That’s it. Seattle’s oldest continuous business–and the better of its two daily newspapers–is no longer a newspaper. After today, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer will only be available as an online product.

It’s not a terrible thing. There will still be some members of the newsroom staff at work digging up stories and reporting the news that matters in a way that local blogs can not, thankfully, but it is going to be a much reduced staff that will be working extra hard. As Michelle Nicolosi, “executive producer” of the new SeattlePI.com explains:

We’ll spend our staff time where we know we have something unique and civically important to offer. A lot of our staff efforts will be on coverage of government, spending, crime, and harder news in general. … We don’t have reporters, editors or producers—everyone will do and be everything. Everyone will write, edit, take photos and shoot video, produce multimedia and curate the home page.

So we’ll have original content produced by media professionals which is good, but they’ll have to act more like bloggers who do it all on a shoestring budget, which is not. Why not? Local news bloggers such as MyBallard.com and even Seattlest (where I used to write) are sites I love, respect and think do great work, but they do it for free, as a side project or a one-person show. As a result, they can’t dig deep into all the important stories that are out there or even dig deep to find the important stories that are buried by ne’er do wells. It’s a service to run a blog where I can find out about proposed bike lanes in my neighborhood or read about the new restaurant or a rash of burglaries at local businesses, to be sure. But those blogs can not uncover corruption in government, failing schools or any of the other poisons from which our imperfect form of Democracy can and does suffer. For that, we need news professionals who get paid to dig deep and tell us those stories.

To be clear, I have no problem with that news being presented online only. It is where I get my news and it is an excellent way to get it. Sure, I’ll miss hard copies of newspapers–as a collector of editions covering huge breaking stories, screenshots of big events don’t really cut it–but I’ll read the PI online, as will many others. Hopefully, we’ll find some way to pay for that content and that work. After all, it’s only fair. Non-news professionals expect to be paid for their work, why shouldn’t they pay for the work we do?

I paid a guy who bought the last 5 copies at the store near my house 50 cents for this. Cover price is 75 cents so I already made money!

There is no love lost by me for Huffington Post, but now and again, they post something to their Comedy email that is worth sharing. A video documenting the many places where images of Jesus (and the Virgin Mary) has been found by Everythingisterrible.com is one of those things.

This is the world we live in folks.

Why do people keep pissing off John Stewart? Really, what was CNBC’s Santelli thinking?

Yesterday in the Times there was an Op-Ed about creating an endowment that would save the NYTimes and pay for its operations. In other words, turn the paper into a non-profit organization. It’s not a bad idea and one I’d like to see examined and vetted. It could work. In theory.

Then today, there was an idea proposed on PJNet to turn the NYTimes into a cooperative. Or at least, to turn its newsroom into a cooperative.

If everyone who subscribes to the New York Times paid $400 a year, just for it online, but also got shares into the cooperative, that would be $400 million a year. The Times newsroom costs about $200 million a year to operate. The extra $200 would go into an endowment, so in five years there would be a billion dollars, in ten years $2 billion. Enough that the subscription rate would go down for anyone who contributed for ten years. A ten year investment would be $4,000 or $2,000 less that what you pay for the newspaper now.

Nice idea, but I have my qualms about it. Sure, I’d like to be an owner of the NYTimes newsroom, but what’s to keep me from doing that now? I can buy stock in the company.

More importantly, I’d like to know what the shareholders would control and how? In my experience, co-ops are big messy things with a lot of competing interests all trying to make things happen they way they want them to. But often, little actually gets done, and what does get done, gets done slowly.

I’d much rather see it as a non-profit a la the NPR model.

One commenter on the post brought up The Seattle Times and the PI. Who would buy into those co-ops? They’re not The Grey Lady after all.  Plus, in Seattle, we are often the victims of too much process (see our inability to get light rail built until now). If 300,000 of us all owned the newsroom, I’d see one issue a year after all the arguing about who to hire as a reporter.

I exaggerate to make my point, but I think you see my it anyway. This is an important question at the national level (The NYTimes) and the local level. A lot of folks seem to think local blogs can take the place of major dailies in each city as long as there is some sort of pool reporting on the bigger issues (government, police, etc). But I am not so sure. Most local bloggers are commenters, not reporters. God love em, they’re not taking the place of a newsroom with all the assets and contacts they bring to the table.

A couple of quick environmental notes for you today, as I am heading out the door to go networking with other sustainability types. I’m heading to my first EcoTuesday event and I have high hopes for the smaller size format. (I like sustainability types but I hate networking. Can you tell I’m procrastinating?)

Anyway, an article in The Times today tells of a growing divide between Congressional Democrats who are splitting on Green-Brown state lines (read: coasts vs. midwest and South) over environmental legislation. The nut graph, as they say:

“There’s a bias in our Congress and government against manufacturing, or at least indifference to us, especially on the coasts,” said Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio. “It’s up to those of us in the Midwest to show how important manufacturing is. If we pass a climate bill the wrong way, it will hurt American jobs and the American economy, as more and more production jobs go to places like China, where it’s cheaper.”

Someone needs to tell all of these people that moving toward renewables and away from dirty industries doesn’t have to mean the death of Midwestern economies. In fact, it could be a renaissance for them. Do they think wind turbines and solar panels grow on trees? A few well-placed tax credits to spur new manufacrturing and you’ve got a lot of out of work steel and auto workers going back to the plant in Ohio, Michigan and more. Unfortunately, the Times doesn’t get around to talking about this till the last graph:

“Every single wind turbine takes 26 tons of steel to construct,” Mr. Markey said. “A lot of new jobs will be created if we craft a piece of global warming legislation correctly, and that is our intention.”

Finally, courtesy of the Christian Science Monitor, news about the driving habits of Hummer owners. Not entirely related to sustainability, but it makes my hippie heart sing nonetheless:

An insurance research firm has found that drivers of that icon of climate-trashing excess, the Hummer, are more likely to get traffic tickets than drivers of any other vehicle.

Interstingly, the Hummer is the ONLY SUV to be in the top 10 on that list. Makes FUH2.com makes even more sense, doesn’t it?

If the brave new world of media and journalism is online, then the Huffington Post is one of the few business models that seems to be working right now. Makes sense since, in the early days of the industrial revolution, the business models that worked took unfair advantage of workers just like HuffPo does.

Remember when capitalism thrived because companies kept employees sequestered in fire-trap sweatshops like the Triangle Factory, housed them in company towns where employees could take company wages to the company store and buy what they needed and if they couldn’t afford it right then, could even use company credit that they could pay back through wage garnishing. The company town/sweatshop for writers and journalists is virtual, but it’s just as dangerous.

HuffPo’s business model is simple: Give away the product for free, poach aggregate content for free, generate original content for free, sell ads for revenue, investors make millions. As I watch the media organizations great and small fail all around me, that model is really starting to chap my hide. Especially when Arianna Huffington is quoted as saying something as pompous as this:

“We have 200 new blog posts a day and about 2,500 bloggers with a password who can post any time day or night,” says Arianna Huffington, another founder and HuffPo’s public face. What she offers them is “a platform with millions of readers,” a “civil environment” maintained by moderators paid to purge the readers’ comments of vulgarity and stupidity, and the opportunity to write “whenever they have something to say, with no expectations of being paid.” This assures her that her writers are driven only by their big ideas. “Do you think,” she asks, “that someone doing an op-ed for the New York Times is doing it for the $100?”

(via Chicago Reader)

It’s true that if I had the opportunity to write an Op-Ed for The Times, the $100 would be just icing on the cake, but it would also be my due for helping (in a very small way) the publication generate revenue.  In Arianna’s world view though, free publicity on her site is payment enough.

You know what the problem with this world view is? It surmises that there are plenty of  avenues for writers to follow where they will get paid. But as sites see that aggregating content for free and not paying writers works, there are going to be less and less paying outlets where writers can earn a living. Sure, every last Tom, Dick, and Harry can publish a blog or even a book these days, but that doesn’t mean you’re gonna get noticed and paid, even if you are a HuffPo blogger. After all, there are 2,500 of them.

The irony is that, as HuffPo admits, most of its bloggers are not full-time writers and are using the site for publicity anyway. But what kind of publicity can you get unless you’re a professional writer who is good enough to get noticed and pimped by the editors?

I get the HuffPo daily email and look at its headlines. I am a liberal after all and they make me feel good. On average though, I read very little on the site because most of it is drek. Even the highlighted articles chosen by editors are often poorly written, long-winded, masturbatory pieces. So while Arianna may think she is doing the world a service by giving us all a platform to spout off at 3 in the morning and increasing the prevlance of “citizen journalism” at the same time, she’s not. By making sure there is more out there to read, she is making sure less people will want to read it because the good stuff will be lost amidst all the chaffe and making sure those of us who do try to earn a living at this craft will no longer be able to.

If there’s always someone willing to do it for less, then why pay the guy who wants more for his services? Sound familiar?

The top image was taken from adrants.com and the second came from a long piece on the Triangle Fire by Mike Ely at his blog.

Some stories, on first glance, seem so idiotic that  it’s easy just to skip over them and hopefully never think of them again. That was my first thought when I saw a news story about how much carbon dioxide is emitted everytime someone does a search on Google. Via TerraPass:

A couple of Google searches emit significantly less CO2 (about one-hundredth of an ounce) than boiling the kettle for a cup of tea,

(NB: turns out the orignial announcement didn’t mention Google emissions at all. The Times of London was the first outlet to pick  up the story and decided to name drop Google all over the place. Still…) One-hundredth of an ounce? It may be interesting to quantify every last little bit of our existence for some, but in the big scheme, this is nothing. I chalked the release of the results up to a scientist somewhere needing funding and banking on news-hungry web sites to provide some free publicity to point to in a grant application. But then I read TerraPass’ post which referenced a Google post about the Google emissions flap and got to thinking. I realized the larger story that is being ignored at this point.

According to Google,

Not long ago, answering a query meant traveling to the reference desk of your local library. Today, search engines enable us to access immense quantities of useful information in an instant, without leaving home. Tools like email, online books and photos, and video chat all increase productivity while decreasing our reliance on car trips, pulp and paper.

Saying that the footprint of research is smaller now because we don’t have to go the library anymore may be a specious argument.

First of all, we need to look at how much research was done pre-Internet and how much is done now. I certainly didn’t look every last thing up at the library back in those dark ages. Also, way back when, I had a really groundbreaking invention right at my fingertips that Google may want to research: books such as dictionaries and encyclopedias that I didn’t have to drive to get to.

Second, Google claims to have one of the most energy efficient data centers around and a commitment to sustainability which I believe. In fact, further down in that post, the author comes to a different conclusion about how much CO2 is emitted thanks to a search on its site. Only about .2 grams which is way less than just about anything we do.

But I am still curious about the oroignal research which actually quantified the amount of CO2 associated with visiting ANY Web site. Google’s end of any online trip might be energy efficient, and my end might one day be (if Apple ever really gets on the green bandwagon) but how much of the footprint comes from the running of Google’s data center (or any particular site’s servers) and how much from the trip the request makes through the “tubes?” I think this is an important point because in days of yore, when folks had to trudge to the library (uphill both ways in the snow, dagnabbit!) I’d bet they were more efficient and looked up all sorts of stuff while there. Nowadays, a million trips to Google or Wikipedia fires up servers all over the globe and THAT’S got to have an imapct.

So while it sounds nice to say that trips to the library to research were bad for the planet and the Internet solves that problem, there’s a lot more I bet we don’t understand about the footprint of cloud computing (which is what this story is really about) and something more I’d like to learn about.

<em> the image is by Flickr user Kevin Dooley and used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.

Recalling my last post about the demise of the PI, I give you this:

The idea that the Huffington Post, or the explosion of interesting internet news or blogging sites, can replace journalistic institutions like the New York times or other newspapers or dinosaurs of the mainstream media truly misunderstands the web, newspapers, journalism and the serious threat posed to democracy if the news gathering institutions fail.

Did it come from an angry old journalist writing in the dinosaur of the old media newspapers? Good guess, but no it is by Steven Waldman: Why the Huffington Post Can’t Replace The New York Times and appeared on The Huffington Post this morning.

Just liked that at least one blogger who writes for a news aggregator understands that his job is beholden to that “dinoasaur” of old media so many blogs and other sites like to call dead. Without The Times, Post, LA Times, and a few others, blogs would die, quickly. And so would democracy.

Today is not a good day for journalism, but then very few are these days. Today though, the news hits closer to home for me. After a premature report on the TV yesterday that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was closing, word came out today that Seattle is likely to become a one-paper town because the PI is for sale and if no buyer is found in 60 days it will close or go online only.  This terrible news ties into something I have been thinking about a lot lately. Speaking not just as a journalist but as a citizen of this country and world, I fear that this ongoing stor of dying papers and magazines could doom our democracy.

In the comments section of the PI’s story about its impending doom, there are a number of lamentations about the loss, but there are also a fair amount of hecklers (and not a few trolls) who are more than happy to see the “dinosaur of old media” go extinct. These people live in a world where they get all the news they want, on any subject they want, whenever they want, for free. To them, the idea of paying 50 cents or a buck for a sheaf of dead trees mashed into a pulp and covered with a petroleum product is unseemly and there is no need to suppprt a business by paying for their work if it is online. After all, they reason, what’s the point of getting one’s hands dirty with newsprint (even if it is virtual) when citizen journalists aplenty have blogs and twitter feeds to get the word out and they do it for free? (Not to mention Google and its belief that newspapers could survive, but their unwillingness to actually do anything to help.)

As a blogger and a journalist for an independent media company, I honor, respect and love the work that smaller outfits do on the Web. They can unearth stories missed by the big media, can dig into the minutae of one singular story that catches their attention and shed light on some important topics. This I know.

But how effective is their reporting if no one knows it goes on? I’ll bet dollars to donuts that most of the people on the PI board crowing about the death of “old media dinosaurs” get most of their news from Web sites like HuffPo, Red State, Crosscut, and from cable news on the boob tube. Hardly bastions of independence or small-scale community reporting if you ask me. Which leaves the small-scale reporter, running a blog out of his basement or the local coffee shop where exactly? Probably with a devoted but very small following, little income and less effectiveness.

In short, the work that newspapers can and have done in the past is vitally necessary in this world and more so than ever before. When the plethora of online news outlets are simply aggregators, pulling “free” content that was produced by “old” media, who will provide the resources to agressively cover a city/region/country/world as deeply as ours needs to be? Who will pay to send reporters to Darfur and break stories about corrupt politicians I’ve got news for you young’uns, unless you’re willing to pay for content, or have a brilliant business plan for making money online with content, no one is.

And that’s a sad state of affairs that I fear is leaving the citizenry less educated and ill informed.

Deeper and deeper we go.

This may come as a surprise since I am a journalist, but when it comes to what news stories I follow, I think I’m pretty average. Generally, the big stories of the day catch my attention–currently the economy, Gaza, weather in Washington where Seattle is currently isolated thanks to flooding and avalanches–but how I follow them is a little bit different than the average consumer. Because I’m a journalist, I like to dig deeper, get information from sources that take the time to report and question the accepted wisdom (when there is some). It’s one of the reasons I’ve been listening to Planet Money during this Recession and urge you to as well.

Planet Money, while far from perfect, at least digs into the story a bit deeper than most outlets and asks listeners to decide what might be the right way to fix things. Take the new stimulus package for example. In stories across the major papers, because everyone cited in articles about it wants it to pass, it is taken as a given that an-almost (or maybe for-sure) $1-TRILLION stimulus bill is the right way to go. But did you know that that there is a large school of thought out there that thinks dumping more money into the economy through public works programs is not a good idea? Thanks to Planet Money I do. Now, I don’t happen to agree with that school of thought since I think that anything which creates jobs at this point is a dam good idea, but it sure is helpful to know there’s another option.

Take a minute and dig deeper.