upscale luxury apartment tower, the “Viktoria” (yes, with a K). The developers are employing all the usual buzzwords (including their vow that this will be “the signature residential building in Belltown”). Construction starts within a month.
• Next threatened landmark that needs saving: The Funhouse, that delightfully seedy and decidedly downscale rock club, situated within easy jeering distance of EMP and Ride the Ducks. Yep, it’s due to yet another “mixed use” project.
• Wash. state’s next big contribution to the music world is a Korean American “pop lothario.”
• Public-school advocates calling themselves “Occupy Education” show up at Gates Foundation HQ to pick a verbal fight, about what the activists call the foundation’s “corporate brand of education reform.” Hilarity ensues.
• SeattlePI.com’s list of “most hated Seattle sports figures” relegates Clay Bennett to the #2 slot behind Howard Schultz, the man who made Bennett’s team-theft possible.
• Co-ops, locavores, Kickstarter, Etsy—Sara Horowitz at the Atlantic calls it all a revival of 1890s “mutualism.”
• Mike Lux attempts to explain why so many professed Christians behave so not-Christlike. (Lux mainly blames the Apostle Paul.)
• William K. Black at AlterNet would like to see the same kind of attention paid toward Wall Street’s corporate crimes that’s paid toward blue-collar street crime.
• Village Voice Media continues to defend its Backpage.com sex ad operation, even within an article about a group of accused child abusers who are charged with using the site to pimp out their underage victim.
• Encyclopedia Britannica, having sold only 8,000 print encyclopedia sets in the past two years, announced it won’t print any more after 244 years.
• We know junkies were stealing copper wire, but liquid Tide?
• Charlie Jane Anders at i09.com offers advice on how to be a better sci-fi/fantasy writer by being less annoyingly “clever” about it:

Try writing the same line of dialogue three different ways: 1) the quippy version, 2) the version that simply conveys the meaning of the line, and 3) the emotional subtext of the line. And then try to find the version that combines 2) and 3) as much as possible. You might find you end up with a line that’s more quotable than the witty version you originally had.

Learn how we and our immediate forebearers ate!

I’m participating in a History Cafe session about old Seattle restaurant menus. It’s 7 p.m. Thursday at Roy Street Coffee (the off-brand Starbucks) at Broadway and E. Roy on curvaceous Capitol Hill. It’s sponsored by KCTS, HistoryLink.org, MOHAI, and the Seattle Public Library.

Be there or be yesterday’s “fresh sheet.”

• The World Trade Organization (remember them?) sez Boeing gets unfair subsidies from the U.S. gov’t.
• Are an ad agency’s “homeless hotspots” at the SXSW music festival really more demeaning than the Seattle company that  still calls itself “Bumvertising“?
• No, Michael Medved. We’re not secretly jealous of Rush Limbaugh and his awesome power. We’re disgusted by his puerile stupidity, bullying, and bigotry (and yours too).
• The Oregonian won’t run the Doonesbury comics about the GOP’s war against women. A local cartoonist responds by depicting the paper’s readers choosing to “abort” their subscriptions.
• Is there really something particular about the training of soldiers at Lewis-McChord that’s led to these dreadful stories about abuses of power in the Afghan field? Or is it just a coincidence, based on the fact that the base has grown so big, with so many troops transferring in and out of it?
• One of the 1980 American hostages in Iran would rather not see history repeat itself thank you.
• Blogger/editor Maria Popova believes websites should formally adopt a “curator’s code” identifying direct and indirect links via special unicode symbols.

I’ve talked briefly recently about the “future of news.”

I’ll talk about it some more.

But I should explain what I mean by that phrase.

I mean something different from what the cyber-hucksters mean by it.

By “news,” I specifically mean:

• Original reporting and storytelling, by people who are paid a living wage for their knowledge, their writing acumen, and their research skills.

Therefore, by “the future of news,” I’m talking about ways to fund professional reporting, particularly on a local/regional level.

Therefore, I am not talking about:

• Aggregation sites and apps.
• The latest flavor of social-media gimmickry.
• Comment threads and chat boards.
• For-profit websites built around unpaid or sub-minimum-wage contributions (reader blogs, “Examiners,” content farms).
• Search-engine gaming or other gimmicks to ginny up page views (presuming online ad revenue will follow).

•

Ex-Seattleite (and Rocket music mag cofounder) Robert McChesney has been a longtime scholar and observer of the media biz.

McChesney’s and John Nichols’ 2010 book The Death and Life of American Journalism attempts to figure out what to do.

McChesney and Nichols, like many other commentators, note in great detail how the old-media industries of newspapers and local broadcasters are withering and, in some cases, dying off.

But they also note that the “new media” business model, putting everything up online for free and hoping web ads will pay the bills, is also not working.

And they conclude, as I have, that web ads are never going to work. No matter how frenetically you play the page-view game. No matter how thinly you dilute a site’s professional content with amateur and aggregated freebies.

At least they won’t work at supporting professional local reporting, which is what McChesney, Nichols, and I care about.

So what do they suggest?

Federal subsidies!

In McChesney and Nichols’ ideal future, newspapers and news sites would turn themselves into nonprofit or “low profit” organizations. Then they’d apply for a share of maybe $30 billion in “public media” grants, to be awarded on the basis of need and public service.

Yeah. From a U.S. government that can’t even supply more than a trickle of what public broadcasting needs, and gets bashed by right wing sleaze-mongers for even that.

McChesney and Nichols’ solution reminds me of certain early ’70s radical and feminist manifestos, in which every prescription for a better society began with the phrase “The federal government should…”.

Not practical then. Not practical now.

The search continues.

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Elsewhere, Arianna Huffington has come out with a diatribe against one of the cyber hypesters’ newest obsessions du jour: the insistence that every single news article must be contrived to “go viral” on Twitter n’ Facebook, and that news orgs must think more about “social media integration” and less on, you know, actual news. Of course, she then admits her own outfit’s just as taken in by the madness as the rest of ’em.

The parking garage on Second Avenue between Stewart and Virginia was completely demolished in two days.

In order to minimize traffic disruption, the whole job was scheduled for a single weekend. Even then, at least one lane of Second was open to traffic at all times.

Four jackhammer and shovel rigs converged on the site; first knocking down the front walls, then moving in for the rest.

By late Sunday afternoon, all that was left was rubble and some old painted signage revealed on the side of the building next door.