Results tagged “seattlepi”

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?

We often say that the Times comment section specializes in crazy, but this weekend's post on the P-I.com heralding their site redesign has prompted a whole bunch of commentating goodness. The complaints vary, from "too much white space" to "too much focus on blogs" to "too many ads." As always, readers like the previous incarnation better, with some faux-threatening legal action ("I want to sue the Seattle P-I and get an injunction forcing them to bring back their old look."), while others claim they will no longer use the P-I, in favor of the Times. Now that's crazy.

Not so fast on the Mayor Nickels-bashing, claims the P-I. Turns out charges that he costs the city by not playing well with Olympia may be overblown, because Seattle’s legislators aren’t very good at helping Seattle themselves.

The Seattle P-I has an interesting article on the escalating war of online words between Amanda Knox supporters and those who think she's guilty. We wrote a short post about this back in January, but things have apparently radically escalated since the first salvos were fired.

We got the following screenshot from intrepid tipster Steve Winwood, who writes: "See if the P-I fixed the hellscape catastrophe apostrophe in paragraph five. This is the worst moment of my entire life!!!!!!!"

The Case-Schiller Home Price Indices show the Seattle market has unwound to July 2005 valuations. The Seattle Bubble has updated its time-shifted home price comparison graph, which illustrates what happens when you remove a 17-month lag between Los Angeles/San Diego, and Seattle/Portland: the curves' slopes match up real nice.

The seattlepi's real estate reporter, Aubrey Cohen, just spotted a bridge floating across Elliott Bay. Turns out it's pieces of the new Hood Canal Bridge (to be finished in 2010), "pontoons U, V, W and X," according to WSDOT. (We're kidding about Aubrey wanting to sell it. That's a little real estate humor, vital in these dark times.) WSDOT has been photographing the Hood Canal bridge project for Flickr, if you want to see more.

Online media is ready to eat its young, we see. Paul Constant, Glenn Nelson, and Chuck Taylor have reviews in on the new, online-only Seattle P-I and it's mostly thumbs down. Each of them seems to think the move to an online platform was a planned transition, and that there should have been some "reinvention" to wow everyone on Day One. Our sense was that thanks to Hearst's poker skills, no one at the P-I was sure until a few days ago that they even had jobs, let alone what they were. Someone was working on a simple, clean mobile interface, but a site redesign had to be out of the question.

"out of paper" by Kurt Schlosser, from the Seattlest Flickr pool

It probably means something that we just heard about the last print day of the P-I on Twitter. Publisher Roger Oglesby just made the announcement on behalf of will-they-won't-they Hearst corporate. Over the weekend, the P-I's web address simplified itself to seattlepi.com, and the word is, the online-only version is a go. The P-I is dead, long live the P-I! [UPDATE: P-I Executive Producer Michelle Nicolosi expounds on plans for the online-only version.]

On the same day the Seattle Weekly was prognosticating about the Seattle Times' survival odds, and the Times was filling us in on the P-I's, sometime-Seattlester Seth Kolloen sent us this enigmatic screenshot. Are they trying to tell us something from inside the Fairview compound?

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.

Crosscut's Bill Richards has the story on Hearst's signal of disinterest: "Hearst Corp. said today that it won’t make a final $1 million payment to the Times’ majority owners, the Blethen family, for the right to bid first for the Blethens’ 50.5 percent stake in the company." Hearst also said that if they turn P-I into a pixel-only publication, they would do so outside the warm bosom of the JOA. But they haven't decided yet. "What's the big rush? Stop pestering us!" Meanwhile, the Seattle Times is in "survival mode," reports the Stranger--they're asking the unions for 12 percent payroll cuts. This is grim news indeed for Stranger staffers who were hoping to sell out and snag a cushy MSM job one day.

We all know there'll be no buyers for the P-I, but what do you think the chances are that it could live on as an online-only publication like The Christian Science Monitor did last year?

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 fall we are combining our love of the football and our dream of learning to cook by preparing a meal from the city of the Seahawks' opponent.

This fall we are combining our love of the football and our dream of learning to cook by preparing a meal from the city of the Seahawks' opponent.

We love the bus. We ride it whenever we can. We try to convince our friends, family, and neighbors to ride the bus. We even offered favors to our girlfriend if she would start riding the 41 from her Northgate crib to her downtown office. (She declined; we broke up. Draw your own conclusions.)

There's a terrific piece in the Seattle P-I today that took us down a 700-foot shaft into New York's Rondout-West Branch water tunnel. "For this, the city has enlisted six deep-sea divers from Seattle-based Global Diving and Salvage who are living for more than a month in a sealed 24-foot tubular pressurized tank complete with showers, a television and a Nerf basketball hoop, breathing air that is 97.5 percent helium and 2.5 percent oxygen, so their high-pitched squeals are all but unintelligible." The P-I picked the story up from the NYT, and it's written in that weirdly compelling style where extreme underwater plumbing somehow speaks to the universal human condition. It's a five-year, $240 million project, which should put our friend who just got a $5300 estimate to dig out his backyard sewer drain into a more philosophical frame of mind.

The Seattle Times Blethens have endorsed Dino Rossi (R) for Washington State Governor, saying "he can best be trusted to erase the state's huge projected deficit without raising taxes." The Seattle P-I endorses Christine Gregoire (D), pointing out, "Especially for uncertain times, she's a much more proven leader than her Republican rival, former state Sen. Dino Rossi." The Seattle Times, under Blethen leadership, has laid off about 20 percent of its staff this year, so we're a little dubious about their powers of prognostication when it comes to dealing with huge projected deficits.

Traffic was snarled on Aurora for about two hours this morning, as police closed lanes to try to talk down a man threatening to jump from the Aurora Bridge. The P-I says he is in his mid-30s, fell 150 feet into a parking lot, and survived the fall. He was alive when taken to the hospital--probably Harborview, we imagine. This local blogger saw the traffic jam and wondered how hard it would be to justify increasing mental health coverage, given the cost of the stalled commute. But we seem more likely to build a fence instead.

We'd heard that the media's other, cash-poor shoe would be dropping after the election, when all the campaign money dried up. But the Seattle Times is going shoeless a day early, with the announcement of a "workforce reduction of approximately 130-150 positions, a combination of voluntary separations and layoffs." Back in April, the Times shed 200 employees, and said then that further cuts might be necessary. What with classifieds, real estate, and financial services advertising down to a trickle of their former Niagaras, political advertising was the last...oh, we've done the shoe thing already. But you get the idea. Next up, similar news from the P-I?

Transportation professionals say Initiative 985 will make traffic worse. Tim Eyman says, "I-985 implements common sense reforms based on recommendations from Sonntag's thorough investigation." The P-I says, "Voters should decline to join Eyman in blowing this multi-toxin poison dart at themselves." But what do you say? Yea or nay? Our poll closes tomorrow at noon, and don't be shy about voicing your opinions in the comments. (More on I-985 here)

"Why is that green thing in the street?" Little Miss Seattlest asked us recently. "It's for bicycles," we replied. But we'd have been mystified (putting green? guerrilla ad?) if we hadn't read Erica C. Barnett's lament about how they weren't working. Today's "Getting There" column in the P-I repeats our daughter's question. "They signal to turning motorists that bicyclists might be in the bike lane," explains Eric Widstrand, Seattle's traffic operations manager. Of course, a signal only works if people actually understand it, and even Widstrand admits people don't know what the mats are for. Next on the city's honey-do list: Install signs to explain. Brilliant! You're driving, you're confused by the weird green thing in the street, you search for a handy explanatory sign, you figure it out, and you rear-end the FedEx truck in front of you because you've been looking everywhere but where you're going for the last 30 seconds. Even if we hadn't just read Traffic, we'd have to question exactly how a sign is going to clarify anything.

The Seattle-PI asks in the headline of a couple-hundred-word story a question we could answer in one word and a single photo.

We're no prude, but we have to admit to being a wee bit (okay a lot) shocked to see the following banner ad attached to a local news story on the Seattle P-I's site.

Today in two-newspaper town coincidences: real estate made the front page of both the Seattle Times and the P-I. "King County home sales edge up in June," says the Times, while the P-I makes a stronger claim for temperature-based sales, "Local housing market warming up with the weather."

The Seattle P-I—that liberal bastion of Seattle daily newspapers—has a very important question on which they want your opinion: Miss Universe contests in their swimsuits--hot or not?

The way Bonnie Hunt tells it, the movie Dave started as a short film with her in the role of a White House tour guide. Then Kevin Kline dropped by the set, started riffing, and the whole project changed.