Seattle Post-Times

Metro Seattle general news Twitter rankings

I might make this a regular thing. Let me know if I'm missing anybody with more than 1,000 followers.

Snapshot taken Friday, Oct. 1, 2010.

1.	@seattletimes	22,180
2.	@king5seattle	14,743
3.	@seattleweekly	12,138
4.	@seattlemag	10,391
5.	@kiro7seattle	8,260
6.	@westseattleblog	7,979
7.	@seattlepi	7,277
8.	@komonews	6,063
9.	@seattlemet	5,274
10.	@nwcn	4,930
11.	@q13fox	4,147
12.	@thenewstribune	3,408
13.	@strangerslog	3,277
14.	@myballard	3,248
15.	@techflash	3,239
16.	@komonewsradio	2,862
17.	@seattleglobe	2,711
18.	@psbj	2,585
19.	@mygreenlake	2,554
20.	@seattlest	2,518
21.	@publicolanews	2,505
22.	@pnwlocalnews	2,490
23.	@wallyhood	2,184
24.	@seatransitblog	2,152
25.	@everettherald	2,009
26.	@btownblog	1,869
27.	@thenewp2	1,815
28.	@fremontuniverse	1,486
29.	@seacrime	1,470
30.	@queenanneview	1,439
31.	@columbiacity	1,422
32.	@phinneyridge	1,351
33.	@phinneywood	1,259
34.	@crosscut	1,066

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How I surf the Web

I now use several browsers to surf the Web on my MacBook Pro:

• Apple's Safari is my default browser. It's the browser that is launched by links in e-mail, and it's what I use for general surfing of news, shopping, and other stuff. For me, Safari is faster than other free browsers, although it is often the last to be supported, or is unsupported, by third-party plug-ins. I also like the fact I can effortlessly sync my Safari bookmarks via MobileMe with my iPhone, on which Safari is my only browser option.

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:

My seat back and tray table are in the fully upright and locked position

I can't recall very well a time when I wasn't working in the media business. I think it was during high school, probably 1973-74, and I was busing tables at Cole's Town and Country Restaurant in Albion, Mich., just off Interstate 94. The owner, Vern Cole, had a banter with the patrons that consisted mostly of "hi there how are you come on in bye now." He was not humorless, but he had standards, and it was good honest work, as they say. I was on my feet during an eight-hour shift after school. Vacuumed the dining room after closing. Cleaned the restrooms. Went home smelling like fried food.

The only other non-media job I think I ever had was at the Left Bank restaurant in Walla Walla, Wash., possibly in the summer of 1977. My friend from Whitman College, Reed Price, who went into the news business himself and now works at MSN, was cooking lunch there and got me hired as a combination host-busser-cashier. It was a disaster. I think I was fired. But by that point, at age 20, I had a daily newspaper job under my belt and also that summer was working three or four weekend shifts as a disc jockey at KUJ-AM, "Southeastern Washington and Northeastern Oregon's official hit music and contest station." Several other commercial radio jobs ensued during college years, and I returned to the newspaper business a month after graduation. I've been a journalist ever since.

You have a constitutional right to practice irresponsible journalism

Image by team doster via Flickr

Ever since he came on the scene, I've been a big fan of Seattle Times baseball writer Geoff Baker. He's a great beat reporter, and just as important in this day and age, he gets the new media landscape. He writes an excellent blog. He engages his readers and is down with the local baseball blogosphere. He's tireless and was born to do what he does.

Today Baker posted his thoughts about a recent controversy involving former Seattle Mariner Raul Ibanez and Jerod Morris, a blogger elsewhere who, offering statistical analysis but no other evidence, has implied that perhaps Ibanez's improved recent performance is due to something other than his own hard work. In his own blog post, Baker rips Morris a new one, without naming him, and suggests that it's time for non-professional journalists to get some training and learn to look their subjects in the eye when writing critically of them. This is where Baker loses me. There's a certain lack of nuance to this analysis, much as I respect his baseball coverage.

A failed experiment with free advertising

Image via CrunchBase

I've pulled the ads from the blog after experimenting for a couple of months. My traffic is very modest — it's in the triple digits per day. And modest, too, has been the ad revenue from Adify and Amazon: pennies per month. Even if I had exponentially greater traffic, the ad revenue would be paltry. I was essentially giving the ads away.

Not sure what I expected — I've been in the media business long enough to know better. But I wanted to experience the process from the perspective of a small publisher.

I don't understand how these ad networks can stay viable given the minuscule margins. I can't be the only publisher giving up, even if I'm one of the smallest.

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Will blog for food

The other day I mentioned how I use TypePad for this blog and said it was absolutely worth $8.95 a month, and at the time I was indeed paying that. But now I've qualified for free blogging under the TypePad for Journalists program, formerly known as the TypePad Journalist Bailout Program.

Six Apart Media, the parent of TypePad and Movable Type, the application version of their blogging service, is smartly offering free services, including advertising help, to out-of-work journalists. Says the Web site:

The fundamental changes going on in the media world are a serious challenge. We can't promise that everyone will thrive in this new medium. But we firmly believe in giving journalists tools that you can use to take control of your work and be in charge of your own success.

This is not just nice, it's smart. Some of these journalists are going to go on to big new things, and if they develop brand loyalty, it can't but help Six Apart, whose products are competing with various free and open-source blogging platforms.

In any event, thank you, Six Apart. That's likely all I am going to say about this — end of commercial.

5. Life in a zero-newspaper town

If Seattle suddenly found itself without any newspapers (parts 1, 2, 3, and 4) and unemployed journalists decided get something going to fill the void, the most important early hire would be a database engineer.

The reasons for the demise of for-profit newspapers are many, and no one factor in isolation would have doomed the backbone of American journalism so suddenly. But one factor made it inevitable: changing technology. Once the writing was on the wall — say, in 1993 — the newspaper industry at large did a poor job of developing the Web as a platform, though there are notable exceptions.

The problem wasn't just the fact every piece of technology was devoted first and foremost to producing a printed newspaper. (In today's terms, the most important application would have been InDesign instead of Dreamweaver.) Failure to innovate was compounded by corporate ownership. Even if someone at the paper in, say, Portland wanted to do something novel with the Web, the locals were faced with ownership by, say, Advance Publications (Newhouse), to name the most egregious example of online screw-ups that for too long foisted the worst Web tools imaginable on its newspaper children. Throw in consolidation of chains and the mess was compounded. (I'm looking at you, McClatchy.) To do any real technological innovating at a newspaper, you had to be either in New York or Lawrence, Kan. (I exaggerate, but only a little.)

So given the opportunity to start from scratch, it's time to develop a journalism Web platform like no other, designed from the bottom up to accommodate the special needs of professional news editing and vetting. It must serve all the usual forms of content — articles, blogs, images, video, audio, commenting — as well as provide for the complicated interactivity of social networking, sharing, rating, and wiki collaboration. It needs to be the offspring of The New York Times and Facebook.

The name of this blog

... is Seattle Post-Times. It speaks to the local media scene and my role in it in a couple of ways.

First, I'm in the second half of my career, my post-Seattle Times phase. As my official, authorized bio states:

Taylor joined The Seattle Times in 1985 as the paper's first newsroom graphic designer. He spent 16 years at The Times, working as a designer, editor, or reporter in four news departments. As a reporter, he covered media, with emphasis on television, and Boeing and aviation safety.

I left in 2001 for very different work at Seattle Weekly and Crosscut.

Also, we might be entering an era that is post-Times in a bigger sense given the precarious perch that newspaper occupies at the top of the local mass media market. It's possible the Times will merge with, be purchased by, or be purchased by and replace the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Literally, Post-Times.

And this, of course, is the beginning of what could be a post-racial and post-partisan age of American politics. We can only hope.

So "post" is the new "new." As Wallace Stevens said, "Let be be finale of seem."

As time passes and I digest my own disruption, I plan to write here about where journalism is headed. However, I reserve the right to be frivolous and tediously personal.