Which, if true—and if the KING 5 story is true—suggests that this is not some sort of coordinated effort in which, say, Hearst would put the P-I up for sale on the understanding that Seattle Times publisher Frank Blethen would later sell the Times to Hearst.

So, if true—and again that's still a big if—and if I'm understanding all of this correctly, and if I'm remembering JOA intricacies correctly, then this to me suggests more of a gamble on Hearst's part. Maybe a high-odds-of-winning gamble. But still a gamble.

Nobody is buying newspapers just now—but Hearst, reportedly, is going to go through the motions of attempting to sell the PI. King 5:

...a source close to the deal tells KING 5 that the paper's owner, Hearst Corporation, will announce as soon as tomorrow that it's putting the P-I up for sale. Under the joint operating agreement between the P-I and The Seattle Times, the P-I must be offered for sale for at least 30 days before it can cease operation....

We're told Hearst does not expect another buyer to step forward and that Seattle will likely become a one newspaper town within the next few months.

Rumors have been rife that the incredible shrinking Seattle Times was the likelier of our two dailies to go under—is it possible that both Seattle's dailies could go under? Or is there a deal in the works?

Says a friend who follows the newspaper industry: "The thing to remember is that in other cities, Hearst put its paper up for sale, closed it or sold it cheap, and then turned around and bought the other paper." Hearst did this in, he says, "San Francisco and San Antonio and maybe Houston." So Hearst closing down the PI could be its first move toward acquiring the ailing Seattle Times. It seems highly unlikely that the owners of the financially strapped Seattle Times could come up with the money to purchase and shutter the PI.

The PI is the older of Seattle's two daily papers.

Here's a bit more about Hearst from a 2003 PI story about the Seattle Times' efforts to end the Joint Operating Agreement (JOA) that kept Seattle a two-daily town:

The company, a media conglomerate owned by descendants of late newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, owns such magazines as Esquire and Cosmopolitan and has stakes in successful cable-TV operations such as ESPN and The History Channel, in addition to newspapers, broadcast stations and other businesses.

It also has a record as a survivor in two-newspaper markets. In three other cities—San Antonio, Houston and San Francisco—Hearst ultimately outlasted its competitors.

And the Seattle Times in 2006 on Hearst's MO:

And if Hearst buys The Times, it could shutter the P-I.

There's precedent—in San Antonio and San Francisco, where Hearst owned the smaller of each town's two dailies. In each case, it bought the larger paper from its competitor and closed its own publication or made it a nonfactor competitively.

Frank Blethen "stunned," according to a report that just went up on the Seattle Times' website—a report which emphasizes the fact that KING 5's story has a single, unnamed source. No one from the PI or Hearst has confirmed the report. So... uh... maybe the PI isn't for sale. Maybe the PI has accepted the Commerce Secretary position in the Obama administration.

So far nothing on the PI's website—home to a million and one community bloggers, and the "Big Blog," which only asks, never tells.

The Seattle Times story now includes reactions from inside the PI's newsroom...

At least four sources in the P-I newsroom said the rumor reported by KING-TV was a surprise to them, that they hadn't received any memo or email or announcement from management indicating the P-I was up for sale. Across the newsroom, small groups huddled to discuss the rumor, not in anger, but with visible surprise and a touch of panic.

"We don't know anything," said Daniel Lathrop, a P-I reporter.

...but as of 6:10 PM, there's still not a word about KING 5's story on any of the PI's homepage or on any of the paper's numerous blogs.

UPDATE: The story is up in the PI's homepage now (6:15 PM)...

...and the news seems to have stunned the management at the PI.

The P-I's managing editor said he knows of no plans to sell the paper. At about 5:15 p.m., soon after the report was aired, managing editor David McCumber told the newsroom's staffers, "If this is going on—and I don't know that it is—it's going on at a level that's far above me, and nobody has seen fit to clue me in. I think it's a bunch of rumor. You look at the state of this business—it wouldn't surprise me if something was going on, but I have no knowledge of what that something is."

...

KING 5 reporter Linda Byron said in an interview that she would not reveal her source but that she is "confident" about the information. She repeated that the source is "close to the deal."

...that pit bulls need a better publicist.

Thank you, Slog tipper AWIH.

And furthermore, my dear Mr. Connelly, your recounting of events contains a bit of strategically selective editing:

A rumor took hold that the newly re-elected governor was about to be named Secretary of Commerce.

"Gregoire as Commerce Secretary?" headlined a Slog posting in The Stranger. There followed a brief, totally noncommital exchange between reporter Eli Sanders and a gubernatorial spokeswoman.

"Like everyone, I await Tuesday's announcement," Sanders wrote. "But I will say - and again this is just tea leaves - that Lockard didn't sound like a staffer who was mourning some sort of personal tragedy in her boss' life."

Huh?

"Huh?" is definitely what a person would say if he or she read only the above recounting of events. But if you read my whole post (not just Joel Connelly's excerpt) you'll see why I was engaging the possibility of a personal tragedy—and why the Commerce Secretary rumor took hold. From my interview with Gregoire spokeswoman Laura Lockard, conducted after Gregoire's mysterious Monday disappearance:

Q: Is Governor Gregoire going to be Obama's nominee for Commerce Secretary?

A: “We’re not able to speak to that so we’ll do a release in the morning.”

Q: Where is she?

A: “She’s out of state.”

...

Q: Is she going to continue as Governor of Washington State?

A: "I’m not allowed to say.”

Yes, the Commerce Secretary rumor was wrong. Yes, that's the price of playing the speculation game. But, to publicly decline to say whether the governor of Washington State is going to continue serving out her term is to invite and fuel rumors.

And Joel Connelly! All's fair in politics and bloggery, sure, but to selective-quote-kick another political reporter while he's home sick and communing with the ghost of William Henry Harrison. Well, I never.

That an armchair pontificator who actually shows up at city events about once a year would mock a rival paper for printing a rumor before doing 100 percent of its reporting. (Related: Do you really want to make fun of Crosscut's writers for being "long in the tooth" when your last two columns referenced Nixon, and your bio brags that you've had the same employer for 33 years?)

MSNBC appears to be letting Rachel wear her own clothes on her show these days—not her wonky glasses, but actual button-down shirts. Men's shirts. The "school principal look" that Maddow complained about is dead because, I guess, the suits at MSNBC suddenly realized that viewers know Maddow's a dyke and don't care.

P-I columnist Joel Connelly, talking on KUOW, just declared The Stranger an "underground newspaper."

Now that the holy day is over I can ask: Am I the only one deeply creeped out by the metrosexual mixmaster Santa shilling for Centro?

No matter how you feel about the skinny, umlauted Claus, it is now January 5, and this shit must stop. (The above commercial was airing as late as last night.)

There's an... an... advertisement... on the front page of the New York Times.

Here's your first galling dose of FOX News for 2009. (Watch the running news ticker at the bottom of the screen, which was reportedly posting New Year's messages from viewers.)

(Thanks for the heads up, Towleroad.)

A summary, in three parts:

1) My bus wasn't running. Therefore, the city, or county, or somebody, should spend millions on a plan in case it snows like this again.

2) EXCLAMATION POINTS COUNT TOWARD MY WORD COUNT!!!

3) This snowstorm is EXACTLY like Katrina, and Nickels is EXACTLY like Bush. Think about it.

Edge Boston:

Religious Conservatives Defend Pope’s Anti-Gay Message

Eh, dog bites man, priest rapes kid...

From Susan Kelleher's front-page editorial in today's Seattle Times:

The icy streets are the result of Seattle's refusal to use salt, an effective ice-buster used by the state Department of Transportation and cities accustomed to dealing with heavy winter snows.... By ruling out salt and some of the chemicals routinely used by snowbound cities, Seattle has embraced a less-effective strategy for clearing roads, namely sand sprinkled on top of snowpack along major arterials, and a chemical de-icer that is effective when temperatures are below 32 degrees.

And why does the city refuse to use salt and other chemicals on its roads? Back to the Seattle Times:

"If we were using salt, you'd see patches of bare road because salt is very effective," [said Alex Wiggins, chief of staff for the Seattle Department of Transportation]. "We decided not to utilize salt because it's not a healthy addition to Puget Sound."

From the introduction to the "Failing Our Sound" special report published by the Seattle Times way back in May of 2008:

Despite all we've learned about Puget Sound over the years, and all the promises we keep making to do better, we haven't met the challenge.

The Sound is by no means dead. By some measures it's cleaner and healthier than it was 30 years ago. Yet that progress is at risk because we're still betraying Puget Sound with the choices we make...

The "Failing Our Sound" series focused on development, not snowy streets, but in May the Seattle Times called for developers, homeowners, and our local elected officials to make sacrifices to protect the health of Puget Sound. Today the Seattle Times is howling at the city for pausing to consider the health of Puget Sound in the wake of this week's snowstorm.

So which is it, Seattle Times? Make sacrifices to protect Puget Sound? Or to hell with Puget Sound—dump salt and chemicals on our streets every time it snows? Was Frank's commute in from Mercer Island really that bad?

The old New Media-is-Parasitic argument, this time with legs:

The Huffington Post, a venture-capital-backed new media site that mixes links to other sites content with hundreds of celebrity and volunteer blogger posts, is being accused of slimy business practices by a handful of smaller publications who say the site is unfairly copying and publishing their content.

Whet Moser, an editor at alternative weekly Chicago Reader wants to know why The Huffington Post's newly formed Chicago-focused venture is stealing their copyrighted concert reviews and reprinting them in whole in order to get search engine traffic. And he found other examples taken wholesale from The Onion and Time Out Chicago.

Here's a link to the Reader complaint and a screen shot of the story reprinted by the Huffington Post.

Kevin Allman, editor of New Orleans's Gambit Weekly, sums up the fear and loathing in a sentence:

In other words: professional newsgathering organizations have paid professional writers to do professional work, and then Arianna comes in, creates links to their creations, and sells ads on her own page.

It's an old complaint but it'll get hotter as blogs get bolder, newspapers get weaker, and experts keep predicting that major cities will be without newspapers as soon as 2010.

If the newspapers dry up and blow away in the wind, what will the aggre-gators eat?

There was a letter to the editor in the New York Times this morning from the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe, bemoaning the sad state of our democracy here in the United States. His evidence? Caroline Kennedy's attempt to get herself appointed to Hillary Clinton's senate seat. "Surprising and appalling," Delanoe wrote, a "dynastic move" on the part of the "vanishing Kennedy clan," Kennedy has "no qualification whatsoever" to sit in the United States senate.

When I read it I thought, man, that seems... kinda undiplomatic. Delanoe may be right, but why would the mayor of Paris give a shit? Doesn't he have shit to worry about? WTF?

Turns out the letter was a hoax—um, whoops.

The Times blamed the mistake on a failure to verify the authenticity of a letter that arrived by e-mail.

"In this case, our staff sent an edited version of the letter to the sender of the e-mail and did not hear back," the paper said. "At that point, we should have contacted Mr. Delanoe's office to verify that he had, in fact, written to us. We did not do that. Without that verification, the letter should never have been printed."

This past weekend, Robert Jamieson discovered Santarchy. The results are, as always with Jamieson, illuminating:

Usually the good folks at Seattle's Lusty Lady would be ecstatic when Santa Claus drops in.

But Saturday afternoon, when about 200 giddy Santas stormed the lobby, Saint Nick's "Ho, ho, ho," left the staff thinking "Oh, no, no, no!"...

...Welcome to the wild and wacky world of "Santarchy" — "Santa" plus "anarchy" — which could be described as equal parts pub crawl, equal parts holiday celebration and a whole lot of fun.

Some commenters on the story are less than pleased.

Posted by Who is John Galt? at 12/20/08 9:40 p.m.
Whats next in the bag of tricks to keep the newspapers in print....a piece of investigative journalism on a fraternity hazing event? What a joke. No wonder newspapers across the country are failing with tripe like this seeing print. Looks like the news editor was asleep at the desk.

Posted by jem1 at 12/20/08 11:06 p.m.
The real horror is the reading public bombasted with the same lamebrain comments regarding this columnist. The same jerks wallowing in their stupid world of arrogant inanity.

It all reminds me of Charles Mudede's great piece on Jamieson and who he's writing for:

A writer writes to one person. His/her so-called audience is in fact a single soul. The specific system of words, images, rhythms, phrases that the writer molds and remolds have as their goal the most complete satisfaction of this one reader he/she has in mind. A writer without this goal—a person who reads what has been written just for him/her—does not exist. "This book's purpose," writes Ludwig Wittgenstein in the preface to Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, "is achieved if it gave pleasure to one person who read and understood it." The achievement of that purpose is at the heart of any writing act.

Now that we have established this understanding (that every writer has a reader in mind), we can turn to the popular and award-winning Seattle P-I columnist Robert L. Jamieson Jr. and ask: Who is his one reader?

If you haven't, you should read Charles' story.