I’m not the only one who’s noticed that local news is but a small piece of those fiscally endangered local newspapers.

Alex Jones, author of the book Losing the News: The Future of the News that Feeds Democracy, calls original local news content the “iron core” of a newspaper’s info-wares. To use an ’80s ad metaphor, that’s “The Beef;” with sports, comics, wire copy, opinions, and all other non-ad material as the “Big Bun.”

Clay Shirky uses this concept to conclude his old hometown paper in Columbia, MO has, at most, a dozen employees providing the really essential reportage. Therefore, Shirky continues, any nonprofit news entity for a Columbia-sized metro area (in print and/or online) need only subsidize that dozen people’s work. The rest of a newspaper’s product (including local commentary, local arts, and local sports) could be left to live or die by the whim of the free market or the passion of unpaid bloggers.

I, as you might expect, disagree.

As a reader and a scholar of journalism, I believe in the full meal deal. We need the protein of objective reportage, but we also need the fiber of larger cultural/community coverage. We need the starches of punditry and the greens of the arts. And, yes, we need the dessert of humor and entertainment.

(from KIRO-TV): “The pastor of Fircrest’s Liberty Baptist Church pleaded guilty to repeatedly making obscene phone calls to female baristas at a coffee stand near his church. The father of four girls, 41-year-old Randy Brock, entered the plea on Sept. 30.”

As long as the weather holds (reasonably) dry, I’m out researching potential local walking routes nearly every day. Today, I’ll be wandering in search of a good west Capitol Hill route.

Images from these walks will appear on this site once I get it moved back to the original URL.

(This will appear in the 10/7/09 Capitol Hill Times.)

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I just signed a contract with Wilderness Press to produce a walking guide to Seattle.

Of course, Capitol Hill and First Hill will be major locales in it.

After all, The Hill is one of America’s finest examples of a walkable neighborhood. You’ve got residences (in a variety of styles and price points), shopping, dining, entertainment, schools, churches, parks, medical facilities and more, all within a healthy stroll along sidewalked, tree-lined, lighted streets. Add the Hill’s adjacency to downtown and you’ve got the state’s biggest concentration of jobs, major stores, and tourist/scenic attractions.

The Hill also has extensive bus transit, both within the neighborhood and out to downtown, the UW, and the south end. (And there’ll be a light rail station on Broadway sometime in the next decade.)

Civic advocates, such as the Seattle-based Feet First, have long touted the many benefits of walkable neighborhoods. Such places foster a greater sense of community, bringing people into face-to-face interaction even if they don’t live or work in the exact same building. They save on energy and other natural resources.

And they offer more intangible benefits as well. Neighborhoods with a lot of foot traffic are simply more “alive” than places where everybody’s stuck inside either a building or a vehicle.

So it’s natural to find officials in other localities trying to figure out how to add the magic of walkability (and bikeability) to what have heretofore been car-dependent suburbs.

One local example: “The Landing In Renton.”

Out by the Boeing and Kenworth factories, where Cirque de Soleil used to be, and where Clay Bennett once claimed he wanted to put up a new sports arena for just a gazillion taxpayer bucks, a different kind of suburban district is forming.

Some of its retail blocks (particularly the Target and the Fry’s electronics superstore) are built in traditional strip-mall style, with storefront entrances recessed behind giant moats of parking.

But other blocks, including a “main street” intersection, are built direct to the curb, with storefronts opening straight onto real sidewalks.

There’s also a block-long apartment monstrosity, also built to the curb, with indoor/underground parking. A second apartment complex of this type is currently under construction, despite the nationwide building slump.

The Landing, in its current form, is a good start. But it’s not enough. Sidewalks, by themselves, do not a neighborhood make. The Landing’s developers know this. On their web site, they promise that by the time the whole project’s done, it’ll be a real pedestrian-friendly place. “Wide, vibrant sidewalks—lined with lively cafes, dynamic retail shops and cozy residential buildings—will encourage pedestrians to stroll throughout the varied streets. A collection of restaurants surrounding a strong retail core will create a venue vibrant enough to be a year-round destination.”

Until then, The Landing might be a nice place to shop, but it’s not quite the stuff for a walking-tour book. It’s a collection of your basic suburban strip-mall and big-box chains, designed and arranged a little differently.

Even when The Landing is complete, it’ll be something manufactured from scratch, representing what one developer/landlord believes are the shops and businesses and housing-stock types a neighborhood needs.

But traditional urban neighborhoods like Capitol Hill didn’t just grow organically either. They were planned and platted and nurtured by zoning laws. Much of Seattle’s urban cityscape was essentially built up from scratch in relatively short timeframes (from a few years to a few decades). Every building and block in our town has evolved since it was built, but they all were built by humans.

Places like Capitol Hill can be built again. Perhaps not with the same materials (those old houses and apartments used a lot of no-longer-cheap ingredients, including labor), but with the same sense of scale and vibrancy. Will they?

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Back to the walking-tours book:

I already know plenty of spots on Capitol Hill to send the book’s readers to—Volunteer and Anderson parks, Lakeview Cemetery, 15th Avenue, Broadway, Pike/Pine, St. Mark’s, the mansions. And on First Hill there’s always the SU campus, the Stimpson-Green Mansion, St. James, the Frye Art Museum.

Where else should I send the book-buying walkers?

Let me know at walking@miscmedia.com.

Yes, the Animation exhibit at the Pacific Science Center is one big ad for Cartoon Network.

But it’s also educational. Really.

You see, animation (even CN’s unapologetically 2-D animation) involves a lot of math, geometry, spatial relationships, optical theory (”persistence of vision”), and maybe even a daub of artistry. And that’s even without CGI. (For the purposes of this exhibit, CN’s shows are billed as being produced in traditional cel animation; in reality, even something as simplistic-looking as Code Name: Kids Next Door uses a lot of digital compositing, coloring, and assembly.)

Thanks to Jennifer Manlowe, I’ve heard of two researchers who’ve got a new book called Why Women Have Sex. I haven’t read the book itself, just the UK newspaper story about it.

The story claims the researchers have deteremined there are exactly 237 reasons for a (hetero) woman to do the sex—no more, no less.

You know most of the common reasons—lust, love, baby-making, social-ladder climbing, cash, barter, kicks, comfort, novelty, submission, empowerment, celebration, consolation, getting/keeping/dumping a guy, because all the other girls are doing it, because parents/teachers/preachers say not to, and so forth.

But let’s imagine some reasons that might land a little further down on the list of 237, some of the less-common reasons for sex:

• He cooked a really great dinner.
• He wore something so ugly, she had to get it off of him.
• There was nothing good on TV.
• The only good DVDs at the store were taken.
• Pilates just gets too repetitive.
• That church retreat weekend made her feel too clean.
• To crowd out the noise of the neighbors/kids/voices in her head.
• She wanted to try out a Sleep Number bed and he had one.
• She wanted to prove he wasn’t gay.
• She wanted to prove she wasn’t gay.
• She wanted to prove she didn’t have implants.
• She wanted to prove the rumors about men of a certain profession/ethnic group/nationality/weight class.
• Hey, why not?

Then there are the “reasons” that would fall off the 237 altogether. For instance, I’m pretty sure no woman has ever had sex with a man just because he used a certain brand of deodorant body spray.

I was in the downtown library yesterday with my MacBook (which doesn’t get out much anymore, now that I have an iPod Touch).

Some dude I’d never met before came up and started talking to me. At the downtown library, this happens rather often. But this guy wasn’t trying to sell me a bus pass or tell me a long story that would start by asking for directions and end by asking for money.

He just wanted to alert me to something he’d seen on an Apple rumors site. It was another variant of the long-rumored Apple tablet device. “It’s like a MacBook without the keyboard, or a big iPod Touch. It looks great!”

Now I’ve seen one of these new rumor articles. And I must say I like the specs the article mentions. This is almost exactly the device I’d dreamed of earlier this year, when I speculated that the future of the online written word (including journalism) lay in .pdf documents formatted for tablets and netbooks.

(My caveat: While I’m intrigued by the concept of an Apple tablet as a full-page-size iPod Touch, I suspect many users will also want to use it for more traditional home-computer functions, including functions at which the iPhone OS and its available apps are still insufficient.)

Meanwhile, closer to home, other tech rumor sites are spreading an internal Microsoft video, demonstrating the features of what might be that company’s next-gen tablet computer concept, code named “Courier.” Like the rumored Apple device, the rumored MS device wouldn’t run a regular home-computer operating system. Instead, it would operate its own integrated suite of apps, based on the metaphor of an “infinite journal” where the user could clip and paste anything from/to anywhere.

The warning here is that MS has whole teams of “futurists” and conceptual designers working full-time on the personal-tech version of “concept cars”—items that, in their initial iterations, will never see a sales shelf, but which are used to work out ideas that may eventually find their way into real products. Courier might be one of these.

The new design has been tweaked a bit over the past month, and will be tweaked further, probably repeatedly. Ads on the site: Yes, there will be some, once the permanent URL is restored.

After two years of sitting on my metaphorical petard promising to do it, and after one month of intense (yet satisfying) tedium reformatting almost 4,000 old entries, I’m proud to announce version 4.0 of MISCmedia! It’s a completely WordPress-powered site, with real RSS feeds and comment threads and everything!

(In case you’re keeping track, which I know you’re not, the previous incarnations were a simple shovelware posting of my old print columns (1995), a weekly (later daily) original online column (1998), and a Blogger.com-powered blog (2001).)

While I’m waiting to get the URL transferred to a new server, please view the new site at its interim address, miscmedia.netarcadia.com.

See ya there! (And bring a housewarming gift only if you want to.)

The NYTimes opinion section’s former token far-rightie and well-regarded grammar snoot had previously written some of Nixon and Agnew’s most infamous lines, in a speechwriting staff that also included MSNBC’s token wingnut Pat Buchanan. But by modern standards, he was an example of that rapidly dwindling species, a sane Republican who believed in rational persuasion rather than X-treme demagoguery. He’s already missed.