Results tagged “newspapers”

MyBallard points out an APB for Spewie, the purloined gargoyle. At the Henry Art Gallery, jobs are reportedly disappearing like unattended Rembrandts. And every day, the newspaper industry gets a little more grotesque: Reporter Newspapers, the chain of suburban weeklies owned by Canadian businessman David Black, laid off their photographers today, including a friend of Seattlest.

Last August, we wrote this postscript to a post about the Kindle's holiday sales prospects: "I didn't want to write a separate post, but if I were doing marketing at a newspaper, I'd start figuring out if bundling a 2-year subscription and a bulk Kindle buy would knock down the price enough to horn in on some of this Xmas shopping action. Not only would the newspaper subscriber get a Kindle, but it would actually come with something to read every day."

So we're cruising Craigslist, as is our wont, and there this ad for a reporter for the Seattle Courant? UW journalism grad Keith Vance "quietly"--perhaps too quietly?--launched the site sometime the past few weeks. Vance writes a bunch of stories about Obama and offers links to the P-I, which will likely be broken in another 55 or so days. But the recipe for potato cheddar chowder? That one's a keeper.

As we alerted you the other day, author Steven Johnson was in town this week for a flurry of book talks. We caught up with him at Vivace and talked with him a little about his new book, The Invention of Air, but also about the life of Steven Johnson, author. This is the second and final installment. Here's Part One of the interview.

Just sitting here, watching the news, when woah! WTF? According to King-5 news at 5 p.m., the P-I will announce tomorrow that the paper is for sale. If it doesn't sell within 30 days, it will shut down entirely. That's pretty much all they know right now, since they're waiting for direct comment from the publisher. Anyone wanna buy a newspaper? We hear there's a bright future for print media.

This just in from BikePortland: Price Media, the publishing stalwarts who bring you Outdoors Nw (sic on the small "w") magazine, have cooked up a new magazine, NW Cyclist. It'll be published just once per year; the premiere issue will be available in March 2009 at the Seattle Bike Expo. We were bemoaning the lack of a bright spot in any industry during this recession and we totally didn't think about bikes. Bikes are pretty hot right now. Newspapers, the Seattle Weekly reminds us, are not. We are so close to being a no-daily-newspaper town right now.

Writing news for Seattlest, we spend a lot of time feeling slightly befuddled by local news headlines. Last night's perusal of headlines offered us this gem: "Semi road rage leads to big mess on I-5." We read it as a case of mild road rage, somehow causing a traffic jam. A sentence into the story, we realized our error. In reality, the driver of a semi truck suffered a case of road rage when another truck driver tailed his truck too closely. The angry driver slammed on the brakes, damaging his trailer and sending him careening onto the highway's dirt shoulder.

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.

According to Slog, the Seattle Times is about to lay off 200 employees (at least 45 of them from the newsroom). As a friend noted, it's not entirely surprising. Print media far and wide are bowing to the evolution of demand for media. This Seattlest, for one, only ever touches a newspaper anymore if it's in a bin at our local coffeeshop. And, even then, it's to pull out the crossword. We get all our news online and reckon we're not alone.