Spent a couple hours at tonight’s big P-I employee wake at Buckley’s on lower Queen Anne. At least half the staff had drifted in while I was there. Hugs and toasts and loud Blethen-bashing all around.
As Eli Sanders at The Stranger’s Slog notes, the P-I Web site’s ever so slightly added more links to outside news sites. Sanders then wonders out loud whether this is a harbinger of a future online-only P-I remaking itself into a local version of the Huffington Post.
Paul Andrews has expanded thoughts about this prospect. Go read his stuff yourself, then come back here.
Back so soon?
OK. HuffPo’s a great site, with healthy readership figures and ad revenues. Andrews is right to nail “news as personality” as one leg of its business-model tripod. (The other two are original blog entries and carefully chosen links to other sites’ news stories.)
It’s the “personality” that differentiates HuffPo from all the headline aggregators out there. At its heart is Arianna Huffington herself (even though she lives in LA and the site’s produced in NY). Her personality, and her range of interests, define the site’s general political POV, its curation of content, and its audience niche.
But despite its slogan (”The Internet Newspaper”), it’s not a source of much primary information. It has a couple of staff reporters, and it pays the Associated Press to post AP articles on its own pages, but most of its news items are carefully chosen (and re-headlined) links to stuff researched and written by others. HuffPo’s blog posts are mostly original (a few are simultaneously “cross-posted” at other sites), but none of them are paid for.
For all its accomplishments, HuffPo’s not the elusive answer to the conundrum of online news reporting and how to pay for same.
HuffPo’s formula, by itself, isn’t going to preserve the P-I as a professionally staffed newsroom.
But it might provide two ingredients toward the final recipe.
One is establishing mutually beneficial relationships with bloggers and solo Web journalists.
The other, more subtle, component is a site’s “voice” (or, to be coldly corporate, its brand image).
The P-I already has a stronger voice than any other mainstream print daily in the region. Thus, it has a head start in this department.
For another angle on branding, consider the Northwest beer industry.
Around the time the P-I shotgun-married the Times in the papers’ first Joint Operating Agreement, the first local microbreweries (Redhook and Grant’s) started up.
At the time, our region already boasted five major breweries, all producing nearly-identical watery lagers, differentiated mostly by advertising. The last of those breweries, Olympia, closed in 2003.
Instead, WA and OR now boast a lively array of smaller outfits creating a vast array of products. These products really are unique, not merely advertised as such.
As news moves online and becomes more decentralized, it will, by necessity, morph from the verbal equivalent of the old stubby-bottle Oly into a wider palette of flavors, crafted on a more artisanal basis.
I’m reminded of how Weimar-era Berlin had as many as 70 daily newspapers. These weren’t all huge endeavors. Some were raucous little scandal sheets. Others were intellectual and ideological journals. But each of them scraped out its own piece of the market.
That’s what news sites will need to do.
Anheuser-Busch surrendered to the Belgian-based InBev. Miller was sold to South African Breweries (which, despite the name, is based in Britain). Coors merged with Molson.
So: What’s the biggest remaining American-owned suds maker?
As you recall, the company now calling itself Pabst is simply a budget-priced marketing company, whose products are made under contract in Miller plants.
Next on BeerInfo.com’s Top 50 list: Boston Beer, a.k.a. Samuel Adams. Boston used to be a “virtual brewer”, like today’s Pabst. But today the majority of its product comes from the former Hudepohl Brewing plant in Cincinnati, bought by Boston a decade ago.
In sixth place stands Pennsylvania’s Yuenling, the biggest remaining regional lager producer.
Several Northwest microbrewers are also on BeerInfo’s list–Widmer, Redhook (both of which have distribution deals with Anheuser-Busch), Pyramid (now merged with a Vermont firm), Deschutes, Full Sail, Mac and Jack’s.
This prominence signifies both the strength of regional specialty brews and the disappearance of the industry’s whole former second tier (Stroh’s, Ballantine, Schaffer, Falstaff, Blatz, Carling, Lucky, Rainier, Oly, Blitz-Weinhard, etc. etc.).
…to the 27 people who attended my li’l book event at the Form/Space Atelier gallery. If I’d known I’d have had a mike and a stage and a desk, I’d have scripted something.
IN SATURDAY’S NOOZE:
…to love one of my alma mamas: Oregon State U. researchers have found beer can fight cancer!
Tacoma’s own Ventures, kings of instro surf-pop lo all these years, have got their totally deserved berth in the Rock n’ Roll Hall O’ Fame.
Apparently, during the ’90s microwbrewery craze, a lot of hop farms emerged in Eastern Washington. When that nascent industry experienced a shakeout, many of those farms went under, sold out, or switched to other crops. Now, suds-biz experts warn we may have a serious hop shortage. When combined with a tight barley market, the result could be skyrocketing prices for the Northwest’s better brews. Will we have to turn to wine, or gin, or (Heaven forbid!) low-hopped swill from the mega-beer factories?
But by that time, the whole company might be sold off.
I can still remember when there were five mass-production breweries in the Northwest alone, each operated by a different company.
Fortunately, we now have a wealth of microbreweries, whose broad range of tasty product has long since rendered superfluous the likes of “Colorado Kool-Aid.”
Both Kerouac and Rand are better known today for their celebrity and their ideas than for their prose stylings.
But both authors’ rambling self-indulgences actually serve their respective egotisms.
Both liked to hype themselves as daring rebels, valiantly crusading against the stifling anti-individualism of grey-flannel-suit America.
Kerouac helped provide an ideological excuse for generations of self-centered dropouts and anarchists to proclaim themselves above the petty rules of mainstream society.
Rand helped provide an ideological excuse for generations of self-cenetered tech-geeks and neocons to proclaim themselves above the petty rules of civil society and rule of law.
But at least Kerouac’s devotees don’t go around declaring that the oil companies and the drug companies somehow don’t have enough power.
(P.S.: Digby has much more lucent thoughts than mine i/r/t Randmania.)
…since a post to this site. What can I say except (1) I’m sorry, (2) I’ll try to do better, and (3) I’ve got some great print work I’ve been workin’ on that’s comin’ at ya real soon?
Meanwhile, our Capitol Hill Times friends have a full list of all the beer and wine products you can’t buy downtown anymore. Yet that abominable California product sold under the once-respectable Pabst name still remains freely available.
Autumnal conditions gracefully settled into the greater Seattle area on Tuesday, Sept. 12. We’re cloudy and cool once again, and will probably stay this way, more or less, for the next six months. I like it. If you don’t like it, here’s the URL for Florida real estate.
How high are fans’ expectations for the Seahawks? Let’s just say they’re undefeated, but not undefeated by enough.
And the UW Husky footballers are doing better than expected, having won two squeakers.
Roq La Rue’s Tiki Art Now 3 exhibit is still up. If you go this week, you’ll probably have a more pleasant viewing experience than was had by we who attended the packed-to-overflowing opening night.
I’m sending off the page proofs of my next book, Vanishing Seattle, to the publisher today. There’s only a slight chance copies will be available prior to Xmas; but you’ll still be able to preorder. If you do so through MISCmedia.com, you’ll get a truly lovely gift card to let your lucky recipient know of the memorable reading experience awaiting when their copy does arrive.
Excuse us if we’re not yet really impressed by the newly corporate-approved legal movie download hype. Even if one (1) of the services is Mac-friendly. At this point in time, those physical artifacts known as DVDs still provide greater selection, higher image quality, (usually) lower consumer costs, and fewer pesky rights-management shackles.
It looks like Seattle First United Methoidist Church may move to Belltown after all, even as its previously announced deal with developer Martin Selig goes pffft. Under the new deal, rival developer Nitze-Stagen will take over the church’s historic sanctuary for commercial uses, put an office tower on the rest of the church’s existing land, and help the church buy the Third and Battery site Selig was going to give away to it.
Tomorrow’s primary day here in WashState. I beg of you to all get out and defeat the far right’s highly funded drive to pack the state Supreme Court with anti-environmentalists.
…fortified wine or malt liquor in Belltown as of today. Now if they’d only ban PBR, I’d be happy…
