One Year of Publicola - Hipster Overload Meets Underwhelming Ad Revenue

Publicola.net has some great writing on the dirty world of local politics. Stranger defectors Josh Feit and Erica Barnett are producing some great work and have convinced wealthy people to pay them to do so over the past year. Advertisers have been harder to convince.

That Northwest Film Forum ad that's been there for a year? Can't be generating much revenue. Bill Sherman is a great guy and a progressive, but is his banner ad (running for a year now) really going to sustain the salaries of two professional journalists? As Publicola's hippie elders Crosscut have proven - there's no money in online journalism right now unless you can get the Gates foundation to fork over some of their ill-gotten cash.

After a year of being sponsored by tech millionaires with very little ad revenue ("mid-four figures," according to our source) in my opinion Publicola should concentrate on news and drop the hipster reportage. If Publicola "gets" the Internet so much (the bottom line - no print costs like the ones that burden the alt-weeklies) they will stop trying to imitate the alt-weeklies and drop the utterly irrelevant movie reviews and music crap. News blogs are for everyone - not just the 17-33 hipster demographic.

Josh Feit is not getting that - here's his oh-so-fey in a self-satisfying sort of way announcement about their upcoming party at Belltown's ancient Crocodile hipster nightclub. Or should I say nightclub for ancient hipsters?

The illogically rich yet impossibly inbred town known as Seattle is lucky to have Josh and Erica lurking around writing news. I want to read about local politics though, not which hot new bands two forty-year-olds are gushing about at the moment.

Our one-year anniversary is coming up, and we’re throwing a party on January 27 at the Crocodile in Belltown.

Plenty of details to come, but here’s the one we like best: Lo-fi jazz diva hip hop masters THEESatisfaction are playing. If you haven’t seen the-seriously-about-to-get-huge Thee and Cat take the stage and do their 21st Century re-arrangement of rhythm and blues, prepare to be floored.

Thee young ladies of THEESatisfaction cite Isis, Osiris, Nefertiti, Malcolm X, Barack Obama and Janet Jackson as influences. We’ll add Duke Ellington.

Listen.