Memo to Seattle bars, cafes, and restaurants. Foursquare, the enhanced successor to Dodgeball has turned going out into an even more fun game by awarding weekly leaderboard points, conferring achievement badges, and crowning “mayors” of a venue’s most frequent offenders. Along the way, users can share insider tips and post to-do lists to add a sense of play to their city explorations. In addition to adding a lightly competitive edge to your friendly neighborhood nightlife, it’s also a de facto way for fans to promote their favorite places among their circles their friends.

Forward-looking New York — and now now San Francisco (see above) — venues have stepped up to the plate and are treating their mayors and ardent fans to little perks just for dropping in. It’s time for Seattle’s finest to hop on this trend ASAP. We’re a tech-friendly city; so let’s be on the front end of this trend. In these troubled economic times, we need every possible excuse for going out.

(any local establishments already onboard? let us know! and ping foursquare while you’re at it. [via foursquare.tumblr.com] )

In the last couple months, I’ve basically stopped reading it. Yeah, Eli Sanders did some great work covering the last days of the P-I, and every once in a while one of the other authors comes up with a good article in a blind-squirrel-find-acorn way, but the rest of it seems to have crumbled from being humorous and ironic to being a cross between an angry teenage wannabe sensitive hipster and an angry teenage wannabe gay rights activist who thinks everyone else isn’t gay enough.

Here’s how I think the Slog’s content currently breaks down:

Current Slog post content, showing it's mostly Dan Savage being unreadable

At this point, the Slog can’t even cover Capitol Hill well anymore — Capitol Hill Seattle is running circles around them, natch, but it’s almost like they’ve forgotten they’re even on Capitol Hill.

It’s all about content, kids. And maybe turning the place into an Andrew Sullivan/Democratic Underground repeater station is working, but you’re gaining the whole world while losing Broadway and John. Push Dan off onto his own blog and get back to what you did well. Whatever that was.

This is where the really interesting stuff comes in.

Also, on the agenda for Tuesday is discussion and possible voting on limitations and/or controls on Cooper and Pantages Houses, both designated Historic Landmarks. If you live on Capitol Hill, are interested in old things, architecture, or Seattle history, you will be interested in this meeting. The timing of committee meetings is incredibly inconvenient for most people, but if you can get the time off of work, or are able to comment via email, please do so. Citizen input = responsive government. /soapbox

Cooper House. Photo courtesy of Historic Seattle.

Cooper House was built on land acquired by Seattle real estate developer James Moore in 1900; Moore purchased 160 acres, which he subdivided into 800 lots collectively named “Capitol Hill.” John O. Cooper acquired the Cooper House parcel in 1902 and applied for a building permit. Very unusually at the time, the building was designed to be a duplex, with an estimated cost of $5,000. Construction was completed in 1904. In 1914, the Coopers sold the property to John E. Minkler; the Minkler family owned the property until 1958.

In 2005, the building was targeted for demolition, but local resident Paul Slane was inspired to nominate the building for Landmark status. Slane, a retired Boeing employee, spent the summer of 2005 researching and writing his nomination. The result of his efforts was the preservation of Cooper House. Reportedly, Board members burst into spontaneous applause after Slane’s presentation. Slane, who has since passed away, remains something of a hero to the folks at Historic Seattle.

Pantages House. Photo courtesy of Historic Seattle.

The Pantages House has an even more colorful history: Alexander Pantages was a Greek immigrant who became an early motion picture mogul, via brothel-keeping, burlesque, and vaudeville. While Pantages theatres were known for elegance, good taste, cleanliness, and efficiency, Pantages personal life met none of those standards. Infamous Madame “Klondike” Kate Rockwell, Alexander Pantages’ former lover and business partner, sued him for breach-of-promise in 1902, and in 1929, Pantages stood trial for the rape of 17-year-old aspiring dancer Eunice Pringle. Pantages was initially convicted and sentenced to 50 years for the rape, but won on appeal. Contemporary rumor had it that Pantages was framed by Joseph Kennedy and RKO Pictures, in order to force Pantages to sell his theatres to RKO, which he, in fact, did after the second trial, and for a far lower price than RKO had originally offered for the chain.

The Committee has the power to determine what cosmetic and structural changes can be made to these lovely and historic buildings. Citizens and residents with an interest should make every effort to comment and/or attend. Also, Historic Seattle is always hoping for another Paul Slane to come to the rescue of some poor, neglected piece of Seattle history: Historic Seattle holds Landmark Nomination Workshops twice a year. Find out more HERE.

Be on the lookout for this lemon!

Tomorrow, do not be surprised if you run into a walking, talking lemon that will be wandering Downtown. This lemon will be promoting Worktank’s “Embrace the Lemon” campaign, whose goal is to promote pragmatic optimism.

This innovative campaign seeks to leverage the abundance of lemons in the public psyche to “make lemonade” on an unprecedented scale, creating a community of optimism to turn things around and drive positive change.

Pragmatic optimism (link not related to Worktank) promotes the idea that most of the time in life, the good outweighs the bad. A good summary of how this concept came about comes from a comment in that link: “Because many people do not deal with truly bad events on a regular basis, it is easy for them to adopt a false sense that ordinary circumstances or events are somehow bad.”

You can find the Lemon wandering around the metro bus tunnels starting at King Street Station from 7:00 a.m. to10:00 a.m., at Westlake Center and Pike Place Market from 11:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., and outside Safeco Field prior to the Mariner’s game from 4:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. Stop by and say hi, share some lemons-to-lemonade stories, maybe take photos and drop them in our Flickr pool.

announced today on the slog

Does a stunt candidacy by the editor of a weekly newspaper require any sort of journalistic recusal on the grounds of conflict of interest, or is that sort of the point of alt-weeklies? At least this should be marginally more entertaining and less consequential than Geoffrey Fieger’s disastrous run for governor of Michigan.

The approach has now been picked up by utilities in 10 major metropolitan areas eager to reap rewards through increased efficiencies, including Chicago and Seattle, according to Positive Energy, the software company that conceived of the reports and contracts to produce them. Following Sacramento’s lead, they award smiley faces only. (source)

So when will we expect to see smiley faces? Apparently we already are.

“This is the next wave,” Todd Stames, a residential energy efficiency manager with Puget Sound Energy, told the Times. The company stared a pilot program in suburban Seattle with 40,000 customers in September. (source)

I’m sad though, apparently Seattle City Light has not picked up the practice. Our latest electric bill was for $60 (Nov through Jan) so I suspect we could have earned two smiley faces. Fooey. Anyone seeing this on their bills yet? Have a picture? Please share.

But how much of this is a virtue for the Times? The end of the JOA has the same double-edged sword of a messy divorce settlement — while the ex-wife may get the house and car and leave the ex-husband with nothing, the ex-husband doesn’t have to make the mortgage payment and car payment or pay for their upkeep. He walks away with nothing, but he owes nothing. She walks away with everything, but now she has bills to pay. And so, while the Times is left trying to maintain their old business model and union contract in order to keep the presses running, Hearst is left with no financial obligations and can opt to pursue an online news site without worrying about keeping the presses running.

The Times is still viable. But they have some hard decisions to make. Even though they were one of the first papers to go online — and one of the earliest to realize that not charging for content online made the right business sense — they’ve ossified in the last 5-10 years. Comments on news stories are a recent innovation for them; the P-I was doing it in 2006. Times blogs have been furtive and mostly focused on their writing staff and their own navel gazing; the P-I used Reader Blogs to increase their coverage. As a result, the P-I has been ahead of the Times in web traffic for over a year, opening up a 500,000 unique user lead in December.

So, with their future on the line, here are my suggestions for the Times if they want to stay viable.

1. Understand that now that you’re the only newspaper left in town you don’t have a choice but to publish. The core of Times subscribers are older, more conservative folk who will keep buying the paper because they like paper and won’t be bothered with the computer. My mother-in-law, at 75, still takes the Birmingham News because she feels like she’s too old to learn computers now. And she still does the crossword every single morning. There are tens of thousands of people like my mother-in-law who aren’t going to make the conversion to online. They still need to be informed of local news. And they’ll pay a buck an issue if they have to (but whine the whole time about how much money it is). Print is not going away immediately, not unless the Times falls apart days after the P-I ceases publication.
2. Poach the online-focused talent at the P-I before the Hearst shutdown date. It’s clear that Hearst is thinking online, and it’s clear the Blethens aren’t. And yes, Hearst will clear out 80-90% of the staff if they go online, so there will be a lot of cheap talent on the market come April. But that 10-20% are the people who should be running the Times’ online properties right now. They’re the reason why the P-I is crushing the Times online. And poaching them will not only give the Times an advantage when they’re ready to shift online, it will also deplete the talent pool Hearst will have to work with when they’re ready to launch the online-only P-I.
3. Get back to covering Seattle. One of the biggest complaints about the Times has been its increasing focus on Bellevue and the Eastside at the expense of Seattle neighborhoods. And while the strategy worked to give the Times a subscriber advantage in the ‘burbs (and helped to drive the suburban-focused King County Journal out of business), it also cost the Times dearly in the city, especially as the P-I first increased their neighborhood coverage and then encouraged neighborhood blogging on their reader blog platform. Meanwhile, Josh Feit and Erica Barnett at The Stranger were running circles around the Times city reporters. The future for the Seattle Times is in Seattle. And that means covering Seattle first.
4. Hire a real online community manager. While the P-I has kept their reader comment moderation to a minimum, the Times has been very heavy-handed about their commenting system. Neither system works all that well, honestly. What the Times needs is a real, live online community manager, with a name and a face and an e-mail address, and a list of clear, obvious rules. And that community manager needs to make decisions transparently and use the banhammer judiciously but effectively. There’s nothing wrong with using the banhammer as long as it’s used fairly and honestly. And forget the idea that comments on a news story are the same thing as a letter to the editor. They’re not. It’s a web community. Treat it like one.
5. Stop treating Seattle’s bloggers like pajama-wearing cranks. And I’m looking at you, Geoff Baker. Your eternal condescension towards USS Mariner and Lookout Landing has grown old in a hurry. Of course, this condescension in part stems from the Times’ ambivalence towards local bloggers. They’re not sure whether to treat them as sources or oddities. I’ve never seen the Times reach out to bloggers the way I’ve seen the P-I do it. Again, this is something else that may account for the P-I’s higher web traffic. (If Hearst does decide to shutter the P-I without an online version, the Times should buy their reader blog platform.)
6. Innovate as much as you can. Look for low cost and high return. Throw every idea you have at the online space and see what sticks. Radically rethink print — switch to a tabloid or a Berliner format, use print’s strength in showing large photos and graphics, treat the paper more like a magazine with think pieces than a daily dump of news. Take reporters’ desks away and make them sit in community centers and coffee shops with laptops to file stories. The Times needs to throw everything they can at saving the business. After all, in two years (or less) they’ll be in the same place they’re at now, only with even less capital on hand.

At the end of the day, the only way the Seattle Times is going to become the future of news is to embrace the future of news. And that means a cohesive online strategy that’s reader-centered, open, and transparent. If they take the opportunity Hearst is handing them, they’ll still be around when the online news site business model is viable and merge right into it. If they don’t, either Hearst’s online P-I will roll right over them, or another online news company will push them aside, or they’ll just go belly up on their own.

Hearst is giving you a gift, Mr. Blethen. They’re giving you one last shot at getting online news right. Will you take it? Or would you rather rant about the estate tax some more while your empire burns?

Next up: We know newspapers aren’t profitable, but what about a non-profit newspaper?

1. The P-I as we knew it is dead, because newspapers are dead. The ink-stained wretches may clutch onto false hope that someone will save it, but it’s over.
2. Journalism is alive and well, though. And I’ve already seen one too many people talk as if losing the paper means losing the only journalistic voice in town. Between radio, TV, and blogs, there’s still plenty of journalism in this town. It’s just going to be… different.
3. Hearst shuttering the P-I only delays the Times’ funeral. Before Friday, the Times wasn’t going to see out the summer. Now, they got, at most, two more years of life. But the Blethens are cash-starved and running out of things to sell. Going non-profit won’t save them from their business model. And they’ve been very, very backwards online, castigating bloggers where the P-I embraced them.
4. This is more about the onerous JOA than Hearst losing money. Apparently, Hearst and the P-I have been pushing hard for a greater online presence, but the Times had to say yes to the initiatives, and they consistently said no. Killing the JOA, even if it means killing the P-I in the process, puts Hearst in control of their own destiny in the Seattle market, rather than still in the hands of the Blethen family.
5. No one has ever done a true, daily, online-only newspaper wholly independent of any other media source or revenue stream. No, really. And before you start saying Crosscut, look at it. It produces one, maybe two articles a day. Add that all together and you get the output of a weekly newspaper, like the Seattle Weekly David Brewster used to run. Every online newspaper up to now has depended on revenue from elsewhere to keep itself, mainly from ads sold in the dead tree version. Yes, that means there’s never been a successful online-only newspaper, but it also says that there really is no business model for an online-only paper. The P-I going wholly online will be a first, and comparing it to other web models pre-supposes a great deal.

It seems like going online-only, in the long term, is a smart business decision. Five years from now, being first-to-market with an online newspaper will give you huge structural advantages over all your competitors. Even if there is no model yet for a wholly online paper, five years from now there probably will be. And right now, the old newspaper model is broken. So, if Hearst or someone else with money is willing to gut it out, they will be positioned to dominate the market when the stars do align.

With that in mind, this is what I’d suggest the P-I’s owners should think about the day the end comes.

1. Be strategic about whom you’re keeping. Ideally, you want to cut all but 20 people. Hang on to a couple of sales people and IT folk, natch, but what you really want are the most passionate journalists and editors left on that staff, the ones who are willing to be a little idealistic and eat some ramen for a few years. And you want writers who not only know and understand Seattle, they know and understand the online space. The folks who are anti-online or in the least disdainful of online you need to show the door.
2. Treat this like a Web 2.0 tech startup, not like a newspaper. I’d start by breaking the lease on the office space and telling MOHAI to come get their globe. Hand your reporters laptops and bus passes and coffee cards. If you need to have a meeting, rent a coworking space like Office Nomads. Stay lean. Scarcity should drive, not paralyze. Use free web tools to organize. Pay cash. Avoid adding staff until you can afford it.
3. This will infuriate the Guild. So offer them two choices. They can either choose to continue representing everyone who is left — with massive concessions to the new economic reality and the startup mentality, or they agree that they won’t attempt to (re)organize until the chasm has been bridged — and when they do, you will not stand in their way. Neither one is really palatable to the Guild, and the history of unions in online companies can be written on a cocktail napkin, but in five years the Guild may not have anyone left to organize.
4. Investigate, uncover, watchdog. Seth Godin today really nailed why we value newspapers as a community:
   

   [after going through a litany of things he won't miss about newspapers] What’s left is local news, investigative journalism and intelligent coverage of national news. Perhaps 2% of the cost of a typical paper. I worry about the quality of a democracy when the the state government or the local government can do what it wants without intelligent coverage. I worry about the abuse of power when the only thing a corrupt official needs to worry about is the TV news. I worry about the quality of legislation when there isn’t a passionate, unbiased reporter there to explain it to us.

   …

   Punchline: if we really care about the investigation and the analysis, we’ll pay for it one way or another. Maybe it’s a public good, a non profit function. Maybe a philanthropist puts up money for prizes. Maybe the Woodward and Bernstein of 2017 make so much money from breaking a story that it leads to a whole new generation of journalists.

   The reality is that this sort of journalism is relatively cheap (compared to everything else the newspaper had to do in order to bring it to us.) Newspapers took two cents of journalism and wrapped in ninety-eight cents of overhead and distraction. The magic of the web, the reason you should care about this even if you don’t care about the news, is that when the marginal cost of something is free and when the time to deliver it is zero, the economics become magical. It’s like 6 divided by zero. Infinity.

   Readers can get their local and national and neighborhood news, TV listings, comics, sports scores, and Target circular from the Internet for free. Duplicating those things on your site costs you time and effort you could better spend on the things that make a newspaper a public good, like uncovering graft and corruption, or explaining the pros and cons of a ballot measure, or making sure the poor and needy aren’t getting ripped off or abused by the rich and powerful. We know papers do this, and they do it well. Focus on that. If you can afford hanging on to your AP wire contract, then hang onto it, but don’t let it be the core focus of your enterprise, not when you can read the AP wire through Google News.

5. The bloggers and the journalists should be friends. West Seattle Blog and Capitol Hill Seattle, right now, are handling spot news in their neighborhoods far better than all other local media. Don’t do their job. Make their jobs easier. Use your expertise to do what they aren’t trained to do or what they don’t have the time or ability to do. Do NOT kill the P-I reader blogs; instead, use them to fill in your coverage gaps. Promote good posts and good writers. Aggregate the community stories. A good rapport with the local blog scene will also mean they’ll go to you with stories — and not to the Times.
6. Your goal: A social news media network. If you do it right, the P-I will be the nexus of a news network that covers general and niche stories, one that has professional journalists working alongside kids with camera phones to serve the public good, one that promotes the good writers but also is not cliqueish and open to any and all readers. (This last bit is important; lurkers will make up a majority of your readers, so make them feel at home and not at some party where they don’t know the inside jokes.) Everyone one of us is a news gatherer; find a way to turn that skill into something collectively powerful. (And oh, if you have a social network, then you have an advertising network, too.)
7. If you are going to charge for content, charge for content people will pay for. No one is going to pay for your opinion. Opinion, after all, is a fungible resource on the web. They’ll pay for fantasy football insider data, though.
8. Finally, do NOT pay big salaries for “top talent.” They will only drag your bottom line down. Instead look for talent with experience in startups or in non-profits, people who won’t ask for six figures and won’t twiddle their thumbs looking important but will throw themselves into the position. I am still amazed how many companies overpay for big name tech people, even though the excess of the dotcom bust was only eight years ago.

One last thing: A few people have said that an online-only newspaper won’t work because it’s too generalist and not a targeted niche. They keep forgetting that cities are themselves niches. If they weren’t, then the concept of local news itself is thrown into question. People have been looking to local news media for information and advice since the advent of the printing press. The question shouldn’t be about whether an online news site has the readership volume to sustain itself. The volume is there. The question should be whether such a site will generate enough income to employ journalists to do the public good.

Tomorrow: I address the gleeful conservatives.

7:00 am: alarm goes off. it is still dark outside. I briefly ponder the civil penalties for sleeping in.

7:45 am: get required cappuccino at Vivace, realize the free bus fare for public transit to courthouse won’t get used today

7:50 am: I catch a cab and instruct the driver to bring me to the courthouse.

8:02 am: join security screening line. Pretty much like TSA, except no shoe removal and less room to collect belongings on the other side.

8:07 am: pass through metal detector after remembering to take phone out of pocket.

8:15 am: find the “quiet” room and watch the infomercial about jury service emphasizing the appeal of directly witnessing the slow, deliberate pace of the justice system.

8:25 am: fill out “bio” form (name, occupation, previous legal entanglements, prior jury service) while listening to Judge Patricia Clark warm the crowd with a lengthy monologue about the structure of King County court system, random selection, and a brief history of juries in Western Legal Systems .

8:50 am: A speech from the jury pool administrator peppered with coffee and low-pay jokes

9:10 am: the administrator returns to ask for volunteers to donate their mileage and per diem back to the court system to help pay for childcare at the underfunded (oh, the 90s, we miss you) Kent regional justice center.

9:30 am: the names of fifty “lucky” potential jurors set free due to a continuance are read from a non-alphabetized list, punctuated by occasional stabs at humor, For them, justice moved swiftly.

9:55 am: forty more potential jurors are identified. They pick up laminated numbers and return to their seats to await further instructions.

10:45 am: another coffee break, but most people are so entrenched in their diversions that they remain seated.

11:24 am : A panel of 18 for a district court are called. They get to bring their bios to the baliff and it’s off to lunch until 1:20 pm.

11:40 am: the first forty get to go to their courtroom. the rest of us give anxious looks to the clerk, wondering when we get to go in search of lunch. All we get is tips and tricks for getting back into the courthouse faster.

11:45 am : unassigned jurors are set free until 1:30. Look out Pioneer Square: you will know us by our prominently placed badges.

1:25 pm: back from lunch. Pioneer is surprisingly impressive during the afternoon. Zaina’s falafel is not the best in the world as their sign claims (that title, for now is held by the little place in the Marais), but it is pretty great. The Elliott Bay Cafe seems to have broken free of the Bauhaus empire — reconfigured menu, no wifi, and no sign of the double chocolate cookies I so adored.

1:35 pm: The selected jurors have all been carted off to their courtrooms. I’m camping out in the “quiet room” which I like to think of as akin to the Acela “quiet car” [thislife]. The internet here is slow, but I’m clinging to it anyway.

2:43 pm: uh oh. Just called as number 11 for a case.

3:05 pm: report to the lobby where our bailiff lines us up in a big circle according to our numbers.

3:15 pm: report to the courtroom with our laminated juror labels: 1-12 in the box, the rest in the gallery. Court procedures re-explained, introduced to the attorneys.

3:34 pm: voir dire begins, “Oprah style” with a survey from the judge and weeding out of those who can’t serve for more than two days. Then we go into a talk show hosted alternately by the prosecutor and defense attorney in which we are polled for our feelings about police officers, law shows, domestic violence, etc.

4:07 pm: dismissed for the day in the middle of selection.

–

9:00 am : report to the jury pen.

9:15 am: called up to the courthouse for the dire voir. More talkshow, survey, questioning, etc.

10:00 am: talk show’s over and challenges begin. a lot of shuffling of jurors. we all try to secretly figure out why others are kicked off while we’re still up there.

10:30 am: the challenges are over and we become the real live jury, complete with jury room access. our new home has a coffee pot or two, some old magazines, a boardroom table, and a couple of bathrooms. The bailiff tells us about the schedule.

11:00 am: housewarming break is over, trial begins with opening statements and the first witness.

12:00 pm: lunch break. a great excuse to go to the tiny and super-crowded Mae Phim.

1:30 pm: back to the chamber of jurors, everyone reads quietly or catches up on their twittering.

2:00 pm: back to court. no more witnesses! just closing statements (with powerpoint!) and a packet of jury instructions, read to us by our calm and pleasant-voiced judge.

2:40 pm: we retire to our chambers with the evidence, deliberate deliberatively.

3:12 pm: we have a decision, take a vote, sign the paperwork, and call the bailiff.

3:45 pm: the attorneys reassemble. we turn in the verdict, it’s read and then we are polled individually.

3:55 pm: the bailiff debriefs us, the judge comes back to the jury room to chat, then the prosecutor asks if we have any questions.

4:05 pm: we turn in our badges, notebooks, and pile into an elevator. Swift justice.