Results tagged “media”

The Seattle PostGlobe's recent plea for funding very nearly reads like a script produced for an NPR pledge drive, minus all the cool giveaways. Free swag aside, the news site has re-sounded the alarm, reporting they have only one week of funding remaining in their reserves...and leaving us to wonder whether this time next week we will have to ask what the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ex-pats will be doing post-PostGlobe?

A week ago, news of Fisher Plaza’s fire-induced power outage came as a surprise to gullible emergency management types who were guaranteed the media "fortress" could withstand even the most modern of technological curveballs. But in light of the present truck stop generator makeover that's sprung up on John Street, we're not so sure.

Good thing the P-I is still around to focus on such breaking news as this hard-hitting think piece from Redbook.

Speaking of Mike Davidson, the Seattle PostGlobe posse, and all-digital news platforms, tomorrow night is round two of No News Is Bad News: "Making It Work" (7-9 p.m., Bertha Landes Room, City Hall). The focus is on current and near-term models in the post-newspaper ecosystem, and Cory Bergman (MSNBC, LostRemote.com, MyBallard.com) moderates a panel that includes WSB's Tracy Record, Penny Arcade's Robert Khoo, Newsvine's Davidson, Instivate's Scott Durham, Seattle PostGlobe's Kerry Murakami, and InvestigationsWest's Rita Hibbard. You can reserve your free ticket here.

Newly minted mayoral candidate Mike McGinn has already provoked an awkward situation. While McGinn didn't want to get into Nickels-bashing at his press conference, his campaign fired off an email critical of mayor Nickels' green credentials today, so Publicola's Josh Feit got Nickels' man on the horn for a response. Only thing is, Nickels' man is Publicola's Sandeep Kaushik. Kaushik responded, “Nickels has an excellent environmental record,” and “I’m surprised Mike McGinn is going negative so early in this race," and did not say, "This is an untenable position, and I can clearly have no comment."

You know that Real Age test? Maybe not, if you're under 30 and don't give a rat's ass. But plenty of older folk take the damn thing, which ends with a promise to shave years off your age if you join RealAge.com. After all, the spokesman, Dr. Mehmet Oz, is on Oprah, for Christ sake. Well, it turns out (according to an article in the NYTimes), that RealAge.com sells your private information to pharma marketers, who then try to sell you shit that promises to make you feel younger. And who owns RealAge.com? Hearst Magazines, that's who. They bought the site for $60 to $70 million in 2007, according to the Times. And, yeah, they also own O, the Oprah Magazine. So let's stop shedding tears for the local fish-wrapper, shall we? The suits know perfectly well how to play the internet game, and whatever they're doing over at seattlepi.com isn't some half-assed online experiment. These guys are pros.

Microsoft-owned Razorfish, one of the largest digital ad buyers in the world, has a new virtual book out, the 2009 Digital Outlook Report. These reports are very much documents of their moment--as Forbes points out, two years ago Razorfish was announcing that portals were back from the dead; this year portals have an icy gray hand clutching their ankles again.

You would think, from reading bulletins about the stock market's drop today--about how the Dow Jones decline rate mimics the Great Depression--that Western civilization was on the brink of extinction. To someone who hasn't bought stock or mutual funds (securities of any kind, for that matter) for at least a decade, this doesn't make sense. The closely followed Dow is an average of the prices of thirty stodgy, old-line industrial companies (out of tens of thousands of publicly traded enterprises). An artificial indicator like that is bound to fluctuate, and consider this: No one is forcing anyone at gunpoint to buy or sell anything; for every seller, there's a willing buyer. The Market goes up, the Market goes down. Don't let it get in your head.

We've now "observed" two future of news media via Twitter (the City Club and ONA events) and watched the Seattle City Council and "No News Is Bad News" events go down via their live stream (while eyeing the #nnbn Twitter channel). One caveat before we recap: what we've learned is mostly useless in practical terms.

There's been a lot of talk about the possible closure of the P-I lately, but this Thursday there's going to be a panel discussion of Seattle as a "no-newspaper town." The cold truth is that neither the P-I nor the Seattle Times may emerge from this recession--and if one or both do, it is likely that massive restructuring will be called for. So "No News Is Bad News" asks what we rely on professional journalism for, and what we need to do to guide it through the end of the print mass media bottleneck.

The same day the CityClub of Seattle was holding--and tweeting--its panel discussion "The Newspaper Business: Sunset or a New Dawn?" strange things were happening. The P-I linked directly to a story on the West Seattle Blog. KIRO 7 TV started filing stories on Twitter, following KING 5's lead, though KING 5 was using its Twitter feed today to promote its new Facebook page. News is suddenly everywhere. At the panel, tears were still being shed over Craigslist stealing all those classified ad dollars back in the late '90s--right about the time that everyone in the U.S. was reading Who Moved My Cheese? Ten years later, major newspaper chains are still at the mercy of a cramped, ugly, lo-fi site started by some guy in San Francisco. Hearst thinks the P-I is a money-loser; from where we're sitting, the guys who've been losing billions are in the corporate suites, paying themselves top dollar while they redesign the buggy whip paper to make it more attractive to younger readers.

LET'S TALK ABOUT CHILDREN WHO BREED: Spring Awakening is a musical about teens (really young teens) who have sex. Sex is always a controversial topic, and according to a press release, Roosevelt High School is hosting a community conversation about the musical and its themes for interested locals. A diverse group of people are participating in the discussion, including members of the theatre community and students and teachers from Seattle schools. Two cast members from Spring Awakening will also be on hand to lend their perspective.

Despite layoffs at seemingly every other major news outlet, CNN is adding 10 new regional reporters in the next year—including one based in Seattle. CNN is calling their new additions "all-platform journalists" (which sounds creepily sci-fi to us) and they will contribute to both on-air and online content. We can expect our very own Seattle CNN correspondent within the year. The other cities also being added to the CNN rotation? Minneapolis, Denver, Houston, Las Vegas, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Raleigh-Durham, and Columbus, Ohio.

Seth over Sports NW just tipped us off to the bad news regarding the Tacoma News Tribune's Seahawks Insider blog, which won't be updated until training camp. Ironically, the blog's tagline reads: "Where there is no off season."

With 1,967,000 unique visitors in March, the P-I comes in twentieth, in fact, according to the Nielsen ratings of the U.S. online news field. (Oddly, that's a drop of 8% from March last year.) The Seattle Times didn't crack the top 30, so we don't know where they're at. But Village Voice Media, the alien overlords who run the Seattle Weekly, can boast a 12th-place finish, with about 2.8 million visitors to their network.

Eric Alterman is the sort of liberal we like to refer to as a "Democrat," as in, capitol "D" Democratic Party stalwart. As such, this columnist and Media Matters blogger was an arch-partisan prototype for those crazy kids at DailyKos, back in the days when armchair politicos were relegated to penning rants to the editor of their local newspaper.

Seattlest thinks our city is lucky to count Grist as a native child. It's a helluva publication that always gets at the, um, grist of the matter. They use humor wisely and since, as we noted yesterday, we're a tree-hugging hippy, we love what they stand for.

We have to be honest: We were slightly annoyed when we read the email promoting Seattle School's (of Motel fame) latest event. Anything that calls an organization "insanely exuberant" and says that it is putting on one of the "craziest film events in the history of the city" is trying pretty hard to sound zany and exciting.

What a glorious morning! The Sonics have won three of five, Edgar Martinez wasn't in the Mitchell Report, we've got a kickin' holiday party to attend tonight.

This morning we were glancing through the Going Out section of the Seattle P-I when we ran across these two questionable entries:

"War and Peace": 1 p.m. Sergei Bondarchuk's adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's novel (part one screens today) is widely considered to be one of Russia's greatest achievements. Right up there with Ivan Drago and those wooden dolls that open up to reveal a bunch of smaller wooden dolls. SIFF Cinema, Nesholm Family Lecture Hall, McCaw Hall, 321 Mercer St.; 206-464-5830; seattlefilm.org. $7-$10. Also at 7 p.m.

"As You Like It": 7:30 p.m. This Shakespeare comedy of mistaken identities, clowns and women dressed as men dressed as women gives further credence to the theory that the Wayans brothers are descendents of the Bard. Bainbridge Performing Arts, 200 Madison Ave. N., Bainbridge Island; 206-842-8569. $15-$20.

No. But that doesn't make this factoid from a political campaign article in today's any less disturbing:

in the summertime

Journalist Jim Romenesko is amassing a vast barista army with which he'll one day conquer the world, or at least Seattle (Seattlest, for one, would like to welcome our new caffeinated overlords). He's doing this through his blog StarbucksGossip.com where he invites Starbucks team members to discuss various Starbucks-related news items with him. At least, that's what he seems to be doing at the site--We know he's infecting them somehow. It's like his own real-life bot-net. A bot-net is a network of computers that have been taken over by a usually malicious individual that then perform normally on the surface, but await orders to mail spam or otherwise attack other computers on the internet. StarbucksGossip baristas are just pushing the shot button until Romenesko gives them the high sign to run wild on our municipal buildings, media outlets and independent cafes. Mark Seattlest's words.

's lead real estate reporter--writes an article about the state of the national housing market once a month when the industry standard Case-Shiller numbers are released. The Case-Shiller index (from S&P) tracks the changes in home prices for 20 US metropolitan areas each month as compared to a year prior and is the benchmark index for real estate performance.

While we're finding you writerly folk some jobs, why don't some of you look into the Puget Sound Business Journal: they've got two staff openings: the banking, residential real estate and economy beat and sports, retailing and marketing and media.

Bashing the Noo Yawk Times is just too easy. Story in today's edition that's getting lots of attention: The Frugal Traveler, Matt Gross, visits Seattle for the express purpose of sampling happy hours. Goes to Cascadia, naturally, but is disappointed to find the $1 miniburgers "bland and overcooked, they tasted like they'd been sitting under a heat lamp."

It was four years ago that we'd started falling in love with the woman who would one day be our wife. It was about that same time that she'd lent us an album called Night Songs by a band called Stars. And if memory serves us with any amount of clarity, our devoted attention to that album became one of the many things which cemented our infatuation with this woman. Night Songs (Stars' first LP)...

Enough. It's Bacon Salt Backlash time. Seattlest got in our car to drive home last night and Bacon Salt came on the radio. We opened up the newspaper yesterday and Bacon Salt. Bacon Salt, Bacon Salt, Bacon Salt.