Contribute
Contribute
Most Active Stories
Stories with the most comments
Seven months later: What's happened to Seattle P-I Journalists 
I knew this was hokum the second I saw the TV spot with the "aged" Ivar's billboard being pulled out of Puget Sound. Any marine biologist is going to tell you that the accumulation of animal life on this billboard is not consistent with being underwater for 50 years. And it gets better - long time bitter hippie and historian Paul Dorpat lied about the hoax. This guy has been making his living writing a three hundred word weekly column for the Seattle Times for thirty years. The baby-boomer free-ride party is over, dude! "Times Executive Editor David Boardman says that while he can appreciate the initiative behind the marketing ploy and had suspected it was a hoax, he was distressed that Dorpat, whose "Now & Then" column has appeared in the newspaper's Pacific Northwest magazine since 1982, would lie to a Times reporter." "Dorpat's continued freelance relationship with the paper is "under review," Boardman says." 
Sometimes I look at Craig's List to see what's happening. Here's one - some jackass is offering one cent per word (!) to neighborhood bloggers. "Pay is $3 per review. Each review must be at least 300 words. You can sign up to do as many or as few reviews as you’d like, but I’d prefer a commitment of at least 5. Pay is via PayPal ONLY. You can submit each review as you go, and you’ll be paid upon receipt of each one (so you don’t have to worry about doing a bunch of work up front and not being paid). All reviews need to be completed within 7 days. " Can someone reply to this for me and string these 'tards along for a bit - waste their time and pump them for information? 
Saturday, November 7 Friday, November 6 - 2009 - 8:30 PM PST I voted for Joe Mallahan and endorsed him in the Belltown Messenger. I called Mike McGinn a "paunchy, sleep-deprived brewery rat." And now he is Mayor. Good times. -Rex 
Good timing and massive hits for another brand-new blog from someone who used to work at the Stranger. 
7262 page views by Sunday morning! The Seattle Times temporary non-profit partnership with Seattle Neighborhood blogs is starting to pay off, I guess - a tragic shooting had everybody in town looking at CDNews for information last night. More about the partnership here: Seattle Times, Hyperlocal News Sites Collaborate on Coverage 
Publicola is very proud of Warren Etheredge's Wikipedia entry. I guess he'll start doing some web video for them today. "Warren Etheredge is a cultural conversationalist, interviewer, film analyst, writer, and mentor to screenwriters. He lives in Seattle, Washington and is nicknamed "The Film Guy" among some Seattle media and film enthusiasts.[1] Etheredge has written five books[citation needed] and is the writer or director of over 40 plays staged in New York City.[2]" - Wikipedia I've been waiting fifteen years for the opportunity to do legendary social climber and failed Los Angeles film industry suck-up Warren Etheredge proper justice. Warren remains the second most pretentious film person in Seattle history. (Number one, Charles "M00-DeDe" Mudede, got a burst of horse sex gratification yesterday). Stay tuned. A related story: High Cost, Low Quality Plague Newspaper Video Efforts 
Update: 8-29-09 --- Is the newbie BelltownPeople.com neighborhood blog a propaganda front for Mars Hill Church? You decide. Developing story ... Meet Jesse - A BeltownPeople.com Editor --- 
More downsizing in the world of neighborhood weekly newspapers. The Ballard News-Tribune is getting a wake-up call from neighborhood blog by myballard.com - why? The BNT has employees and printing expenses and pays health insurance and office rent. And still develops their photos in a wet darkroom for all I know - these people are dinosaurs. Myballard.com has minimal expenses and the woman who runs it is married to a Microsoft executive with a six-figure salary (plus potential bonuses for say, developing an experimental network of neighborhood blogs for Microsoft in an attempt to gain some sort of online ad market share). Full story: "The weekly Ballard News-Tribune announced in print this week that its business office in the heart of Ballard will close next month and business functions will be consolidated with its main office in Burien. Also, said the announcement, the Ballard weekly will no longer be delivered by youth carriers. Starting Sept. 16, home delivery will be by mail.... 
The Seattle Times give World Vision a free ride in this PR piece, but do manage to mention that WV employees who are gay will be fired. Love the photo of a WV board meeting - 12 middle aged white Christian people sitting around a table. World Vision's Richard Stearns sets out to put an end to global poverty See also: 
Where's the cast of 'Singles' now? Janet mistakenly dials the wrong number while trying to call Cliff (“Boys do like to be called”), but reaches the hefty lead singer of TAD, Tad Doyle. The cameo reportedly prompted an album offer by Giant Records (they were signed to Sub Pop Records at the time), but despite ab opening gig on Soundgarden's 1994 tour, they never gained the same notoriety as their fellow Seattle music scenesters. A documentary of the band, ”Busted Circuits and Running Ears” was released last year and according to Doyle’s Web site, he’s working on a vinyl record with Seattle band Mico de Noche. Doyle also joined former Soundgarden members to play three of the band’s tracks at the Crocodile Café earlier this year. 
A chubby "faux-green" baby boomer with no political experience or a corporate tool with no political experience. You decide! Incumbent Loses 3rd Term Bid as Seattle’s Mayor 
Wow! Humpday mumblecores it's way to becoming Seattle's first true indie success! A low/no budget shot on video film that is making money in theaters!
developing ... 
Journalist wanted for Queen Anne news site (Queen Anne) 
Update 1-13-2010 Update 1-7-2010 --- Been getting info from my higher-up private sources in the New York Media Mogul world suggesting that the Seattle Weekly will cease print publication early in 2010 and become a "blog." This (unconfirmed) news of the Seattle Weekly's April 2010 demise is very inspiring for local media watchers like me. First thing I did when arriving in Seattle was to pick up every free publication in town. The Weekly cost 75 cents then - one of... 
"Falling circulations and shrinking advertising revenues have forced dozens of newspapers to close down their presses over the last three years. businessinsider.com /Preethi Dumpala - June 30, 2009 / 
See complete Belltown Messenger piece here: 
Last year I was forced to go to a pumpkin patch near what Seattleites call "Redmond" and this pumpkin patch was filled with young exhuberant Microsoft guys and their families. And every damn one of the Microsoft guys had designer jeans on. Expensive-looking finely stitched weirdly cut jeans like the ones we see Microsoft chief environmental strategist Rob Bernard wearing on the cover of today's Seattle Times, in a story about server farms. This piece is straight from the Microsoft PR department: Bloomberg reports today that Microsoft is investing heavily in server farms as a way to somehow gain market share, but the Times piece focuses on electricity use and Microsoft's new "Green" initiatives. Whatever happened to Levis? As data centers suck up energy, money, tech industry looks to turn down the heat 
Update 11-6-2009 -About the caption under the photo: I work with Pacific Publishing Company and this is supposed to be a joke about how behind-the-times neighborhood weekly newspapers are in this era of neighborhood blogs. --- Greetings media geeks and neighborhood bloggers, --- Here are our top 75 Seattle media websites (including upstart WEB ONLY outlets) for the year 2009. Our ranking system is based on data from Alexa, Google, Quantcast, websiteoutlook.com and also our own private formulas.... 
BREAKING! How pretentious is it for me to announce that something here is "breaking." I mean, I only update this site three times a month! Oh well, it's only a blog. I'm not gonna follow up on Brett's latest media appearance. See you in a couple weeks. -Alex BREAKING! Belltown bartender and anti-drug organizer BRETT PAULSON briefly interviewed on Q-13 Fox about Saturday drug bust, taping it and will follow up. --- So much for instantaneous coverage of the recent Belltown bust of an alleged Honduran crack gang. Inbelltown.com linked to the Seattle Times coverage after copying and pasting a 168 word chunk from the piece. Belltownpeople.com has nothing, as of Sunday 4-19 10:00PM PST. You'd think this big crackdown – the largest in years, no doubt – would warrant some coverage from aspring journalists. Take to the streets with a video camera, maybe write a story or do an interview. Of course, the rariefied Belltown Messenger will let this story develop before commenting beyond our callow media criticism here. Rusty... 
Update 5-22-09: All the crap below disparaging the baby-brand-new Post Globe is retarded. As usual I was wrong becuase I've been seeing good things there lately. Update 5-21-09: The worst alt-weekly newspaper in America is Metroland of Albany, New York. Looks like the Seattle Post Globe is up and running, and it is a shocking shell of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's former glory. Look for former P-I staffers now working for the Post Globe to start dropping off once their unemployment checks and extensions of said checks run out. The Post Globe is partnered with the Seattle Weekly, America's second-worst alt-weekly newspaper. Not sure how this benefits the Globe or New York based Village Voice Media. Want to see the PG succeed? Simply donate $240 to their "non-profit" partner, KCTS-9. If they can get 100,000 Seattleites to donate that amount in these hard times, they will have raised 24 million! An uninteresting side bar - when I first started the Belltown Messenger the P-I's Regina Hackett sent me an email saying... 
Mike Seely's feature in the March 24, 2009 Seattle Weekly proves that he knows nothing of Seattle's dive bars and qualifies for the worst Weekly story ever, beating out Mark Worth's "Who Really Runs Seattle" and even anything Mike Romano ever wrote. Seely claims that most folks with dogs in Belltown are afraid of the dog park "most of the folks who should be giving Scruffy a few hot laps are still scared shitless of the corner" across from Kelly's on Third and Bell. This blanket statement is not true and it doesn't help the ailing Seattle Weekly's newest advertiser: Gambas Restaurant next door to Kelly's. (Disclosure: Gambas is a friend of mine.) Kelly's may be Belltown's last remaining dive bar, but it's far from"the most frightening drinking establishment in Seattle." To the contrary, people of different races and ages mingle freely and play pool there. It's a center of petty crime, but no more than the drug scene at a typical "rock show." Incredible that this dive bar trash of Seely's is going to be a 160 page... 
Olde Stye Porn and Olde Style Corporate Monopoly at playboy.com. Sweet Times. 
David Horsey is still employed by the online-only Post-Intelligencer web-blog, but today he's gone and created an insanely distasteful piece about serial killers in ski masks and hair removal from the nether-parts of human females. The dripping wax image is not subtle. That's in the first panel - the one with the spread-legged woman.
My newspaper is gone and I am sad. The plan for the online-only version of the P-I is obviously bull and that is sad too. -Alex |
