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.

Hooters just opened in South Park, the first national chain restaurant in that defiantly unchained pocket neighborhood.

(Update 10/11/09: I got there today. It’s really in Boulevard Park, a tiny commercial strip separated from the South Park neighborhood by a lonely highway overpass. A McDonald’s already exists along this strip.)

I don’t particularly care for Hooters.

I really don’t care for essays that attack Hooters from the standpoint of simplistic gender-ideology, such as Lindy West’s piece in the Stranger.

On the other hand, I love the comment thread following West’s piece.

The commenters hit upon some important points West had elided past:

• Is Hooters’ food really any good? (Some say yes; others insist on the superiority of locally-owned hot wing emporia such as Wing Dome.)
• Is the “Hooters Girl” image demeaning to all women? (Some say yes; some say no; I say there’s no such thing as “all women.”)
• Is it wrong to use sex to sell stuff? (If so, many commenters note, the Stranger would be at least as guilty.)
• Are West and the Stranger contradicting their “sex positive” stance? (I say no, they’re simply overriding it with a stance that’s even more vital to “alt” culture—the stance of sneering at anything to do with “the wrong kind of white people”.)

West, most of the commenters, and I agree on one point—the Hooters Girl look (apparently inspired by the sorority-slut uniforms in the 1979 sexploitation film H.O.T.S.) is, to all of us, decidedly unsexy.

And the whole Hooters aesthetic/experience conjures association with/nostalgia for fraternity-sorority bonding, but is profoundly anti-intellectual and anti-education. The apparent ideal Hooters customer is an adult who went to college but didn’t learn anything.

The biggest remaining locally-based financial company couldn’t resist the offer of really cheap office space at what, for three years, had been the home of the previous biggest locally-based financial company, Washington Mutual.

For one Seattle woman I know, who’s been working for Russell after being laid off from WaMu, it means she’ll be back in her former building.

For Seattle civic boosters, it means a modest stemming of the downtown office glut and several hundred more customers for local lunch spots.

For Tacoma civic boosters, it means the loss of the town’s biggest private employer, the anchor of its downtown revival hopes, the great white-collar hope that T-Town could rise beyond its economic tripod of shipping, manufacturing, and the military.

For Russell’s out-of-state owners, it means nothing more than an everyday cost cut, a paean to the Almighty Stock Price.

…boss Richard Nash insists the (for-profit) book business “cannot be saved (as it is).”

…I like McGraw-Hill’s books and magazines better than their records.

But now, the venerable publisher’s most famous print asset, BusinessWeek magazine, is up for sale, essentially to anybody willing to shoulder its losses. The hereby linked article from Ad Age claims BW’s arch rivals Fortune and Forbes might soon face similar fates.

Remember, these are the outfits the rest of the magazine biz tried to emulate with their solid gold demographics, their cheerleading for BigCorps, and their niche of investment information (you know, the kind people are supposedly willing to pay for even online).

…in her new anti-corporate-scheming book Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture, makes the provocative allegation that (as paraphrased by a Salon.com reviewer) “IKEA is as bad as Wal-Mart.”

To Ms. Shell, it doesn’t matter which social caste a company courts. As long as it imports kilotons of future-landfill consumerist stuff from low-wage countries, she doesn’t like it.

Her consistency is a welcome change from the classism of many anti-corporate leftists, whose disdain for any particular corporation seems to increase with that corporation’s connection to “the wrong kind of white people.” Thus, we’re all supposed to loathe Wal-Mart (purveyors of cheap disposables to stereotyped white trash), but be at least ambivalent about Taret (purveyors of near-identical cheap disposables to hip social climbers).

…a brief, handy list of “Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature .” Essentially, they’re all reasons why serious lit is just about to die off.

My question: Has serious lit ever not been just about to die off?

At first, the concept of a true Microsoft rival brings to mind the early days of the Web, when Netscape (remember them?) speculated out loud that web browsers could become the “platform” of all personal computing, not replacing Windows but displacing Windows’ status as the foundation upon which the entire computer-using experience stands.

Specifically, Google’s announced (but not yet released) Chrome OS would be a combined OS and browser, intended initially for smaller notebook and netbook machines. Instead of “shrinkwrap” software, it would mostly act as a portal to online applications, including (but not limited to) Google Apps.

This begs the musical question, what would you do when you’re not connected?

Call me a relic of the floppy-disc era (which I am), but the term “personal computer” once meant a wholly functional device of one’s very own, not a mere “dumb terminal” that couldn’t work without a central network to plug into.

As the laptop concept emerged in the early 1990s, the principle of freedom from the office joined that of freedom from the mainframe.

But today, “wired” has given way to “wireless,” and the notion of the Big Brother central mainframe has given way to Internet server farms.

With cell-phone company data service, one can go anywhere (within the more populated zones of North America, that is) and be always “plugged in,” for a price.

For the rest of us, there’s WiFi, when and where we can find it. (Hint: If you’re buying a latte every weekday to get coffeehouse WiFi access, you’re not saving much over a phone company’s $60/month data plan.)

Still, my data (writing, pictures, music, work info, etc.) is my data. I want to have it, not just have access to it for a monthly fee.

Maybe I’m being “PC” about this instead of being “net-centric.”

Or maybe I’m just possessive.

I don’t care. I still want to have my backed-up hard drives, my digital “stuff.” And I want to be able to work and/or play with it whenever (even when there’s not a good wireless connection) and wherever (even on buses and planes).

Arcade, the Northwest architecture and design quarterly, devoted its summer issue to environmental themes.

But instead of hyping new “green” buildings and products, many of the issue’s essays (guest-edited by Charles Mudede and Jonathan Golob) propose a world with fewer buildings and products.

Granted, this year we’re not adding too much to the total world supply of them.

This is particularly the case with California professor Barry Katz’s closing piece, “The Promise of Recession.” Katz remembers how past designers such as William Morris sought to influence the world by promoting an honest, simple aesthetic. Then Katz imagines a near-future in which “every act of production and consumption stabilizes, or even adds to, our collective natural assets.”

This, he believes, means a lot fewer new products (of all kinds), hence a lot fewer people employed to design those products. But there would be work for “post-designers.” Some of these would revamp the already-built world to be more sustainable and more nature-friendly. Others would devise “an ecology of information, thinning the festering datamass and rehabilitating the printed page.”

Similar themes are posited by Golob in “Green On Wheels.” He argues that today’s gasoline-powered automobiles are just about as efficient as they can ever be, when you figure in the costs of refining and transporting the fuel. No, Golob avers, “carrying about two hundred pounds of human being in four thousand pounds of boxy steel, glass and aluminum” is an activity whose time will soon pass, by necessity, whether we like it or not.

Also in the issue:

• Three fantasy illustrations by Jed Dunkerly, depicting speculative attempts at “Engineering the Environment”—using sky-bound sprinkler systems to rain on farmland, using offshore “wind rigs” to alter air currents, and using construction cranes to plant fully-grown trees.
• Nicholas Veroli on the meaning of “catastrophe,” and whether any situation (including the present environmental crisis) can be called one before it’s past-tense.
• Erin Kendig on Krazy!, a book documenting last year’s Vancouver Art Gallery exhibit exploring the surrealistic sides of comics, animation, and related arts.
• Jim Cava reviewing Tony Fry’s book Design Futuring: Sustainability, Ethics and New Practice. Cava agrees with Fry’s assertion that the constant making and selling of what Cava calls “unnecessary consumables” is bad for the planet, no matter how “green” any individual product is claimed to be. Fry and Cava insist we need to redesign our whole consumerist culture, not merely individual consumer products.

If we take Fry’s case (and those of the other Arcade contributors) seriously, the human-built environment will change. It’s not just unwise to keep going the way we’ve gone this past century, it’s impossible.

The only question is what we’ll change into.

…this fine day to CompuServe. The pioneering online service (founded in the pre-home-computer days of 1969!) was shut down last week by its final owner, AOL (which isn’t doing that great itself these days).