“I’d like to scale back my subscription to just weekend delivery” I said over the phone to the circulation department. That was last Tuesday, and my last weekday paper arrived on that Wednesday. Just two days later I learned that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was up for sale. I felt like I killed it single-handedly.

I was one of the few—a young web-centric professional that still carried a daily paper subscription. I’ll always feel a print publication offers a lot of important advantages over an electronic edition—and that comes from someone who’s spent years helping people make websites.

Opportunities

I want to see the P-I continue, if not as a conventional print publication then certainly as a web-only production. The latter I feel is a giant opportunity, even though it means cutting a huge amount of jobs and really scaling back the journalistic power of the paper…exactly what you’d rather never have happen…when the bottom line interferes with good journalism.

What the P-I does have is a huge chance to reevaluate what it means to be a modern news institution. Here’s what I want from my local paper—I hope it can happen.

• Community

  First and foremost I want a publication that makes me feel like a part of a whole. Individual neighborhood sections, detailed user profiles, customizable start pages, alerts sent to my mobile or email address based on my news preferences, neighborhood and current location.

  

  I want to be able to find friends and family, see what they are reading. I want the web “paper” to be a community square, with all the advantages you’d get walking down your street—I don’t want just another information fire hose. The P-I has a good start on these tools, but I want more.

• Valuable Ads and Services

  Services aren’t a bad thing, but invasive and irrelevant advertising on the web is. How many times have a I seen someone tear apart the P-I to get to a full Circuit City pullout? Many, many, times…I often wonder why you can’t do that online for the users that want to browse.

  Classifieds? Hasn’t Craigslist ruined that for everyone? I’d love to see a local paper compete with their own free service, but use local knowledge and a superior toolset to that of Craigslist. (Simple mashups like housingmaps.com are ridiculously valuable and pretty easy to implement.) In an ideal world, smart tools and neighborhood specific pages should make ads valuable to everyone viewing the page.

• Local, Local, Local

  Let the AP feeds cover the national and international topics. I want to know what’s in my backyard. Anyone working for a news institution online should look long and hard at EveryBlock, they’re doing a lot of things right!

That’s just a few words from a subscriber that knows a lot about the web, but not a lot about the newspaper industry. I hope the P-I lives on, as the great institution it is. You can read all about the ongoing transition on The Big Blog.