2009-2012
  • 2009-2012
West Seattle Blog's Tracy Record is right: A lot of what she told me during our interview about the death of PubliCola got "left on the cutting room floor."

Constraints of the paper.

However!

Record had a lot of interesting things to say, and the internet has no length constraints, so here's some more of what Record told me—along with some words in response from PubliCola founder Josh Feit (who's now been brought aboard Crosscut as a freelancer).

“I’m always personally sad to see somebody independent go," Record told me, speaking of PubliCola. “Crosscut—I don’t know that that really melds [with PubliCola]. Crosscut has always seemed to me more of a loftier, 'Here, we’re going to look at issues' thing, rather than a more down and dirty thing... I would have personally rather seen Crosscut merge into PubliCola than PubliCola merge into Crosscut.”

Record said the writing at PubliCola seemed more “lively” than the writing at Crosscut, and “certainly had a voice.”

PubliCola, she concluded, “was closer to vibrant.”

Just like PubliCola before its death, West Seattle Blog currently operates on a staff of only two full time writers. How does Record make that work financially?

"We have never had investors, we have never had grants, we have never had savings, we don’t have rich relatives, we don’t have side-jobs," Record said. "Basically, we have lived entirely off our advertising revenue for going on five years now.”

She wouldn't give out exact numbers, but said the site brings in six figures annually and is in the black.

“Their content model was different from ours," Record said of PubliCola. “For us, one of the things that has had our community find value in us is we never stop. We don’t take the weekends off, we don’t take the nights off.” Of PubliCola, Record said: "I noticed that it kind of had a nine-to-five schedule.”

Record explained that constant posting is key to her site's 1 million average page views a month: “Even with politics, there’s something happening at night
 Something that keeps people coming back. If you’re going to do this, you want to be a little more 24-7 about it. And it’s tough. It’s tough.”

In response, Feit told me this afternoon:

"All you have to do is look at our site to know that Tracy's observation that we were nine-to-five is not correct.

"For the past three and a half years, I've been getting up at five in the morning, for example, to write Morning Fizz every day. And hey, just in the last month, as The Stranger well knows, we covered their evening political candidate forum in the 36th District, went home, wrote it about it at length, and published our take the next morning. There were plenty of late nights in the last year. Erica and I were typically leaving the office at 7 o'clock, 7:30—and heading off to an event, by the way.

"You do have to be crazy to be in this, and Erica and I are pretty crazy. Dude, I haven't slept in almost four years."