Given Hearst's silence on the central questions about its plans for the P-I, one eventually ends up wondering: Does even Hearst know what it's doing?

Most of the time, my default assumption is that it does—that a giant media corporation such as Hearst would have a big project like closing down the P-I pretty well gamed-out in advance. Put the P-I up for sale on Jan. 9, stop printing newspaper in early March, execute Top Secret Plan Z immediately thereafter. Or something like that.

But here's an e-mail from P-I publisher Roger Oglesby that reminds me it's also possible that Hearst has no firm grand scheme beyond limiting the money it's currently bleeding through the P-I's print edition. All that talk of a Hearst master plan to stop the presses and maybe transform the P-I into an online-only publication? Well, as of Jan. 14, five days after the P-I was put up for sale, Hearst, via Oglesby, was still fishing around for ideas about how that might be done:

From: Oglesby, Roger

Sent: Wed 1/14/2009 11:52 AM

To: PiStaff

Subject: ideas for the online model

We've recently spent time with the leaders of Hearst Newspapers' Digital Media group, focusing on creating a viable online-only model for this market. We're exploring all the options, and would appreciate your help and input.

Some of you shared with Lincoln Millstein during his visit last week your thoughts about what an online-only seattlepi.com should look like. Lincoln asked that we capture your ideas and forward them so they could be considered during this business planning phase.

If you have thoughts about how an online-only seattlepi.com should operate, please email them to Michelle Nicolosi. She'll pull them together and forward them to Lincoln and Ken Riddick.

Here's their explanation of what they're looking for:

"Please don't confine yourself to staffing proposals. We're interested in your thoughts on how to maintain and grow our online audience so we might have the competitive advantage in the market. If you have ideas to help us drive the revenue side of the business we're interested in that, too.

"Send along ideas for partnerships, part time models, revenue sharing, freelancing and any other creative types of structures that might help us reach our goal of creating a profitable business model in the market.

"Think outside of the box. Break the molds. Be inventive. Be bold. Think lean. Invent what journalism can and should be at a lean online-only operation."

Here's your chance to weigh in. Thanks in advance for your creative thinking to help flesh out what a vibrant and profitable seattlepi.com might be.

If you have any advice, Sloggers, it sounds like Hearst would appreciate it.