Seattlepi.com’s Ghost Town
Those eager for Hearst’s splashy debut of its great online experiment, seattlepi.com, are in for a big letdown. It’s Wednesday, March 18, the first day of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s digital age, and the Web site looks, well, like everyone who wasn’t staying packed up and left, and the few who were coming back are still hung over from the Monday-Tuesday wake. The content model appears to be: We’re making this up as we go along.
I was going to lean on my nearly three decades of experience as a sportswriter, columnist and editor, both print and online, to offer some insights on how seattlepi.com was going to approach sports. Clicking on the “Sports” section from the main navigation bar is like being transformed into Robert Neville, the Charlton Heston character in “The Omega Man” (or Will Smith in “I Am Legend,” for you more contemporary fans of post-apocalyptic movie fare). The place is a ghost town and you know there are digital mutants lurking about, but they have yet to reveal themselves.
The lead and only story on the Sports page is a remnant from the day before, ”Can the ‘Zags Go All the Way?”. Thank goodness, there are TV/radio listings, but, oops, they are from Monday, March 16, and Tuesday, March 17, as if sports on the airwaves died along with the P-I print edition.
The Place and People I Hated to Love
For a good 12 out of my 17 years at The Seattle Times, I felt total hatred for our arch-enemies, the Post-Intelligencer. It was, I admit, my way of generating the competitive juices to engage in the daily dance of newspaper journalism and, I understand, it is not rare for the industry. I took that competitive hatred to new levels, however, generally refusing to socialize with my colleagues on the road, the way it was done in city after city across the country.
P-I's Go 2 Guy
If Jim’s colleagues were people I loved to hate, he was the exception that I hated to love.
The Good and The Bad Plus
When I was invited to shoot an in-studio performance by The Bad Plus for NPR-affiliate KPLU in Seattle, Wash., I didn’t hesitate to accept. This is one of the most unique groups to emerge in the jazz genre in years. Describing it, in fact, forces one to retreat to a thesaurus.
The Bad Plus — bassist Reid Anderson, pianist Ethan Iverson, and drummer David King — is raucous, unexpected, often mind-bending music. Wendy Lewis, an indie-rock singer, joins them on their latest record, “For All I Know” on Heads Up. They are well known for their rock covers (Kurt Cobain’s “Lithium” is on the new disc), but that term really unfairly pigeon holes them.
This is Iverson, from his piano’s perspective:
Nikon D700, 200 mm f2.0 lens, ISO 2000, 1/320th at f2.0.
Jazz and the Flip Mino HD Camera
I’ve been meaning to mention the Flip Mino HD video camera, and posting the video from the University of Washington students (shot on standard Flip Mino cameras) the other day kicked that memory back into living color.
To wit, Bobby Hutcherson performs on the vibes at the Crystal Ballroom during the 2009 Portland Jazz Festival:
Now this is a tool that even the least tech savvy users can get up and running in no time. Really, all you have to do is press the big red button to record. A 1.5-inch LCD screen reveals all the action. The lens zooms with the + and – buttons, but even if one didn’t know that, she or he could use the “human zoom” (moving closer), which is the preferred way anyway. The unit has 4 GB of onboard memory, enough to shoot about an hour of HD video.
Seattle P-I Closing
Reported and produced by Jane Austin, Rebecca Livingston, Sasha London and Helena Habes. The piece was produced entirely with Flip Mino cameras.
Is The Seattle Times Next?
ON DEATHWATCH IN SEATTLE – The evidence continues to mount that today (Tues., March 10) may be the last day in the print life of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. This is, after all, the deadline that parent company Hearst set for a buyer everyone knew would never come. P-I employees, who were offered a “last” visit to the newspaper’s iconic globe on Monday, are speculating that Tuesday will be spent producing the paper’s final edition and that the new, online-only P-I would be launched on Thursday.
The bust up of a Seattle icon?
The lack of sentimentality is not surprising. The Times actually cast an eye toward the P-I’s imminent demise in the newspapers’ shared Sunday editions (produced by the Times, per the joint operating agreement (JOA) between the two) by promoting its week’s content on every section cover. The effort, of course, was aimed at capturing P-I subscribers once their newspaper stopped publishing.
(It’s interesting to note that the eagle is part of The Seattle Times logo; I strongly suggest it be replaced with a vulture).
It’s a Girl Thing
As thrilling as the advent of Web-accessible, high-definition video may be, I guess I’m old fashioned. I still prefer the moment-captured, visceral impact of a good photograph. Better yet that the photograph is set on top of good audio, not only making the picture worth even more than a thousand words, but imbuing an I-was-there kind of feeling. I also think the still-audio combination engages the viewer’s imagination a lot more than the video version of talking pictures, which is too literal, in both production and consumption, for my taste.
The industry standard format of this sort of presentation is called Soundslides, a creation by Joe Weiss that is so pervasive, it is to audio slideshows what Xerox is to copying or Kleenex is to tissues.
Nikon D700, 200mm f2.0 lens, ISO 1250, 1/500th at f2.2.
Joe makes creating Soundslides much easier (in fact, Joe by his lonesome redefines the term “personal customer service), but that isn’t to say that creating a presentation is easy. On the contrary, I’ve heard plenty of newspaper photogs, for example, say they have to change their way of shooting. Accustomed to finding “the” moment, they now have to shoot even images to produce a usable set of a dozen, 20, sometimes many more, to tell a story. I’ve also heard many print shooters grumble that too many photographers throw a bunch of mediocre images together, thinking they have created a worthy presentation.
Seattle’s Past-Intelligencer
If it walks like a duck, but barks like a dog, it’s a … what? Likewise, if it’s called SeattlePI.com, but staffed by only 20 or so people with the skill set to produce a portal with an attitude, isn’t it really just branding on the cheap?
And branding to what end?
The SeattleP.com
Reading between the lines, parent company Hearst offered either Guild (union) exempt personnel (editors and online producers) or younger reporters whom they believed would be so desperate to stay in journalism, they’d agree to slashed salaries, lower benefits, zero severance and zero vacation accrual. Many newspapers, including the P-I’s competitor, The Seattle Times, already have been making a move to cheaper, online and non-union staffing instead of training and shifting current staffers to now-generation, multimedia mode. Enlightened national publications such as the New York Times and Washington Post, of course, have spent considerable time and resources in both retraining and consolidating its print and digital newsrooms.
Journalism on the Brink (Part II)
It bears repeating that it is not journalism that’s necessarily on the brink. It’s the newspaper business model that isn’t just on the brink, but hurtling back through time to the penny press days.
Yes, the Web makes it way cheaper to present content. And, yes, there are fewer barriers to entry to both content providers and technology. But one plus the other does not equal profits, or even sustaining revenue.
A lot of the discussion at “Journalism on the Brink” at the University of Washington last week (see Part One) focused on how the Web was changing journalism. Seattle’s two daily newspapers, the Times and the soon-to-be-gone Post-Intelligencer, both were represented by non-traditional content providers who reflected the kind of wrong thinking that has doomed the U.S. newspaper industry into a certain shakedown, if not extinction. That is, that news on the Internet should be free, that newspapers need to be everything to everyone, and that aggregation and what I call “celebrity presentation” (folks such as the P-I’s Monica Guzman not reporting on anything, but snarking and Tweeting about what already exists on the Web).
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The Kindle 2 Won’t Save Newspapers
The first thing I do every morning is look outside a window, to spy the New York Times and Seattle Times, safe and dry, usually in the NYT’s blue plastic bag, sitting on my porch. Then I turn off my home alarm and retrieve them. All this, before making my first cup of coffee.
Nowadays, there is an extra step to my top-of-the-morning routine: I shuffle over to my coffee table, slide on my Kindle 2 and check to see if the day’s editions of a trio of Timeses (Seattle, New York and Los Angeles), as well as the Washington Post, have been delivered via Whispernet. So far, so good. As I would hardly blame the amazing delivery person who leaves my newspapers wrapped and easily retrievable every morning, I won’t ding Amazon’s Sprint-based, 3G delivery mechanism for the Kindle’s shortcomings in its alternative to the tree-killing, death-rattling print editions of U.S. edition.
First, the good to great: Text on the Kindle 2 is crystal, eye-massagingly clear; the device is thin, light and portable, and navigation (especially to the Amazon Store, no surprise) is easy and intuitive. I’m a huge gadget guy, so the thing gets major kudos for being cool and innovative. I hadn’t planned on reading books, since I love the physical presence of bound pages and bold covers, but I may try a few because of the crispness of the text, the fact that you can bookmark pages, highlight passages and insert notes (if the only the Kindle were around when I was in grad school). I even don’t mind the text-to-speech features that others have criticized as being too robotic (ever listen to a Garmin GPS device?).
