You all remember how until last year the Stranger’s masthead read “Seattle’s Only Newspaper?” Did you ever think it might just come true?

Today Hearst put the P-I up for sale, the first step in shutting down the paper. By spring we will have one print daily in Seattle, the Times… which is struggling under mounting layoffs, the inability to close the sale on their Maine papers and local real estate, and a real lack of operating capital.

On the one hand, Hearst is handing the Times 100,000 subscribers. On the other hand, that’s like handing the captain of the Titanic a bucket. Rumors have flown that the Blethen family is trying to take the Seattle Times non-profit, but I have a hard time seeing that fly with their unions. The Times has so many rocks and shoals to navigate it’s inevitable they’re going to be out of the print business soon.

Meanwhile, the Seattle Weekly keeps getting smaller in print. It may not be much longer for this world as a print vehicle. And community newspapers, facing higher costs and increasing competition from neighborhood bloggers, are falling left and right.

So, come 2010, you might only have one paper in the city to wrap your fish in: The Stranger. Or will you? The increasing shift of focus in the Slog towards being more national and less local makes you wonder if their future isn’t as a liberal multi-user blog, BoingBoing for the young, twentysomething Capitol Hill resident.

Print in this town looks dead. But journalism in this town will not die. The death of the print P-I will finally mean the full flight of the online P-I, which as a property has been matching the Times at every step. The neighborhood blogs are filling in the gaps in the hyperlocal scene alongside local bloggers who report on their life and times. Seattlest and Metblogs are trying to take in the entire local scene with amateur journalism (though of late Seattlest has been looking decidedly less amateur). Crosscut, despite its struggles, continues to host a bevy of quality, seasoned journalists. And the Slog will probably cover local things, at least when they stop foaming at the mouth from some perceived slight long enough to take a look around.

Print is dead. Long live the Internet.

The twitterverse confirms last night’s rumor: the newsroom at the P-I just found out that their paper is for sale. [twitter]

update: the P-I will be on the market for 60 days. if no one bites, they will consider online, but “in no case” will it continue to be published in printed form. [p-i]

photo by Shawn McClung [flickr] and grabbed from our group pool [#]

• Just because you shouldn’t need an excuse to help homeless youth during this particularly climate-challenged winter doesn’t mean that rocking incentives aren’t appreciated. Tonight, the Whore Moans, Thee Emergency, and the Lost Episode convene at the Vera Project to make up for their “warm for the winter” show that was previously snow-delayed. Tickets are $9 [vera] and the doors open at 7:30; bring along something warm as a donation if you’ve got it. [soundonthesound]
• The true key to C. Hill style points? The fixie scene. Get your foot in the door with Fast Fridays. [chs]
• Show the gay-hating ricin idiot that it takes a lot more than partially plagiaristic death threat letters to quiet the capitol hill bar scene on a weekend. [capitolhillpubcrawl]
• The original party was snowed in; so you get another shot at helping Stranger genius filmmaker and sometimes indiecore actress [Lynn Shelton fund HUMPDAY's premiere at Sundance. The party is on Saturday night, with DJs, preview of a preview, and fantastic prizes. [nwff]

photo by joshc [flickr]

Early this year, Starbucks rolled out its latest experiment in caffeine addiction with the time-honored dealer’s techniques: the first taste’s on them, followed by a month of afternoon discounts, and winding up in a back alley of regular priced hopeless dependency. “TeaTime” involves tea lattes (tea, frothy milk, and secret herbs and spices) and tea infusions (tea mixed with steamy cider or juice). So far, I’ve only sampled the lavendery vanilla London Fog version and can report that it was oddly delicious enough for me to return for a second taste.

French animator Michel Ocelot is best known in this country for his film Kirikou and the Sorceress, this Saturday’s Film4Families selection at SIFF Cinema. A lively fantasy based on African folklore, Kirikou is the charming tale of a chatty newborn who takes on the sorceress who has laid a curse on his village, told via Ocelot’s vivid imagery and engaging musical soundtrack. It makes an excellent companion piece to this week’s SIFF Cinema feature selection, Ocelot’s Azur & Asmar Azur & Asmar tells the story of two boys raised as brothers by the woman who is Asmar’s mother and Azur’s nanny but considers both of them her sons, even after Azur’s wealthy and stern father forces her from his household in medieval Europe. The young men are reunited as adults in nanny’s unnamed homeland in the Arabian peninsula but their roles are reversed: now Asmar is the child of wealth and Azur is the penniless stranger. Nanny Jenane welcomes Azur with open arms but Asmar is less forgiving and the two set out on a quest to rescue the legendary Fairy of the Djinns as fierce rivals. Simple enough on a basic level for even a young child to follow, Azur & Asmar uses its plot to thoughtfully examine ithemes of prejudice, respect, and discovery, all skillfully woven with the threads of Ocelot’s brilliant, brightly colored visuals that combine two- and three-dimension animation, both hand drawn and computer created.

Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon cleverly uses creative camera work and an artful narrative structure to examine truth and human nature by having four unique characters relate their own version of the facts, as they see them, in a case of murder and rape. This provocative film is now over 50 years old but has lost none of the stunning impact that has made it a highly respected and often reference work of supreme artistic merit. Opens Friday at the Grand Illusion .

A Japanese film of an entirely different sort also plays at the Grand Illusion, late nights this weekend: tough cop Raku battles genetically altered villians in a brutal future Tokyo in the appropriately titled Tokyo Gore Police. Not for the squeamish.

Northwest Film Forum pays tribute to a transitional year in history and pop culture: 1969, the year that saw the release of both Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid and Easy Rider. I’ve never been a big fan of the latter myself, but Easy Rider is an immensely well-regarded film for its no hold barred portrayal of many complicated social issues of the 1960s, many of which continue to resonate today. Produced with an extremely low budget by Peter Fonda and directed by Dennis Hopper, the stars of the film, Easy Rider was a “countercultural” movie that achieved widespread recognition and commercial success for its fresh point of view. Today the movie is an excellent document of an era and definitely worth seeing for its historical value alone. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid were genuine outlaws of the American West, active as the 19th century turned into the 20th. Screenwriter William Goldman played with the true facts of their lives to come up with a story more fantastic than factual, but the first on-screening pairing of Paul Newman and Robert Redford, directed by George Roy Hill, isn’t mean to be a serious biography. What it is is an exquisitely entertaining movie with action, adventure, and a great deal of humor that absolutely deserved the four Oscars that it earned. (Read the full series schedule here.)

Romantic comedy fans might want to head to Central Cinema for a screening of Moonstruck where Cher plays a widow all set to marry a safe older guy until she meets his hot younger brother, Nicholas Cage.

Stretch the weekend into Monday with the The Paramount‘s Silent Movie Mondays. Monday, January 12, see the 1926 film The Magician. Based on a story by Somerset Maugham which was in turn inspired by the notorious Aleister Crowley, The Magician centers on a sorceror who discovers an ancient recipe for creating life. Silent films at the Paramount are always very well done; the Paramount is an excellent place to see a movie and the Wurlitzer organ soundtrack makes for an enchanting time. Buy your tickets early and attend the pre-film lecture celebrating silent film.

Midnight at the Egyptian: Wet Hot American Summer.

screencap via twitter.

Here’s a shocker (except for those who predicted it [fimoculous] last week): As of an hour ago & via the Seattle Times (the irony), come reportsthat Hearst could be putting the P-I up for sale as soon as tomorrow. After that, by virtue of the J.O.A., they’d have only a month of survival while hoping for a buyer [king5]. All of this means that things don’t look good for the long-term existence of the P-I as a [print-based] publication or for Seattle as a two newspaper town. As much as I see continuing value in untrendy print, I think that a far-fetched and somewhat-positive resolution would be for some richbags to step in and try to make a go of it by running the P-I as an online/kindle operation. With the L.A. Times recently claiming that their online revenue is sufficient to meet their editorial payroll [buzzmachine], this option isn’t entirely impossible. Ditching print in favor of their already very popular website certainly wouldn’t be ideal, but it would be a lot better than the further disappearance of local newsgathering, engagement, and arts criticism from the city.

Just like Times publisher Frank Blethen [times], Big Blogger (and most recognizable P-I personality to those who already take the majority of their news online) Monica Guzman tweets that mood in the P-I’s newsroom is “stunned”. [twitter] Of course, it’s worth remembering that the original story has a single anonymous “source close to the sale” and the managing editor at the paper reports that neither he nor the publisher had any idea about the impending doom [p-i], so maybe it’s just a dicey rumor eagerly picked up by the TV news.

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In other newsprint news, the Stranger’s print edition (printed across the mountains in Yakima) was almost a victim of the environment’s Seattle-isolating conspiracy until they made use of the Times’s print operation in Kent. [slog]

photo by joshc [flickr]

Of course, it’s nowhere near as bad as the flooding cutting off I-5 south of the city [times] and conspiring with the passes to further isolate Seattle from the rest of the country, but even Capitol Hill isn’t immune to the effects of monsoon season. Seen here, the parking lot between Vivace and WaMu on Broadway. So far, no one’s broken out their inflatable kayak to make a withdrawal.

My plan for this weekend involved two friends flying into Seattle, and four more friends driving up from Portland for a weekend of revelry (well, as much revelry as one can have when two of the six guests are under six months old). Unfortunately, Mother Nature had other plans for my weekend, and now my four friends in Oregon are not likely to be able to join the Seattle contingent.

As disappointing as this was, I’ve been extremely impressed with the communications and use of technology from the Washington State Department of Transportation. Between their blog, their Twitter feed, their Flickr photos, and their constantly updated maps, I’m feeling incredibly informed, and very happy that they’re so communicative.

If more governmental units were as open and helpful as WSDOT (who even replied to one of my Twitter questions about alternate routes), I think we’d benefit tremendously. Keep up the good work, guys!

I don’t recall ever seeing the Falls this full before. Washington is in the midst of some serious flooding, with 40,000 urged to evacuate their homes, I-5 closed, a landslide on Rainier Avenue, and avalanches closing I-90 and Hwy 2.

* 6:30 PM: Comixtravaganza!!! SPL Ballard Branch is hosting cartoonist David Lasky for a slide show and discussion about PNW cartoonists. Tonight’s presentation is the kick-off to a series of comics events hosted by SPL: tomorrow at 6:00 PM, Queen Anne Branch will host Family Toon-In, a showing of classic cartoons.
[LINK]

* 7:30 PM: Seattle poets Thomas Aslin and Laurie Blauner will read from their respective books at Elliott Bay Book Co.
[LINK]

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IN OTHER NEWS: Fantagraphics has extended the Beasts exhibition through February 4th, to allow those who were snowed in a chance to get down to Georgetown. This info is not up on the website, but I received an email announcement this morning, so you’re going to have to just trust me. Or, not. [LINK]