Her Daze In Court

You could — finally — read about Susan Lindauer in the P-I this morning, although you couldn't read that she is a former P-I reporter (she once worked for "two newspapers" the P-I tells readers). But the accused Iraqi conspirator has began a mental competency hearing in NYC, with a second session set for next month.

Clearly a flakey day in court, The New York Times reports "She rolled her eyes. She stuck her tongue out at the prosecutor. It was decidedly not the usual courtroom demeanor. Then again, it was not the usual federal case."

Lindauer angrily contested an accusation in her indictment that she had illegally lunched with Iraqi intelligence operatives. “You want to send me to prison because I had a cheeseburger,” she said, “even though I’m not the person who actually ate the cheeseburger.”

Scoop also reports she once predicted the Sept. 11th attack on Manhatten. Cough.

Topics: Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Bottomline 1, Entry-level Newsies 0

It's always a little scary when newspapers outsource the low-rung positions that used to be the foot in the door fresh-faced j-school grads desperately sought. TV Guide announced today that they signed a syndication agreement with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to provide editorial content, previews, recaps, and features on boob tube entertainment, in addition to the listings.

Not to say there aren't good business reasons to avoid paying salaries, benefits and taxes on employees who basically rewrite press releases. But after the blood-letting at the family-owned Spokesman-Review, the job prospects are looking increasingly less awesome for Washington state journalism majors.

Topics: Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Is Sassy D. Parvaz a Felon?

On Sound Politics, the Snarkalator, Sassy D. Parvaz, fesses up to registering to vote using her work address at the P.I., which is a big no-no, according to Stefan Sharkansky.

Topics: Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Guzmangate Continues

As some of you may have read yesterday, the Newspaper Guild is suing the P.I. over the existence of online reporter Monica Guzman. After the jump you'll find a little more depth — specifically, the initial blast e-mail sent out by Guild rep Liz Brown and P.I. publisher Roger Oglesby's response. It's interesting stuff that could help to define whether papers can circumvent union regulations when it comes to hiring web-specific talent in an increasingly web-specific age, but having read Guzman's stuff, we think their anger is misplaced. The Guild shouldn't be suing the P.I. for pulling an end-around; they should be suing the P.I. for failure to adhere to reasonable journalistic standards by hiring such a dolt to be the face of its web content. But then, that's about what you'd expect from a crew of aging hipster wannabe suckups who serve up Sassy D. Parvaz (a full-time blogger in columnist's clothing; shouldn't she have gotten Guzman's gig?) and "Snark Attack" every Saturday. And now, for the Brown-Oglesby e-mail ping-pong...

Continue reading "Guzmangate Continues"

Topics: Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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The P.I. Cools Itself Up

Judging from public reaction, yesterday's Seattle Times front page, the one where they had like 63 different power outage warnings printed in 63 different languages, is as divisive an editorial decision as I've seen in awhile. Some people expressed that it was a fantastic bit of reader service. Others thought it was a too-PC crock of shit move for a major metro daily that should be running news on its front page. I saw it on the Times' website and thought it was fine. But when I realized that was actually their front page — oy vey.

And, happy as I am to see a previously web-only writer get a shot in print, the P.I. pimping the Stranger's vote of confidence in a pre-column editor's note to explain its decision to use a less than conventional sportswriter is pretty fucking pathetic. Depending on how you look at this maneuver, that's either like using the old, "yeah, but I was drunk" excuse, or saying, "hey, this guy's stuff is cool because the Stranger says it is." Screw that: Run the guy's stuff because you like the guy's stuff. If it's as good as you think it is, no disclaimer should be required.

Topics: Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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It's Called Attribution, Dipsticks

Yesterday, the Times essentially reran claims about the Army Ranger robbers that Rick Anderson made first in his cover story a couple weeks back. They didn't cite Rick's story. Why was this somewhat excusable? Because they at least started following the story close to when Rick's piece ran. But today, the P.I. — which really hasn't written jack about the Rangers until now — is regurgitating claims the the Rangers robbed a South Tacoma bank not for money, but to expose war crimes — without sourcing anyone. Source Rick, ya toolsheds. Dailies poaching material from alt-weeklies is as old as Kevin Federline is awesome, but I can see your beautiful rotating globe from my window, and I'm 'bouts to knock it into Puget Sound with a baseball bat.

Topics: Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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The Broader Implications of Sinking Circulations

The Times and P.I. are once again reporting declining circulation - especially the P.I., which is down 5%. There is more than a handful of people within the industry who feel that, in 10 years, print newspapers — all print newspapers — will be available exclusively online. I'm not one of those people. I think alt-weeklies have an airtight niche when it comes to attracting spur-of-the-moment readers on the town who want to know — right then and there — where to go at night. Dailies, in my opinion, missed the boat here (hence, a big reason for the Weekly's existence). Whatever advantages they have in covering hard news and beats, weekilies tend to return serve with equal vigor by providing much smarter, wittier coverage of music, culture and the arts.

But there are two other reasons why I don't think newspapers are doomed to a web-only fate. First and foremost, you go to any small town or rural community — heck, even a mid-sized one with a prestigious college, like Walla Walla — and the pace and modernization of everyday life is progressing more slowly than in uber-wired metropolises like Seattle. This may sound like a condescending statement of the obvious, so let the record show that I happen to love cities like Walla Walla, do not consider their citizenry to be undereducated rubes (quite the opposite, in fact), and actually prefer their pace of life and progress to what's occurring here, handy as I think the web is. The Walla Walla tempo still fosters face-to-face interaction and community, while providing just enough of the high-tech stuff to keep people apace with the times at large (Walla Walla, awash in wine money and a newfound rep as a great place to retire to, is fascinating to observe, in my opinion). In Seattle, I've noticed, people can't often peer up from their BlackBerries long enough to have a free-ranging lunch-counter conversation, picking through the daily wash and discussing current events at length. If papers are relegated to the web, that sort of exchange goes the way of the Yugo, I fear.

Secondly, there's always the option of a paper like the P.I. offering itself for free — every day or perhaps on a twice-weekly basis, as the Portland Tribune does. I'll plead ignorance as to whether that's a better economic or ethical concession than going web-only immediately. Guess it'll depend on how much the powers-that-be value the type of interaction that's still on display at the diner or lunch counter. Or at least it is in Walla Walla.

Topics: Newspapers, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and Seattle Times

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Court Rules For P-I Journalist-'Spy'

Five years after she came to the government's attention as a self-proclaimed if not delusionary foreign agent, Susan Lindauer has gotten a break. The former Seattle journalist, accused of spying for Iraq, cannot be forcibly drugged  and compelled to take the stand in a government espionage case that may be overblown, a federal judge in New York ruled yesterday. An ex-Seattle Post-Intelligencer reporter and former U.S. Senate and House aide, Lindauer, 44, is charged by the Justice Department with conspiring to act as a spy and being an unregistered Iraqi agent. One of the alleged overt acts was delivering a letter in 2003 to her second cousin, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, hoping he could persuade his boss, George W. Bush, not to launch a war against Iraq. U.S. District Judge Michael Mukasey yesterday deemed that letter the "high water mark" of the case, suggesting the mentally ill Susan Lindauer is no Mata Hari.

As Seattle Weekly earlier reported, the letter mentioned in her March 2004 indictment was actually one of two she wrote to Card, the first coming two months after Sept. 11, 2001. In it, Lindauer made no secret about her activism or her emotional mission to aid Iraqi citizens and, if she was a spy, she was letting the White House in on the secret. She told Card she was working back channels of government and claimed she was meeting with officials at the Iraqi embassy - something prosecutors say she in fact did. She wrote about conversations with Iraqi diplomats and extended an olive branch on behalf of Hussein's government-in hopes, she said, of getting U.S. economic sanctions lifted against Baghdad. "I am truly praying, Andy," she stated, "that this correspondence will trigger some sort of response from you, so that this ugly quagmire in Iraq can begin to heal."

U.S. prosecutors allege the antiwar activist accepted $10,000 from Hussein's intelligence unit over five years and sought to support resistance groups after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. She insisted her efforts-principally, to get economic sanctions lifted against Iraq-were misunderstood. The bigger question, however, was always her sanity. She had a history of mood swings and paranoid fears, as noted by friends and former co-workers - raised in Alaska and a graduate of Smith College in Massachusetts, Linduaer went to work in 1987 as a reporter at the P-I, and in 1989 was an editorial writer at The Herald in Everett. She also worked as a writer and researcher at U.S. News & World Report and Fortune. People were watching her, she often said, although, as it turned out, federal agents in 2003 indeed had set up surveillance and tapped her phone.

Judge Mukasey last fall, however, ruled she in fact was psychotic and incompetent to stand trial. Prosecutors then moved to have antipsychotic drugs administered so she could be tried. The Associated Press reports that Mukasey yesterday agreed that Lindauer suffers from hallucinations, grandiose and persecutory delusions and mood disturbances dating as far back as age 7. But he found that the government's interest to compel the drug induction was "significantly weaker" to other cases and ruled that it "would be a denial of reality ... to find otherwise." Lindauer's New York attorney, Stanford Talkin, didn't necessarily find the ruling a victory and was unsure where the case goes next.

Update: On Friday, Sept. 8, Judge Mukasey released Lindauer, ruling the government no longer had legal grounds to retain her. See comment below from J.B. Fields, who lived in Lindauer's home.

Topics: Media, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and United States of America

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City Hall Park: It's In The Times

City Hall Park, which sits next to the county courthouse on Third Avenue, has sure been in the news lately—'cuz the city wants to renovate the park and give the homeless and crackheads the boot from what locals still call Muscatel Meadows. In fact, there's an article on it in today's SeaTimes, which is funny 'cuz didn't the P-I write the same basic story back in June? Why, yes, yes it did. Of course, we are standing by and waiting for the Stranger to take credit for "breaking news" on this penny-ante pressing civic issue in the first place. It's also nice to see that the city is planning to chop down trees in the park as part of the rehab. According to our sources, since Occidential Park had its soft re-opening last week (the official ribbon cutting comes next month), some of the same homeless folks the city was trying to chase off have reappeared in the park. Looks like cutting down all those trees in Oxy Park made a really big difference.

Topics: City of Seattle, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and Seattle Times

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10-Year Plan Runs Into NIMBYs

As this paper has noted for the last 18 months or so, King County's 10-year plan to end homelessness is up against a bunch of challenges—federal funding cutbacks, state funding gaps, not enough housing being built for poor folks, gripes from citizens about some of those to be housed (the 1811 Eastlake chronic inebriate housing for example, which has turned some reporters and commentators into cranky dry-drunks) and neighbors going all suburban-NIMBY whenever a social service agency makes noises about building houses for the formerly homeless in their urban hoods. Today, the P-I takes on the neighbors' backlash against housing for the homeless—or potential backlash at any rate. It sure is interesting to watch a buncha progressive liberals, as all Seattleites are, turn into a buncha heartless, narrow-minded hypocrites.

Topics: City of Seattle, County of King, Health and Welfare, and Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Bill Gates, Newspaper Guy

What does it say about the dinosaur newspaper industry that the world's richest man is investing in it? According to an Aug. 8 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, MediaNews Group Inc. has a $597.3 million line of credit from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and other members of a lending consortium to finance its purchase of several San Francisco Bay Area newspapers. The filing does not specify exact amounts invested by the foundation or others consortium members which include banks and insurance companies. MediaNews, which publishes the Detroit News, Denver Post, and other dailies, recently bought four papers from the McClatchy Co. for $1 billion. The deal was part of McClatchy's larger takeover of the now-defunct Knight-Ridder chain, buying 32 papers and selling off 11 of them. (KR was the minority, 49.5 percent, owner of The Seattle Times, a stake now held by McClatchy, which also owns the Tacoma News Tribune, Bellingham Herald, Tri-City Herald and The Olympian). The Gates/consortium financing enabled MediaNews to complete its purchases of two of the largest Bay Area papers, the San Jose Mercury News and Contra Costa Times. The Hearst Corp., owner of the Seattle P-I and the San Francisco Chronicle, also jumped into the deal. It now has a $299 million equity investment in MediaNews, according to the SEC, in return for a 30 percent stake in the company. It's an unusual alliance among publishers who compete on the same turf, but both corporations could benefit by squeezing out smaller area publications—assuming the coziness passes antitrust muster. For the Gates Foundation, it's just another day at the bank. It currently has $4 billion in holdings, according to a separate SEC filing the foundation made this week. The holdings include a $312 million stake in petroleum giant BP (and $217 million in Exxon), $259 million in Costco, $222 million in Waste Management and a new, $32 million stake in Wal-Mart. The lingering question: Does it matter how you make it, if you give it away?   

Topics: Business, Media, Newspapers, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and Seattle Times

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We're in the P.I.

Mike Lewis does, in my opinion, a very respectable and fair job of chronicling staff turnover and potential tweaks in editorial focus at the Weekly in today's P.I. Granted, he manages to fuck up the year the Weekly was founded ('76, not '78), ex-publisher Terry Coe's current whereabouts, and curiously claims we're going to be more "East Coast" than "squishy Seattle;" but all in all, kudos to Lewis for not falling for the various left wing conspiracy theories floating around out there.

Topics: Business, Media, Newspapers, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and Seattle Weekly

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Sheriff Fires at the P-I

Last Friday, July 28, the King County Sheriff's Office and Sheriff Sue Rahr (pictured) filed a complaint against the Seattle Post-Intelligencer with the private, non-profit Washington News Council, which offers to broker or judge disagreements between people and the press. The complaint is in response to the P-I's yearlong series "Conduct Unbecoming," which has reported on several badly behaving deputies and the kind of discipline they received or didn't receive for their misdeeds.

In an accompanying letter to the council, Rahr states, "The P-I has tried to destroy public trust in the Sheriff's Office." She further accuses the paper of writing stories that have been "intentionally biased, unfair, malicious and lack[ing] balance." The series, principally authored by investigative reporters Eric Nalder (a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner for his work at The Seattle Times) and Lewis Kamb, in short, painted KCSO as a police department where deputies can violate department policies, such as those governing use of force, and either get a slap on the wrist or be allowed to retire.

Earlier this year, Rahr met with Executive Editor Ken Bunting, Managing Editor David McCumber, and Publisher, Roger Oglesby to complain about the series. Rahr claims that since the meeting, 33 more stories have appeared "still lacking fairness and balance."

Bunting did not immediately return a call requesting comment. McCumber was unavailable. Glenn Drosendahl, the paper's reader representative, says that, initially, the paper will focus effort on trying to hash out an agreement between it and KCSO. What form that might take is anyone's guess.

But given the breadth of the complaint, encompassing 100 articles and editorials, and the bad blood between Rahr and the P-I (she has refused to speak with Nalder and Kamb since last fall), it is difficult to imagine the two parties could iron out their differences.

Continue reading "Sheriff Fires at the P-I"

Topics: County of King, Media, Politics, and Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Painting the Balls Off Dogs

A story on the recent death of Bob McCausland, 90, (pictured) the lovable P-I artist and creator of the Hairbreadth Husky cartoons, noted not only his great talent but those he worked with—Ray Collins and Stu Moldrem, among others. But missing was information about what some of them, as pre-computer newspaper artists, were required to "paint."

I was once a P-I copy boy who carried art orders from editors to the art department, where McCausland and the others touched them up, usually by applying white-out brush marks. The orders often included photographs that needed features tastefully erased. Among the requests I saw, or heard about, were orders to paint the balls off a German shepherd, the fat off a matronly lady's ankles, and the udders off a cow. "No teats in a family newspaper," an editor said.

I also recall a talented artist in his stall surrounded by stacks of new footballs. To each, he was busily signing the autograph of University of Washington football coach Jim Owens. As part of a newspaper promo, the P-I was giving away autographed footballs to readers. Owens signed one, and the artist copied the signature onto the others. After all, the P-I had promised only footballs "with Jim Owens' autograph," not footballs autographed by Jim Owens. So there.

Topics: Media, Newspapers, and Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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