the blethens are afraid to let a court "step in and exert a certain amount of control over the paper's business model"?!?!? because their current business model is SOOOO good?! you wanna know what their current business model is? it's "lemme close my eyes and pretend this is just a bad, bad dream." anything other than what they're doing now would be better.

Blethen thinks there is a pony under that pile.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

in a depression why is this any big deal

King County will file bankruptcy as well as many other counties and cities - not to mentions hundreds of business big and small

a bit selective to act as if 50,000 jobs did not just go away in our region ... more to follow

remember TV depends on ads as well - who will go under in the big world of broadcasting?

It makes me think that The Stranger might want to take on the mantel of Seattle's "newspaper of record" in the near future...

Hey Eli... Why don't you use some of your inside resources and find out what kind of bonuses were paid to Seattle Times board members and upper- and middle-management last year as a reward for "trimming" Guild employees.

It looks like "Seattle's Only Newspaper" is getting quite close to being literal...

Ha they think Chapter 11 will help, what a joke, time for liquidation folks.

The challenge is original content. Local newspapers are little different from blogs that reprint 85% of someone else's article and wrap it with one or two sentences. In that sense the value added are people like Danny Westerneat, but all the rest is just recycled stuff.

Given the choice between the ST and nothing, I choose nothing.

I agree with AJ. I'll be taking the NYT or WSJ, not the Seattle Suburban Times.

"The challenge is original content. Local newspapers are little different from blogs that reprint 85% of someone else's article and wrap it with one or two sentences. In that sense the value added are people like Danny Westerneat, but all the rest is just recycled stuff."

Where do you think most blogs get their content from? Newspapers. Without the full-time, paid reporting staffs of newspapers and other publications, like the Stranger, government -- school boards, water districts, city councils, etc. -- won't be watched and will be free to run amok.

Say what you want about the Times or the P-I, but simply their presence is enough to keep many lawmakers in line.

9 and 10. Careful what you wish for.

@11:

Once there is a West Seattle Blog for every neighborhood in the city, your position will cease to be tenable.

In certain niche areas, the blogs have been eating the dailies' lunch for some years now. They have reported stuff that the dailies aren't even aware of, and wouldn't cover if they were. As the dailies collapse under their own weight, opportunities for niche news blogging can only grow.

The problem for the blogs IMO will be access. The dailies were too big to blow off. The blogs aren't. If you were Frank Chopp, would YOU return Josh Feit's phone calls? I wouldn't.

Bloggers who want to build themselves into credible, respected news operations will have a long hard slog. They will have to respect their sources and respect the process. There will be no instant gratification.

The future belongs to bloggers who also are *real* reporters, such as Eli Sanders and Tracy Record -- even to David Goldstein, if he can discipline himself.

I expect ECB, Josh Feit, and Dominic Holden to be "road kill on the information highway," and the sooner the better.

Ask Alayne Fardella how much of a bonus she got a few years ago for getting the guild to take a two-year wage freeze.

The P.I. employees are toast regardless what happens...they've ALL been given pink slips and the final day is March 18th. If Hearst decides to go to a web edition, they'll hire from scratch, and presumedly, will negotiate completely new contracts.

@13:

I agree with you on many points. Yes, some hyper-local blogs provide their readership with more and better information. Done well, these sites are very beneficial to their readers. But how many of them actually make enough to money to qualify as a "living wage"? How many of them do it during free time and will eventually grow tired and let their site wither and die. Then, with the newspapers long gone, where will people get their information and who will hold accountable the powers that be?

Obviously, I'm a fan of newspapers. They must make drastic changes to the way they operate -- to be both functional for the public and profitable. But who do you want watching over your city and state government? A huge daily newspaper or a handful of bloggers who have no access? We need the local press to stick around.

@16:

Watch West Seattle Blog, and watch it closely. They appear to be selling plenty of ads. I have done my best to support them and their sister site, White Center Now.

You'd have to talk to Tracy to find out their financial picture. I'm not privy to it. But if any local news blog around here can make it, WSB will.

I assure you they have access to, and plenty of respect from, public officials. IMO this is the journalistic model to watch.

don't live in West Seattle.

When you come out with a Fremont-UDist daily paper with Zippy comics, wake me.

From two great dailies to nothing in a year. Party hats are already being hoarded in the halls of county and city government. Neighborhood blogs are nice, but can't do the work of teams of daily reporters backed by deep enough pockets to find out the truth.

The Stranger does a great job as well, but someday Dan Savage may want to do something else, and the Savage gravy train will grind to a halt. How to pay the great journalists then?

Personally, I would like to know who Eli is sleeping with to get the manager e-mails and want to urge him to use protection.

#19, where are these teams of daily reporters roaming around to find the truth? Why are they different from me roaming around to find the truth (stack of phone calls, e-mails, in-person visits, long meetings sat through, court documents and legal records dug through online - and that was just the past 19 hours)? Those "deep pockets" are a myth. If "deep pockets" led to some grandiose commitment to pay for big news organizations no matter what the cost, then Hearst wouldn't be doing what it's doing, because by all accounts I've heard, their pockets are plenty deep, and a $14 million loss is chump change.

And #11, it takes me both hands and both feet to count off the number of councils, boards, districts we cover, often with nary another reporter in sight, from neighborhood councils to design review boards to hearing-examiner proceedings to school-board members' community Q/A sessions, to a 3-week murder trial last fall that resulted in the stunning exoneration of a teenager who shot a man dead near popular Alki Beach ... an exoneration that may yet lead to your tax dollars paying a significant amount of compensation for the allegedly wrongful prosecution of what turned out to be, agreed the jury, a case of self-defense ... a trial I paid a reporter to cover day in and day out.

Then there are the social-equity stories, like the neighbors who noted that the only wading pools open in West Seattle on Sundays were in the higher-income parts of town ... we did followups and used map graphics to show the picture citywide ... with the neighbors continuing their full-court press, the Park Department finally relented, and the only time any other news organization jumped into that story was to publish the news release announcing the decision (several days after we reported it shortly after it happened).

This kind of coverage isn't "nice." It's ESSENTIAL. And in time, EVERY neighborhood WILL have it.

I don't wish for the demise of citywide or regional journalism organizations. I spent more than 30 years working for news organizations big and small. But the reason that organizations like mine are on the rise is that we are filling a VACUUM. Nobody was reporting IN A TIMELY MANNER - the timely manner that the Internet's been enabling for more than a decade now - on neighborhood-level matters from development to dogcatchers, from business openings/closings to same-day crime reports, and way beyond. Citywide/regional media will parachute into a neighborhood if there is a sexy crisis or controversy that will be of interest to readers outside the immediate location; otherwise, they have to be all things to all people.

Our central statement in all this is, don't be fearful and cling to the past. Focus on the journalists and the journalism, not the organizational framework in which they are producing it, and get on with the business in assisting them in discovering how they will be supported in producing it in the future - because the future is here, now.

Looks like I will be using www.jobdango.com to run job ads now. At least the work better than craigslist.