I’ve finally let my Seattle Times subscription lapse, after seven months with SeaTimes and 31 prior years with the now-discontinued print P-I. The only thing I’d still used the print paper for, that couldn’t be done online, was to methodically study how much smaller the SeaTimes was getting.

As a print subscriber, I was hardly supporting the newsroom. Subscription fees barely pay for the manufacture and delivery of the physical product. What I was doing was adding to the aggregate eyeballs the SeaTimes could sell to advertisers. That company’s done a lousy job at selling ads the past several years. Even before the Internet killed want ads and the Great Recession decimated home and car sales, they’d already been losing huge accounts to direct mail.

Supporting “newspaper style journalism,” and transitioning from it to something better, is a topic I’ve long written about.

Online ads earn far less income per reader than print ads. This is unlikely to change any time soon. SeattlePI.com has the potential to become profitable once the general economy improves, but won’t likely ever support anything near the news staff the print P-I had.

I currently see three potential scenarios:

1) Print papers continue to shrink, not to oblivion but to the point that they become vulnerable to startup competitors (who suddenly don’t have to pour in $30 million a year in costs and who can target niche audiences in a way old-line dailies can’t).

2) Print papers continue to shrink, to the point where they’re small enough to become subsidized by their big-business community friends (either through contributions or vanity ads).

3) New ebook-esque consumer devices (the long-rumored Apple tablet?) finally make true online publications with paid subscriptions not only feasible but popular.

Another viewpoint: Doug Morrison sees the Incredible Shrinking Newspaper as an issue affecting the exchange of ideas, the flow of facts, and even the future of democracy itself, and wonders if there could be a political solution.

The Wall St. Journal now has a slick “style” magazine supplement called WSJ. (Yes, the period is part of the name.)

Its fall cover depicts a gold-painted apple and the headline “Forbidden Fruit: Selling Luxury in the Age of Abstinence.”

Which is precisely what the section’s articles and advertisements proceed to do.

Page after page (88 in all) lauds the charms of gaudy wristwatches, private jets, Lincolns with “eco” features, fashions (including fur items), jewelry, wines, boots, hotels, purses, and accessories for rich white people of all adult ages and genders.

The cover, though, really says it all.

How do you sell things/services/experiences of little to no practical value, at a time when even CEOs pretend to be regular folks trudging through thes times like the rest of us?

By re-imaging them as icons of daring rebellion.

Be un-PC! Thrift, practicality—BORING! Show the petty little people of this world you don’t give a damn about them. Look as unashamedly silly as any “white gangsta” teen hanging in the malls.

…what the odd temporary readerboard sign for a Hal Ashby film festival was doing up outside the Showbox one day last week, we now know. It was part of a Target TV commercial with Pearl Jam. Really.

Jeff Bercovici at Conde Nast Portfolio believes the online-only seattlepi.com is “a worthy experiment” that “won’t work,” because he doesn’t expect Hearst to keep it going long enough to hit any fiscal stride.

And remember, loyal readers: The new P-I site really launches on Wednesday, and may or may not look like it does today.

Thanks to Charles Brubaker, I’ve rediscovered Ted Rall’s three-part column on the state of the newspaper biz in that simpler time known as November 2007. (Here are the links to installments one, two, and three.)

Rall begins with the now too-familiar roll call of woes besotting the newsprint industry; principally, the woe that online ads bring far, far less money per reader than print ads do.

Rall ends with the suggestion that the three national dailies might thrive while mid-market local papers wither away.

Instead, the recessionary rains have fallen on all newsprint creatures, great and small.

…since Hearst started a 60-day countdown to either sell, scrap, or drastically shrink the Post-Intelligencer. So far, the corporate brass have publicly issued nothing. Privately, they’ve made lowball offers to a few staffers for an online-only P-I. Several people who’ve gotten these offers have reportedly declined them.

All this time, meanwhile, P-I staffers and friends have quietly (and less-quietly) sought one or more buyers for the paper from among the city’s rich and civic-minded. Now, Slog hears rumors that a potential sale just might (might, mind you) be in the works. Or it could be just rumors.

I’m thinking of becoming a freelance book packager, leveraging the lessons I’ve learned over the years.

Here’s a sample lesson:

Book publicity is a two-headed monster. Or rather, it wants you to become a two-headed monster. Your first head’s supposed to quietly conform to hidebound notions of tweed-suited authenticity and NPR-mellow good taste. Your second head’s supposed to go all manic and aggressively hustle after every sale like Billy Mays hawking OxyClean in a late-night commercial.

Hearst is leaking a few hints about a potential online-only P-I. As many of us had feared, it’s shaping up as a barer-than-bare-bones operation, with few of the original-reporting positions that we in the save-the-news crowd are trying to save.

The SeaTimes notes two limited experiments in print newspapers going online-only, and finds them both relatively low-budget efforts relying on subsidies from larger organizations.

The NYT remembers that nonprofit journalistic endeavors have been around since before the Web. One of these, Mother Jones, is hanging in there fiscally, but is not immune to the larger economy’s ebbs and flows.

Chuck Taylor concludes his own “Life in a Zero-Newspaper Town” series with his own answer to funding the new news: There is no one answer. Instead, news Web sites will need what the motivational coaching industry calls “multiple streams of income.”

Nathan Richardson offers some simple things the big Web portals could do to help news sites. One suggestion: Google, etc. could vow to link directly to original-reporting sites, rather than to all those slice-n’-dice aggregation sites. (How would that affect a site like this, which offers both original prose and linkage?)

Alan Mutter believes news sites can indeed charge for online content. The trick: Have some content people will want enough to pay for. That’s not rewritten press releases, human-interest homilies, or ambulance chasing. It’s comprehensive news-you-can-use coverage of consumer, business/financial, and governmental topics.

That’s another ingredient in what I’m calling microbrew news—stuff people really care about reading, stuff people will go out of their way to get.

Turns out there are actually two separate groups trying to jump-start new local news Web sites to unofficially replace the P-I, or to compete with any surviving remnant of the P-I site.

Besides the “Packers model” group mentioned here on Wednesday, there’s also a team of P-I staffers planning what Sandeep at Publicola calls a “non-profit news entity, primarily focused on investigative journalism covering the Western states, which would be funded by foundations and other major donors.” Its inspiration is ProPublica, a foundation-funded “non-profit newsroom” specializing in big national stories “with moral force.”

This site would spend money and, more importantly, time on the kind of original research that commentary-based news sites simply aren’t set up to perform. It could also offer serious political, economic, and civic-planning news for a readership of hardcore wonks, activists, and organizers.

This product and market differentiation is good.

We don’t need two or three new organizations doing exactly what the P-I’s done but on skeletal budgets. But two or three new organizations, each taking complementary but different approaches to telling us what’s going on—now that’s microbrew news.

Finally, someone’s announced a concrete (albeit still liquid concrete) plan to start a new, pro local-news site in town, no matter what Hearst finally chooses to do with the Post-Intelligencer brand.

A group of P-I vets, including reporter Kerry Murakami, are planning a local news site to be partly funded by voluntary reader “memberships.” They’re calling their scheme “the Packers Model,” after the Green Bay Packers’ fan-ownership structure. (The site’s organization may or may not end up emulating the Packers’ system of many small shareholders. It could, instead, be set up as a cooperative or a nonprofit.)

They’re going ahead with this plan without waiting to hear Hearst’s plan. This is good. Hearst is acting exactly within its reputation as one of the nation’s most secretive corporations. It could close the print P-I any day now (or any month now), and could relaunch or scrap the paper’s web site concurrently.

The Stranger’s Slog team has its collective doubts about the plan, and about the “Packers model.” Why would thousands of individual citizens plunk down $25 a month, or even $25 a year, for a free-access Web site bent on carrying on the P-I legacy without its name?

I’ll tell you why. It’s because, while this new site probably won’t get the P-I’s name, ad accounts, or archives, it would have some of the paper’s best known staffers. (They don’t know which ones yet; that all depends on whom they can recruit, and whom, if anyone, Hearst keeps around.)

It would be responsible, and responsive, to its stakeholders.

It would cover local/regional politics for readers who really give a darn about local/regional politics. Less heat; more light. More wonky details of the legislative process. More explanations about why we should become interested in, say, Port of Seattle mismanagement or a suburban mayoral race.

This is what I meant last week, when I compared the difference between the new news and the old news to that between microbreweries and the megaproducers of swill lagers.

Like microbrewers, new-news organizations will be smaller but more plentiful. They’ll craft their product with more care. They’ll appeal to a wider range of specific preferences/interests.

And, yeah, most of their product will have a stronger kick.

This “Packers model” team and a rump P-I site could both exist. Or one or the other, or neither.

My wish is for as many “voices” as the Web can carry.

Which, while finite, is a very large number indeed.