​"I would say the Big Blog was responsible for me becoming a journalist."

That's the end quote of James Rainey's LA Times story this morning on the eP-I's first anniversary, and it seems to appropriately define both the P-I and what some think a journalist is today. A wacky theatrical moment at Thursday night's bash at the Crocodile, says Rainey, "played a bit like Seattlepi.com itself - uneven and inspired, accessible and oddball. The new PI can't afford to be comprehensive. It doesn't really try to be authoritative. It no longer offers routine coverage of county government, for example, but highlights felines in the cutesy LOLcats feature and misses no turn in the saga of Amanda Knox, the University of Washington student tried for murder in Italy."

Rainey notes that while the eP-I is claiming to have as many website visitors as it did a year ago when the print edition was still alive, the folks at Nielsen say it is half that number. Rainey also spotted a paper posted outside General Manager Pat Balles' office which suggested the website is coming up short financially, having "booked" $544,000 toward a first-quarter goal of $1.3 million. But "Those aren't the real numbers," Balles told him, saying the site is "on track" to profitability.

As the for the guy who says the Big Blog inspired him to become a journalist, Rainey writes, "He's not letting go of his job at Kinko's yet."

The site celebrates tonight at the Croc.

​It was hard to imagine a year ago that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer could ditch nearly all its employees and still produce a useful, credible news site. But the fact is, they have.

Staff for the online-only venture may be skeletal by daily-newspaper standards, but there's meat on the bones. They've got a handful of high producers who hit hard on the basics--sports, politics, crime, and general hot-button street news, such as today's feature by Vanessa Ho on the undeveloped holes blighting neighborhoods all over town. Just as the P-I always felt more like a city paper than the suburban-conservative Seattle Times, so too its site feels more city-focused than its larger competitor.

But to say that seattlepi.com is valuable to Seattle isn't to say that it provides any kind of model for how to make daily newspapers work in a post-print world. Because it sure as hell doesn't.

The P-I is trumpeting the fact that its readership has remained steady, at about 4 million visitors a month--comparable to what it was back when the print paper was still around. On the one hand, this is an accomplishment of sorts: There's less content on the site than there used to be, and yet the same number of readers are showing up. On the other hand, if Seattle Weekly were to suddenly stop distributing all 90,000 copies of the paper to coffee shops and news boxes all over the city, I'd be pretty alarmed if that didn't cause a serious jump in visitors to our Web site. That would be a lot of readers to just see disappear.

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Have you seen this nattily-dressed scribe?

​Thursday marks the first birthday of the online-only Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which is a rose-colored way of commemorating the first anniversary of the death of the print P-I. In the year since the presses stopped, the slimmed-down eP-I has managed to hang on to--or at least maintain freelance ties with--some of its higher-profile personalities, including Joel Connelly, Art Thiel, Jim Moore, and David Horsey, while most others have washed up on the shores of surviving publications, public relations war rooms, or startups like the Post-Globe or Investigate West.

But what's become of lead Metro columnist Robert Jamieson? It's a question no one--not even a host of his former colleagues--can seem to answer, although a pair of Jamieson sightings have been reported around town.

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Black, one of print's great defenders, makes a virtual splash by partnering with the eP-I.

​The eP-I just bought itself a slew of local bureaus--cheap. How? By announcing a partnership with David Black's Sound Publishing, wherein the online-only daily will link to stories hosted by pnwlocalnews.com, the portal page for SoundPub's 30 community and suburban newspapers. In addition to the link love, the P-I will publish the full text of up to 10 Sound Publishing stores per day.

Sound Publishing has papers in Bainbridge Island, Bremerton, Bellevue, Kingston, Port Orchard, Whidbey Island, the San Juan Islands, Bothell, Enumclaw, Federal Way, Marysville, Issaquah, Kirkland, Mercer Island, Redmond, and Auburn, among other markets. In effect, then, the P-I, which ceased printing earlier this year and is making an online-only go of it with a fraction of its former editorial staff, gains itself a slew of regional offices through the partnership with Black's empire. In return, Black--one of newsprint's last true believers, as Don Ward noted in a lengthy July 2008 profile--gains increased visibility for his chain's stories with a presence on one of the country's more popular news websites.

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Evenly matched--in lameness.

​Just days after this blog leapt to defend Sounders F.C.--and soccer in general--from a know-nothing P-I sports columnist (who called the team's recent 0-0 playoff match "ninety minutes of nothing"), the Sounders delivered yet another scoreless 90 minutes of regulation play against the Houston Dynamo yesterday. But "nothing" would be a too-kind way to describe what went on at Major League Soccer's Western Conference Semi-Final.

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These people are excited. But why?

​Fat people like to complain that they're the last minority group of whom you're still allowed to be openly contemptuous in enlightened society.

Not true! Soccer, and its fans, remain a perennial, if thoroughly predictable, subject of bemused contempt among a certain class of wags who think of themselves as grizzled and no-nonsense.

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As long as Connelly's around, don't expect the Times-P-I rivalry to flatline entirely.

​Ever since the P-I folded its print edition into a wiry web-only operation that is extremely generous about linking to content from other sites (thanks, Casey!), including its once-hated competitor, The Seattle Times, some folks assume that rivalry is in the rearview. But while there's no arguing that it's a shadow of its former self, the presence of vets like Joel Connelly ensure that a jab will still get thrown here and there. In his election recap column today, Connelly, as is his custom, subtly reminds us whose forecasts were the most off-base. Dead-center in his bull's eye: the Times' Metro columnist, Danny Westneat--and for good measure, the Times' editorial board.

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If faithful lefty McD can accidentally overlook I-1033, then anyone can.

​A curtsy to the P-I's Joel Connelly for giving us the line of the day:

An energy-efficient light bulb flashed on in the head of U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., as he drove to work on Monday morning.

Baghdad Jim's epiphany came after he realized he'd forgotten to vote against the life-source-sucking I-1033. McD had completely missed the little sucker hiding down in the far left column of his ballot. So learn from his mistakes, registered voter.

McD may be older, and possibly in need of a new prescription, but he's just the latest, and most high-profile, example of voters scratching their heads when trying to find and kill Tim Eyman's initiative. Don't let what happened to him, happen to you.

If he's smart enough to wear a helmet, he's smart enough to know he's wrong on this one.

​Mike McGinn keeps making this choice easier. The P-I points to Sunday's mayoral debate and asks if the robo calls produced by the McGinn campaign trying to tie opponent Joe Mallahan to the NRA will actually hurt him instead.

First off, nobody likes getting robocalls. Then there's the substance. Mallahan, the T-Mobile vice president, has labored to come off as the level headed pragmatist to McGinn's dreamy idealist. In uncertain times, Mallahan is hoping Seattle voters will opt for a pragmatist.

In this and his battle to undo the deep-bore tunnel, McGinn is quickly going from dreamy to downright catatonic. Political reality and Attorney General Rob McKenna say that the gun ban, while good-intentioned, is just a costly way of getting our ass kicked in court by Second Amendment groups.

Does McGinn really think the best way to win voters is to bother them at home, then remind them that he's going to knowingly waste more money we don't have fighting a cause we can't win?

What's a 'News Gatherer"? a C-SPAN interviewer asked Seattlepi.com's Big Blogger Monica Guzman during the recent Gov 2.0 Summit - repeated yesterday, but filmed last month in D.C. NG's are what the online P-I calls its former reporters and editors, apparently because they are no longer just reporters and editors, but something else. Guzman (starting at 05:15 on the clip), explains it thusly: "I think to me, what the term reflects is that we not only report but moderate conversations about news. We go out and we engage with other media and we aggregate whatever other media are saying, so in a sense it's reporting, sure, but with so many new elements that you almost want to give it a new name." As for investigative reporting, marginalized in many newspapers due to staff and financial cuts, she suggests what might be called investigative newsgathering - with the I-Team comprised of everyone. "My take on that is, is that it's not all being lost...if you can empower your readers to be their own investigative reporters, maybe that's better, maybe that's the thing, you know, than one guy in a suit stuck in a third-floor office who has three months to write a story. So I think there's a give and take here, and in the end we're all going to benefit from the fact that everything is one big swirling conversation that never ends."