Seattle Post-Times

Boeing's dumb flight plan

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Here's longtime Boeing watcher and author T.M. Sell, writing for Crosscut, summing up the decision to open a second 787 production line in North Charleston:

So here's the problem with moving to South Carolina, now. Having essentially junked the careful, collaborative process that made the 777 such a success, Boeing has collected a fleet of trouble trying to sort out the problems of the even-more complicated 787. So the answer is opening up a second production line for a jet that still isn’t ready to fly? And staffing it with new hires? In a state where you’ve already had considerable production problems, problems so bad, your evil, unionized Washington workers have had to fix them? ...

... They’re about to spend around $900 million to save $9 million a year in labor costs.

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• Learning the right lessons from the Boeing calamity (seattletimes.nwsource.com)

Formatting text for the Web

Image via Wikipedia

I was looking over some things I had written to help Crosscut reader-contributors prepare their writing for posting on the Web and came upon this. If I do say so myself, it's a cleverly concise primer on inline HTML formatting that you could use when writing for any Web site:

'Newspapers, the mass-less mass medium'

Former ink-stained wretch Alan Mutter, aka Newsosaur, has a great take on the week's grim newspaper circulation reports, which includes this gem:

Despite the obvious, long-running decline in circulation penetration, an amazing number of otherwise intelligent newspaper executives have been spending entirely too much time trying to spin audience numbers instead of acting to save what’s left of their rapidly wasting franchises.

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• Arthur Sulzberger Compares Print Journalism To The Titanic (huffingtonpost.com)
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Seattle newspaper circulation drops 16.4 percent

The Audit Bureau of Circulations this week announced figures for the six-month period ending Sept. 30, 2009, and the year-over-year drop in average weekday print circulation among 379 U.S. daily newspapers was 10.6 percent. That's not strictly due to people simply walking away from print. Over that year, the incentives to subscribe changed, in some cases through price increases and distribution pullbacks. But it's ugly just the same.

So what happened in Seattle? It's difficult, though not impossible, to say.

A year ago we had two daily printed newspapers, and today we have one. Complicating matters, we don't know how many people a year ago subscribed to both The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which now publishes online-only as SeattlePI.com.

But here's what we know for sure: Today's Seattle Times average weekday circulation of 263,588 is, by my calculations, 52,085 less — 16.4 percent less — than the 316,673 combined circulation of both papers a year ago.

So while the Times is touting a circulation gain of "an amazing 32.6 percent" and that "84 percent of the non-duplicated daily P-I subscribers are now Times subscribers," the bigger picture of print newspaper circulation in Seattle is somewhere short of amazing, unless you're talking about an amazing drop.

The above chart was assembled by yours truly, who painstakingly pored over news clippings of the past 10 years and plugged the numbers into Excel. Figures are for the six-month periods ending March 31 (spring) and Sept. 30 (fall). Data are from ABC as reported by ABC, both daily newspapers, the Puget Sound Business Journal, and Seattle Weekly. Due to the wide range of sources required to assemble the spreadsheet, some numbers reflect adjustments after auditing and some numbers are those reported before audit. If anyone has a better collection of Seattle data, I'd love to see it.

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• Seattle Times circulation grows on P-I's demise (crosscut.com)
• Lastest Newspaper Circ Numbers Show Ten Percent Drop (mediabistro.com)

The hierarchy of victimhood

Jack Shafer, Slate's media writer, takes a look at the Balloon Boy case and explains why newsies are such suckers for stories like that — why they forgo the discipline of verification that is supposed to inform good journalism. In doing so, he offers this simple hierarchy to explain newsworthiness:

... in the hierarchy of victimhood, young beats old, female beats male, domestic beats foreign, fur beats scales, defenseless beats well-armed, pregnant beats nonpregnant, and kittens beat everything.

... A keen reader of media manners and former Wife Swap participant, [Richard] Heene obviously appreciates that a 6-year-old in peril is irresistible media bait. God knows what fiendish stunt Heene would have attempted if the family's cat had just given birth to a litter of tabbies.

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• Cynical reporters have a soft spot for anybody who claims victimhood. (slate.com)

The end of chairlift conversation as we know it

I no longer ski because it would cost too much to buy boots that don't wreck my widening feet, but now I don't have to. There's a robot that can ski for me, and it will never complain about boots that pinch.

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• Skiing robot developed by Slovakian researchers (telegraph.co.uk)

Crosscut.com emerges from temporary obscurity

The Seattle local-news Web site I helped found, Crosscut, has finally earned 501(c)(3) status and has emerged from a difficult limbo during which Publisher David Brewster pulled off a minor miracle: He kept it alive with almost no money through the transition from an LLC and he grew the readership.

Today Brewster confirmed that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, through the Seattle Foundation, has granted Crosscut $100,000 to get back on its feet. First order of business: a membership drive.

Crosscut was launched as a for-profit venture in 2007, a little too soon to see the full folly of an earnest journalism business supported primarily by advertising. That wasn't the only challenge standing in the way of success, but it was the biggest one.

<digression> I was an investor as well as a salaried employee, so when it became clear a year ago that Crosscut would survive only as a nonprofit, I lost everything — my investment and my job. I was laid off in November 2008. I mention this not only to explain a conflict of interest but to remind everyone that I'm looking for work! (Does this count as one of my weekly "job search activities"?) Like all business failures, this one was highly instructive and a great experience in spite of my personal financial purgatory. </digression>

I've always wished Crosscut well, but I do so especially now that Brewster has hired Mark Matassa (left) to be editor, part time for the time being. Mark is one of the best journalists in Seattle. He was a reporter and then political editor at The Seattle Times when I was there, went to the Los Angeles Times for a while, then returned to Seattle to be an editor at the recently ink-less Seattle Post-Intelligencer. (His significant other, Michelle Nicolosi, remains at SeattlePI.com as executive producer. Not to be confused with Mark's sister, Michele Matassa Flores, who also worked at the Times and about whom I wrote recently.) I can't think of anyone more qualified to take Crosscut to the next level than Mark Matassa.

Without a job, it's an adventure

Michele Matassa Flores

My good friend and former boss, Michele Matassa Flores, writes today at Crosscut about being out of work and the effort involved in qualifying for Washington state unemployment benefits. (Michele is a former editor and reporter at The Seattle Times, and whoever you are, you should hire her.)

To earn one's keep, one must conduct three "job search activities" per week and keep a log of that activity. But as Michele points out, the definition of "job search activity" depends on who's citing it, although all agree that applying for a job certainly qualifies. The problem is that you aren't supposed to apply for just any job. It has to be a job you are qualified for. So can you count cold calls? Coffee with potential employers? Coffee with friends who have leads? Yes, perhaps, maybe.

In the end, applying for jobs is the goal. And it's not hard to do in the Interwebs age. But there aren't that many jobs out there for which one is neither under-qualified nor over-qualified, especially if you are at an advanced stage of your career.

So everyone's applying for anything and everything. It's

... tough to find three suitable openings to apply for every week for months on end. And it sometimes leads to nuttiness. Corporate CEOs apply for entry-level office jobs. People with no experience apply for executive-level positions. A journalist friend of mine seriously considered applying to be a train conductor. His initial thought: He does like trains.

That journalist friend of hers would be me. Someone read that and tweeted: "I didn't know you liked trains." Well, now you know.

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• It's like a full-time gig (crosscut.com)