This experiment in building a narrowly focused online daily newspaper in Seattle is over. Why? The short answer is money. But there's more to it than that, and I'd like to take a few minutes to explain some of what I learned about publishing an online daily, so that others may succeed where I have not.
To fund a newsroom requires a pretty sizable chunk of money. My goal with the Courant was to have two to three reporters working full-time and making a living wage, as well as, a copy editor and a secretary. To do that, I estimated that I would need about $500,000 a year (gross sales would need to be more than that since sales people and support staff need to be paid too, but they essentially pay for themselves). I would work for free for the first year or so. |
The printed newspaper stuck around a lot longer than other forms of communication, but like all technological breakthroughs, eventually they become obsolete.
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Sometimes you just gotta stand up and holler; the bad economy, the Iraq war, trillions of dollars going into a financial sink-hole, joblessness, homeless people begging by the side of the road with handmade signs saying, "Please Help," and television advertising yelling "Save Big! Buy This! Buy That!"
More often than not, the poor and homeless are veterans of our recent wars, made to fend for themselves on our streets after dodging bombs and bullets for months on end. And folks with money are staying home with it. |
President Barack Obama has repeatedly said what we now need is a knowledge-based economy. The industrial revolution has come and gone. We are witnesses to that fact: Chrysler and General Motors are fading fast. They're history.
Other facts: We are fast running out of oil; we have pretty much depleted this country of its metals wealth; and wood is being replaced by man-made building materials for the most part. While there may be more oil in other parts of the planet, it's become a weapon of wars and rumors of wars. |
Today is National Teacher Day and it got me to think about my career as a student. I've had the pleasure of being educated by many great teachers.
I grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, on the 1300 block of Margaret Street, so I went to Harding Senior High School on the Eastside. One of my most memorable teachers was Mr. Cornell. Mr. Cornell was my homeroom and French teacher. He taught me that it's cool to be nerdy. |
Isn't this time of year just beautiful? Birds are chirping and every possible flower is in bloom. I love it. I really do. This might be my favorite season in Seattle. The nice weather awakens my desire to get outside and exercise. Let's see, I live in Seattle, the weather is nice, where do I gravitate? Green Lake. Ah. Three miles that drop you back where you started, it is perfect.
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As the fall day neared its end, and the evening sun grew dim, my older brother and I lazily walked across the swampy tundra toward our camp, carrying our shotguns and several ducks we had caught. The Northwest Alaska air was still but there was a September-like nip in the breeze. As I looked back to see where we had been earlier that day, a movement in the distance caught my eye. My first thought was: Who is that?
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The company with the most boring of boring names, American International Group, was once huge. Just last year Forbes listed AIG as the 18th largest publicly traded company in the country. On Feb. 11, 2005, AIG's stock closed at $73.12. Now you can buy a share for about $1.40, it's on government life support and quickly becoming the focus of the nation's anger over who to blame for the recession. -- Keith Vance
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Back in 1993, the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain began investigating piracy of Dave Barry's popular column, which was published by the Miami Herald and syndicated widely. In the course of tracking down the sources of unlicensed distribution, they found many things, including the copying of his column to alt.fan.dave_barry on usenet; a 2000-person strong mailing list also reading pirated versions; and a teenager in the Midwest who was doing some of the copying himself, because he loved Barry's work so much he wanted everybody to be able to read it.
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Another installation of Milt Priggee's political cartoon commentary.
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A cartoonist's take on what happened to newspapers.
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Last night, City Council members Jean Godden and Nick Licata sponsored a panel-discussion on the future of Seattle newspapers at City Hall. The Bertha Landes room was full of veteran journalists, and at times it was hard to watch so many of them still in denial, still clinging to the hope that some magic money will fall from the sky and save the Seattle P-I and the Seattle Times.
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How would you fix the $6 billion budget deficit the governor and legislature are facing this year? Gregoire's looking at health care and education.
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America has gone over the economic edge and is hanging on by a mere thread. Nationally, nearly 5 million people are officially out of work and looking for work. Experts say the real number of unemployed is probably more than 10 million.
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We're snowed in and the weather reports are predicting more snow is coming. As commonly happens when Seattle gets its annual snowstorm, the roads are covered in sheets of glare ice. Thusly, the buses, trucks, cars and scooters are all parked. Seattle is quiet.
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The oil industry pulls in somewhere between $15 billion and $35 billion a year in government subsidies. At the gas station on 10th Avenue East and East Roy, the cheap gas is $4.11 a gallon. So-called energy industry experts are claiming that the $135 a barrel price is the result of a bubble, like the dot-com bubble and the housing market bubble. Paul Krugman, an economist who writes a column for the New York Times wrote that the high cost of oil is not the result of a mystical bubble in the market; it's simply basic economics in which the demand for oil is outpacing the supply.
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Jul 29, 2010 07:22:03
@Journalismo: Comprehensive energy bill becomes BP oil spill bill http://exm.nr/bKH1a6 #iwrotethis
Jul 29, 2010 03:22:03
@Journalismo: Dems substitute comprehensive energy bill for BP oil spill bill http://exm.nr/bKH1a6 #iwrotethis
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