Seth Kolloen starting covering sports for Seattlest in January 2005. Late last year he took over as editor, before leaving us to become the editor of the brand new Sports Northwest Magazine. We caught up with Seth poolside at the W Hotel to discuss the move to press row, his sports blog, and why he won’t be calling Maggie Gyllenhaal any time soon.

How did you get involved with the new magazine?

In one sense, I feel like I've sort of always been editing a magazine--the magazine of my life. In another sense, I answered an ad on CraigsList.

For the past three years you’ve been blogging about sports, how does running a magazine differ?

You can do a blog piece in minutes. Any idea you have for a magazine won't hit people's eyeballs for--at a minimum--four weeks. Usually longer. This spawns self-doubt. Will the piece still be relevant in a month? Will someone else do it?

An example: I wrote a piece about the Seattle Grizzlies, a local Aussie Rules football team, for our first issue. The day we get the magazine back from the printer, the Seattle Times sports section has a front-page piece about the same damn Aussie Rules football team. What are the chances?

A second example: For our May issue, we have a bunch of really smart pieces planned about the what the NBA leaving could mean for Seattle, about why David Stern hates us, and a cover illustration about the whole thing that's so awesome, I can barely contain my excitement...but if the whole thing magically gets resolved while the magazine is being printed, we are screwed worse than Horacio Ramirez' agent.

How will you shape your focus knowing that you’ll be competing with a daily sports sections, up to the minute web sites, and blogs?

Smarter pieces and better writing. The difference between writing something that will be relevant that day, and writing something that will be relevant in a month, I've quickly learned, is that you can't rely on lame jokes, or knee-jerk analysis.

It prevents you from taking the easy way out (see above Horacio Ramirez joke). You're forced to write something that's more thoughtful and more likely to be readable a month, a year, five years from now. Also--we have prettier pictures.

And at some point soon (I'll keep you posted) the magazine itself will have a blog. So we'll have both the minute-to-minute and the long view covered.

After writing on your own terms for a few years, how are you adjusting to the world of advertisers, designers, printers, athletes, and deadlines?

It's not a lot different than when I was editing Seattlest. I'm no huge indie music, or mystery novel, or baking fan, but I know that there are people in Seattle who are, so I wanted to make sure there was content for those people--I wanted the site to represent Seattle.

With the sports magazine--I mean, I'm not exactly Mr. Extreme Sports; trying to get my Saturn to accelerate up a hill is about the most excitement I get--but we've got a feature in the first issue about mountain biking, and we're planning pieces on climbing, on motorcycle racing, on kiteboarding, etc., etc. And since it's "Sports Northwest," we're covering Oregon stuff as well. People aren't going to come to the magazine if it's just about my favorite sports--I want the magazine (and the website) to represent the Northwest sports scene.

Still, I frequently threaten my bosses that if they piss me off, I'll make the cover story a 9000-word feature on Garfield High basketball.

What’s it like going from watching the game in the bleachers to the press box?

First of all, you can't cheer, which I'm sure everybody knows, but after watching I'd guess at least 1,000 games cheering my brain out in the stands, it's nearly impossible to stop from an accidental clap now and again.

I'll start and then stop and then wonder if everyone's looking at me. I don't think I'll want to watch too many games from press row, I'd miss cheering too much. On the other hand, you've got your laptop so you can Google "methods of suicide" when Richie Sexson comes up with men on base.

You’re a realist with an optimistic streak, so why should Seattle sports fans not want to smash their faces against broken glass these days?

These things always turn around--look at where Boston fans were in January of '01--Rick Pitino had just resigned after driving the Celtics into the ground, their new NFL coach looked like a dud after finishing 5-11 in his first year, and the Red Sox were an aging team that seemed mired in mediocrity. A year later they have a Super Bowl victory, three-and-a-half years later a World Series win, and now they have maybe the three best franchises in all of professional sports.

And all those dudes who put their faces through windows are reminded of what bandwagon jumpers they were whenever they look in the mirror. Sports are a crazy ride, but if you hang on in when you're rolling down a switchback of losing, you'll get rewarded when you hit the straightaway near the finish line of championship-dom and receive the Gatorade cup of elation. Or something.