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.

Happy holidays. Under threat of site boycott, I’m forced to document a string of weather that’s nearly unprecedented in Western Washington. Here I muster my good humor, so in brief: Swings in Weather. Zing!

Seattle was paralyzed for nearly a week. Several feet of snow collecting—and staying put—in outlying areas. After initial hesitancy, Mayor Greg Nickels has given in to the pressure to lightly season Seattle streets.

For myself, one of the highlights of the snowy deluge was tailgating and attending Mike Holmgren’s swan songy victory over the Jets at Qwest Field. The snow was falling the Hawks were winning and the snowballs were flying—by the end of the game this was all just too much for Jets Defensive End Shaun Ellis.

This proved the costliest of all Seattle snowfall, as that particular cubic foot ended up being priced at a cool $10,000. That could buy a lot of salt.

Happy New Year!

Wednesday morning, right on schedule, I received an email confirming the fact that there were two other folks in my proximity with the same plans as my own. I got the email addresses of Beth and Deepak and we began to exchange pleasantries and firm up the details.

Then there was the email from Brian asking if King 5 could tag along. Lunch with strangers isn’t nearly as awkward as lunch with cameras and microphones.

Thanks to Beth and Deepak for a great lunch. You can check out Noonhat here, and see King 5’s coverage here.

It’s playing Saturday, Jun 2nd at 5:00 pm SAM as part of STIFF 2007, find out more and buy tickets here. Highly recommended!

Find other screenings of Arid Lands.

The lawn bowling green just above Green Lake.

It’s dumping snow right now in Seattle; this is the third major storm of the winter.

The Temple of Light was installed in Seattle Center July 30th, constructed as a memorial honoring the March 25th loss of life on Capitol Hill.

I walked past this every day to and from work—it was a great experience to watch it grow. I took these photos a few weeks ago, and the temple has since been disassembled—now on its way to becoming an installation at Burning Man.

Shawn Telford writes about Built’s Tuesday show over at the PI, “Built To Spill deserves our full attention”

Most multi-guitar bands caterwaul their way into a discordant chaos. Not BTS, this five-piece is able to keep all strings on course and what’s more, they’re able to mount catastrophic attacks on our pop sensibilities that leave listeners dumbstruck and amazed.

My sister is now married, (congratulations Mo and Ed! Whoo hoo!), I’ve moved to a new place here in Seattle. This is a lot for me in two weeks. I’ve also been busy trying to ignore the impossible conflict that exists between my life away from a computer and a happy readership. Two examples from the email bin, names withheld:

• “Man its better when you have nothing to do. You post more.”
• “Need more pics dude.”

In case you were wondering those two quotations represent the entirety of their respective email messages. Nothing brings home the disappointment like a heart-felt single line email. I knew I should have left my furniture in the street and my family alone in the church to pen an extra pithy blog post or two.

I’ll be out of town this weekend, but if you’re in Seattle MetBlogs says there’s a pillow fight at the pier. You know how I loves me a good pillow fight.

The day before yesterday I shot a bit around the office to get some images for our forthcoming website. The object was to get things atmospheric, abstract, basically just for backgrounds as opposed to feature page elements.

The top photo was snapped at 1/8 of a second at f/11, from a tripod about a foot off the ground. (I provided the skilled modeling of course.) The next two are of our conference table, and the last is of an Eames plywood chair with Josh in the background. Fun stuff.

I ran into Bob on Friday at the Mural Amphitheater stage on my way to a NEDA event that was taking place in the Center House. “So, are you going to take a picture of me taking my picture?” Bob asked.

“Sure, if that’s alright” I replied. Bob had noticed me walking by the stage with my camera, adjusting settings and looking a bit aimlessly for a shot. He was hunched over on the stage delicately adjusting his webcam and microphone, pecking away on his laptop preparing to record himself delivering a few poems for eventual publication on his cable access show. No one was in the audience at the amphitheater but that wasn’t the point; Bob had just missed his latest psych evaluation because of a social worker’s scheduling mix-up and wanted to blow off some steam.

“People call me Laptop Bob” he told me after his reading. Bob is a poet, blogger, and will shoot his next cable access show March 25th at Bop Street Records. (Map: 5219 Ballard Avenue NW) Here’s a short video of Bob reading two of the poems I heard in person.

Bob has been homeless for two years.

He lives life as he wants to, and from what I’ve seen he’s doing a pretty great job.

The Seattle Seahawks are the 2005-2006 NFC Champions, and are going to the Super Bowl. A moment of silence please. As a Seattle sports fan I realize how truly important this moment is.

What does one say? Seattle sports teams, save the Storm, are perennial underdogs never given the respect they deserve in the media and frankly rarely given much respect even by their own fans. The Hawks are perfectly emblematic of this most Northwest of struggles. How many 8 and 8 seasons did they have, or perhaps 9 and 7 seasons, when 10 and 6 teams all made the playoffs? At least gone is the endless turmoil of the ruthless AFC West, but even now to many outsiders this 30 year old team is still an expansion club.

But can you feel it? Now it’s all different; the Hawks have arrived and so have these patient Northwest fans. What was it that made the difference? It wasn’t just Mike Holmgren, the new uniforms, or even the new Qwest Field—it wasn’t even MVP Alexander or the resurgence of fan support the Hawks have enjoyed in recent years. I feel it was simply the entire team and the entire Northwest absolutely unwilling to stew in mediocrity any longer.

This rebirth, this realization, is much larger than the Sonics making the 1996 NBA Finals, and probably larger even than the infamous ‘Refuse to Lose’ season of the Mariners in 1995 that saved professional baseball in Seattle. Sunday night walking through Pioneer square amidst a sea of fans I felt an overwhelming groundswell of satisfaction. Not gloating, not unbridled revelry, but the kind of tangible contentment that is earned only after a long tumultuous road. There’s no surprise police made few arrests Sunday night, the fans were too shocked to be out of control.

The naysayers will remain of course, but we’re used to that up here. The same writers that proclaimed Carolina would demolish Seattle are now lamenting Carolina’s shattered running game and the long plane ride to Seattle that broke the game in Seattle’s favor, even though Carolina was a week ago so good on the road none of that would matter. (Mind you, this is not the same thing as the road trips Seattle teams make for every away game every year.)

The Seahawks will roll into Detroit the underdogs again, in the middle of a very hostile crowd, with the media still doubting their pedigree. But that’s okay with us, because, can I say it again? The Seahawks are the best team in the NFC and are going to the Superbowl. Rejoice fans of the Northwest, taste sweet redemption, we have arrived.

Chris Reiff, Matt Redding, and the author at Sunday’s NFC Championship.

That makes a perfect 9-0 at home this season; which I suppose confirms that this was indeed a great year to buy season tickets.