Seattle News - The Daily Weekly - "Seattle Post-Intelligencer" Archives

Posted Oct. 20 at 1:50 pm by Caleb Hannan

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.

Topics: Campaign 2009 and Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Posted Oct. 19 at 12:27 pm by Caleb Hannan

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?

Topics: Campaign 2009, Gun Control, Politics, and Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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Posted Oct. 14 at 10:44 am by Rick Anderson

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."

Continue reading "What the Hell P-I? You Forgot THE Hottest Man in Seattle Sports (or Anything Else)"

Posted Oct. 1 at 3:08 pm by Laura Onstot

www.gq.com

Purrrr.

On the face of it I kind of want to object to the PI.com's ranking of the sexiest Seattle sports personalities. Then again, athletics is all about bodies so I'm over it. What I find far more offensive is the absence of a certain Mariners outfielder from the list. Seriously, I challenge any straight lady or gay dude to sit out in the lower-deck right field seats, watch Ichiro stretch out between pitches, and not get totally turned on.

He's got athletic power, a to-die-for smile, and a tight—um—ly controlled swing. He wears those cute-sexy short pants but also pulled off smoldering-sexy in a GQ spread as evidenced above. Plus he's all adorably/kinda dirty/hilarious. (See the video below the jump.)

Hottest man in Seattle sports? Hands down it's I-chi-rOH!

Topics: Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Sports

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Posted June 11 at 12:22 pm by Mark Fefer

Susan Hutchison: "I don't have to say anything" to voters.

That's the above-the-fold headline on seattlepi.com today. Given that Hutchison has been, until very recently, avoiding saying anything to the press or anyone else, you might assume this was her arrogantly asserting her right to be elected without deigning to speak to the electorate. But when you read the story, that's plainly not the context.

Continue reading "The Insane Campaign Against Susan Hutchison"

Topics: Campaign 2009 and Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Posted June 9 at 1:18 pm by Mike Seely

Yesterday, several members of the local media took their turns striking out against ace UW fastpitch hurler Danielle Lawrie. Among them were KJR-950's mid-day host, Dave "Softy" Mahler (pictured here with Lawrie), and P-I columnist Jim Moore.

Like Jerry Brewer of the Times, Moore wrote a column about the experience. It's entertaining yet predictable (male sportswriters getting their asses handed to them by female athletes is a musty conceit, to put it mildly), except for this snippet: "Mahler apparently foul tipped one ball during his at-bat, but mostly embarrassed himself. In other words, his plate appearance was a lot like his show."

Moore, it's worth noting, is a regular guest on the Kevin Calabro Show over at KJR's new sportsradio rival, ESPN-710. Hopefully Softy will return fire, as a rivalry isn't really a rivalry until the mud's been slung.

Topics: Media, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Seattle Times, and Sports

Posted June 4 at 5:13 pm by Mike Seely

Self-promotion alert: If you can tear yourself away from the NBA Finals for a half-hour tonight, I'll be joining the P-I's Joel Connelly and host Stan Emert live on Public Exposure's "Sound Month In Review" on SCAN-TV (Channel TV), where we discuss the public affairs issues of the day at 8 p.m. sharp. This is a monthly (first Thursday of each) gig for Connelly and I, for which we are paid in prime rib and pints of Sierra Nevada.

Topics: Campaign 2009, City of Seattle, Civics 101, Media, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Seattle Weekly, and Shameless Self-Promotion

Posted April 20 at 11:57 am by Rick Anderson

Former P-I Managing Editor David McCumber has landed on his feet in a new job with Hearst, the people who shut down the print edition of his former paper last month. McCumber is becoming editor of two Hearst newspapers in Connecticut, The Advocate of Stamford and the Greenwich Time, according to Editor & Publisher. He's also been named editorial director of Hearst's Connecticut Newspaper Group, which includes two dailies and six weekly newspapers.

McCumber was hoping one of his staff's final stories might show up on the winner's list of the 2009 Pulitzer Prizes announced today. No such luck. The Las Vegas Sun won for public service for exposing a high death rate among construction workers on the Las Vegas Strip, and The New York Times took home five prizes, one for breaking the call-girl scandal that destroyed Gov. Eliot Spitzer's political career. The Detroit Free Press won for local reporting for its coverage that brought down the city's mayor, sharing the prize with the East Valley Tribune of Arizona for its reporting on controversial Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

Continue reading "Tidbits and Tales From the P-I Memorial"

Posted March 28 at 1:07 pm by Rick Anderson

Some of the news that's unfit to print, from last night's P-I memorial party at the Ballard Elks...(Mainly to deter TV cameras and - serious! - keep things off the record, a sign at the door said "No working press," which made a lot of the press, many of them fresh out of work, laugh weakly)..."The FBI once investigated me on the suspicion I was the Unibomber," said former copy editor Tom Robbins, now a bit of an author. "They spied on me, and then sent two female agents to interview me. They knew my weakness"...Sports columnist Art Thiel plans to launch a sports web site with ex-columnist/editor Steve Rudman; Thiel also has a book coming out and is writing two columns a week for the eP-I (where he works as a freelance, thus he was able to quit the P-I and collect his severance pay when the print edition folded this month). "It looks like the site will be linked to the P-I's, like [cartoonist Dave] Horsey's site," said Thiel...He, like Horsey, wore a tux to the gathering of several hundred former print P-I staffers - dating back 50 years - and a number of current eP-I staffers...A party organizer, onetime police reporter George Foster, was fondly remembered for the day he covered the funeral of a Seattle cop, then had a few drinks and ended up on the plane that was taking the officer's remains back to his hometown (Foster's call from Georgia the next morning began: "Where am I?")...

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Posted March 27 at 8:12 am by Rick Anderson

The saga of the P-I's death was in all the papers. But some readers still managed to miss it, says former P-I reporter Joe Tartakoff. "When the width of the newspaper shrunk," Tartakoff writes from his new job at the media-reporting site, PaidContent.Org, where he's currently writing about Microsoft, Google and the Washington Post, "callers complained to the business editor that the listings had been cut. She ignored the obvious retort: Chances are there won't be a paper at all in less than two months!" Tartakoff, 23, who'd been at the P-I only four months then, watched his world slowly dissolve to black, he says, reflecting on the print edition's final 60 days and the re-launch of a downsized (and now money-losing?) eP-I. "Hearst wanted to make sure that the website was all set to go the day after it shut down the paper. But on the 63rd day, the web editor was still making 'provisional' job offers to fill spots that had been turned down.

"At 10 a.m. on March 16, the 66th day, as most staffers were just arriving in the newsroom, an all-hands meeting was called. The next day would be the last of the print Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the publisher declared...The announcement was spun as the first paper to make the transition to an all-digital daily. Nevermind that the site left behind would be a skeleton of its former self. The new editor in charge would not respond to questions when I asked her for a story about the transition intended to run in the final print-edition. Instead, she posted her own, unfiltered thoughts online. Those staying behind started to fret about their new, all-encompassing beats. (Want to write about Boeing and Microsoft and Amazon, companies that previously each were covered by separate reporters? Anyone? Anyone?) Those of us who were not part of the new website celebrated with whiskey and beer. I packed a box."

Posted March 25 at 9:05 am by Rick Anderson

As we said earlier, it sounded like P-I sports columnist Jim Moore was signing off for good when his paper's print edition folded last week. Moore thought so, too, he writes today. "When I wrote what I thought was my final column last week, I thought I was done, cooked, adios amigos. Then this freelance offer came up, and I'm grateful my new editor sees the same value in Husky-bashing, dog-loving, fluff-filled columns that the Go 2 Guy does." He and fellow sports columnist Art Thiel are writing two free-lance columns a week for the ePI, Moore says. "Thiel and I will write columns like we have in the past, just not as frequently. His will be thought-provoking and insightful, and mine won't. This is my promise to you — just because I'm a freelancer doesn't mean I won't continue to give you the same slacker effort you've come to expect."

Moore was so certain he'd split the P-I sheets that he suffered through an exit interview on his last day, he notes. "Mine was conducted by a nice woman from the Houston Chronicle who cringed when she heard I was 51 and had 4-year-old twins. Shockingly, she did not seem envious; nor was I — I've been there many times; she can have Houston." BTW, "If you've never been to an exit interview, it's not pleasant. You can't help but feel like a loser, though I've occasionally felt like that when I was employed, too."

Posted March 23 at 8:11 am by Rick Anderson

What happened to those 100-plus members of the P-I staff after the print edition folded - and didn't stay on at the ePI? Rebekah Denn, who is one of them, is making at list. The former P-I food writer/critic keeps a running count on who went where, via her own web site, Eat All About It, which is where she went.

More than a few others have also migrated to web sites, she reports, including photogs Gilbert Arias, Paul Joseph Brown, Karen Ducey, Meryl Schenker, Robert Sumner, and Jim Bryant, and a number of writers have turned to blogging: Cecilia Goodnow, Regina Hackett, Leslie Kelly, and Philippa Kiraly. Also with their own websites or blogging - and doing other work - are investigative reporter Andrew Schneider, aerospace writer Jim Wallace, pop music writer Gene Stout, reporter Jennifer Langston, environmental writers Lisa Stiffler and Robert McClure, editor John Levesque, and graphic artist Wendy Wahman.

Former copy editor Christina Okeson has a blog, too. It's called Chrisitina Unemployed. What did she do yesterday, for example? She decorated her site with an empty couch. She also accomplished "the utter glory of motherhood, which included watching old sci-fi movies then baking a cake with The Boy, and loving The Girl when she fell asleep in my arms (Mama bliss!). More cleaning of my scrapping area. A bit of job hunting. Installed and took a quick tour of my new camera..." And she's working on her unemployment application.

Posted March 20 at 2:24 pm by Mike Seely

Granted, those offers were purportedly "less than $10", but one analyst says Hearst should have taken whatever it could get.

Topics: Newspapers and Seattle Post-Intelligencer