Last week I posted about the so-called "Packers Model" for potentially funding a new online news site, made up of former Seattle Post-Intelligencer staffers, after the near-certain death of the P-I's print edition later this month.

For what it's worth, an online poll of about 500 Slog readers found that most respondents would indeed pay to help fund, Packers-style, a community-owned, online-only P-I. (Or a community-owned competitor to a new Hearst-run, online-only P-I in the likely event that Hearst launches such a project after it closes the print edition.)

At the No News is Bad News forum at City Hall last Thursday there was further explanation of how this "Packers Model" might work, and now comes a wetpaint page devoted to thinking through a business plan for a "Seattle Post-Post-Intelligencer."

Skeptics and start-up savants: check it out. I'd love to know what you think of the plan-in-progress, and it sounds like the planners would too. Here's part of the thinking:

We are a group of P-I journalists. Our goal is to allow P-I reporters to continue serving Seattle as watchdogs and informing the public on such key issues as city politics, helping people navigate the current economic crisis, the environment, and education. Additionally, we intend to continue the work of recognizable writers as Robert Jamieson, Mike Lewis, Art Thiel, and many others.

In this economic climate, we believe our role to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” has never been as important, and we intend to use lessons learned by a generation of community bloggers in expanding the idea of the work done by professional journalists.

Should the Seattle Post-Intelligencer close, we intend to begin a news website to fill the void left in our community. We hope that the Hearst Corporation will start a online-only P-I that performs the important role the newspaper has played in this community, but we stand ready to continue our work for the public interest.

We are currently seeking start-up funding, but are planning to start the site anyway and look for funding as we go along.

We would immediately ask the community what sort of journalism it wants in Seattle, and to support it initially through donations to our non-profit entity, the Seattle PostGlobe. In the interim, at least 20 journalists are prepared to work as a volunteers until funding is raised.

Let us know what you think of this plan. We intend to start raising money at launch to begin paying our journalists as soon as possible. We're betting that this community will want to keep us doing the work we do. Please email us at seattlepostglobe@yahoo.com with your pledges of any size, so we can get an idea of the support we can expect to receive. Please consider pledging the $250 many of you already are paying to subscribe to the paper.

Their math:

The P-I currently has 129,563 daily subscribers who pay $234 a year. Should the same number of people—whether or not they currently subscribe to the P-I—donate the cost of a subscription, annual revenue would be $30.3 million.

Illustration by Andrew Saeger