This has been bouncing around since it aired last Friday, but I don’t think it’s been linked on Slog yet.

Here you will find leaders of the city’s big-four word-makers talking to the Seattle Channel about who’s going to survive, and how they’ll do it, in a rapidly-changing, economically-challenging media environment.

The cast: David Boardman, Executive Editor of The Seattle Times; David McCumber, Managing Editor of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer; David Brewster, Publisher of Crosscut; and Tim Keck, Publisher of this here Stranger.

Most interesting thing, in my opinion: How resigned Boardman and McCumber seem about the inevitable, and perhaps just-around-the-corner, disappearance of one of their papers. In the long sweep of intra-media talk here in Seattle, that’s somewhat new.

Eli Sanders was The Stranger's associate editor. His book, "While the City Slept," was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. He once did this and once won...

11 replies on “The Future of Local Media”

  1. I watched it when it first aired – I thought Tim Keck, even though he didn’t talk much, had the most insightful things to say, with the PI guy in second place.

    The other two seemed to be pretty much in denial.

  2. You know what really kills the dailies? Craigslist. It’s the loss of the classified ads. It used to be a whole section of revenue; now the P-I is down to two pages a day. You can’t survive on four-page Macy’s ads and shiny Bartell’s inserts alone.

  5. A while back at a reading at Bailey/Coy, Dan was wearing a shirt that said “Can’t We Just Kill Craig?” (or something like that; the exact wording eludes me).

  7. A H, “two pages” of classifieds in the P-I qualifies as new information, seeing as how it’s a recent development — part of their new consolidated sections — and no one’s mentioned it here before.

    I’m sorry if my comment entry did not meet your stringent requirements for excellence, and I will try better next time, OK? Funnily enough, though, even my worst comment of all time is significantly better than your best. Hmm.

  8. I can’t think of anything in the paper I can’t get online for free.

    News? Yes.
    Sports? Yes
    Comics? Yes
    Crossword Puzzles? Yes
    Ads? Yes
    Classifieds? Yes
    Personals? Yes
    Opinion? Much more than I ever wanted.

    I hope by periodically clicking on the ads creates revenue for the web pages to stay in business and the writers I like employed. But outside of a bathroom stall I have little use for a print edition of the news.

    Newspapers are generally messy, are not good for the environment, and need to be recycled often. If someone needs something to line their birdcages or potty train their pets, there are alternatives to newsprint.

  10. Would hate to see the P-I fold. It’s a great local paper. Maybe I should take a subscription just as a patriotic act? But who wants the newsprint piling up when you can just go online? Tough to be a daily right now…

  11. The Stranger should publish a monthly magazine on high-quality recycled paper with essays, longer in-depth new stories, art, photography, fiction, and poetry by Seattle-area artists. It should come with both a mix CD compiled by random Slog commenters, such as myself, and also come with a DVD-ROM that includes locally produced short movies, music videos by local bands and pdfs of that months back issues of The Stranger annd also every post and comment in Slog.

    I would subscribe to that before I ever subscribe to another newspaper again.

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