Thursday, November 20, 2008

ANOTHER-END-OF-ANOTHER-ERA DEPT.: Bonneville International, which just regained ownership of KIRO Radio last year, will switch KIRO-AM to all sports talk next April. KIRO-AM's news and news-talk fare will move exclusively to 97.3 FM.

Thus will end more than 35 years of what was successively billed as "KIRO Newsradio 7," then "KIRO Newsradio 71," then "710 KIRO." (Each more precise frequency reference responded to the prevalence of more precise tuning displays on car radios.)

KIRO-AM is one of the city's oldest stations. It goes back to the Old Time Radio golden age, during which it amassed a larger collection of CBS Radio network recordings than CBS itself had (a collection of phonograph records that's now owned by the UW). It eased into a middle-of-the-road music and news format by the early 1960s.

In the early 1970s, Bonneville spent its way to the top of the local ratings by ditching the DJs (except on weekends) and hiring a full news reporting staff.

I heard Nixon's resignation speech on KIRO. I heard the start of the first Gulf War on KIRO. The voices of Bill Yeend, Dave Ross, Jim French, the late Wayne Cody, et al. are permanently etched in my brain's ROM.

It was weird, on Election Night, to bring a cheap, FM-only portable radio to my temp office site and try to listen (during a dinner break) to NPR's blathering "analysis" of returns that hadn't come in yet. KIRO had already begun simulcasting its news-talk on FM, but I couldn't pull in that signal from where I was.

But that's one reason why they're doing this. The public now associates AM talk with looney right-wing demagogues. FM is now where the targeted demographic audience segments go for everything except sports (with a few notable exceptions such as KIXI and KPTK).

posted by clark 12:30 PM

LET ME BE the first to bestow the most freakin'-obvious nickname onto the Mariners' new manager: The Intentional Wakamatsu. Thank you, really.

SOME 3,000 WAMU HEADQUARTERS STAFFERS could lose their jobs in the next few months. Three thousand bankers hitting the pavement at once won't be a good thing for all the local consumer industries (from real estate on down to doggie daycare) that have staked their futures on catering to the upper professional caste.

And where are we gonna place all these idled IT techs, comptrollers, paper pushers, junior flunkies, second-tier poobahs, and adjustable-rate adjusters? Michael Moore, on Larry King Live, suggested any automaker bailout be predicated on making the automakers start making what we need to have made (public transit infrastructure, post-petroleum vehicles). But what kind of make-work project can we create for bankers? Can we (and by "we," I really mean Gates and Allen) launch a massive startup employing hundreds upon hundreds of bureaucrats to create an eco-friendly actuarial table? Or will we see panhandlers outside the WaMu Center tower holding professionally designed signs reading WILL WOO-HOO FOR FOOD?

posted by clark 12:14 AM

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

HOW (NOT) TO SAVE NEWS AS A BUSINESS: Crosscut, ex-Seattle Weekly tycoon David Brewster's attempt to bring his lifelong dream of a Seattle New Republic to online life, may turn nonprofit in hopes of survival-thru-donations.

Mind you, Brewster's initial concept didn't have the greatest mass-appeal potential to begin with. And the online-ad market hasn't yet matured to the point of supporting such a niche product with a small yet paid staff.

Still, this admission of need may signify another dead end in the ongoing drive, here and around the world, to find a path toward profitability for professional online journalism.

posted by clark 2:26 PM

Monday, November 17, 2008

I'M FEELING SOMEWHAT BETTER today. Thanks to all of you kind readers who wrote in asking. I went to an MD today about this seasonal crud I've had for the past month. I came back with nothing but a flu-shotted arm. (The clinic techs know me well enough by now to give me the Bugs Bunny Band-Aids without asking.)

I'm only coughing occasionally now. At times circa Halloween, I was violently hacking to the point of momentary breathlessness.

Between that and my last, now-completed, temp gig, I've hardly touched my graphic novel script lately. I really need to get some more progress on it before I can announce it officially.

What I can announce are two new Vanishing Seattle products, just in time for your downscaled holiday giving plans.

First, may I suggest the Vanishing Seattle calendar? Thank you; I shall. It's big, it's bold, and it's full of "future" dates and "past" pictures. Plan your ought-nine tomorrows while remembering the Jet City's funky yesterdays.

Then, for the snail-mail correspondin' holdouts among you, there's also the Vanishing Seattle postcard set. You get fifteen (count 'em!) separate views of Seatown past, each on a separate cardboard rectangle and all handily combined within a carrying case of clear, rugged-yet-pliable plastic.

Both are now at finer book and gift shops and via the above online links. Why not get both today?

posted by clark 8:43 PM

Wednesday, November 12, 2008

MY ELECTION DAY, AND WHY IT TOOK ME SO LONG TO WRITE ABOUT IT (not necessarily in that order): I've spent the last seven days, with one brief exception, essentially doing five things:

• Working,
• Commuting,
• Sleeping,
• Eating, and
• Coughing.

I hadn't planned on having a minor but pesky cold for the past three weeks. The rest of the ordeal was known.

When I signed up for King County Elections' tabulation detail, I knew I'd miss the big Election Day hoopla. I'd work in the distant south-end suburbs from 6:30 in the morning to 7 at night, then go straight back by 7 the next morning. Not only would I miss the big action in person, I'd miss it by proxy--we weren't allowed cell phones, iPods, or other potential media-receiving devices on the sprawling ballot-processing floor. I'd left a cheap FM-only radio with my stuff in the coat-check room, hoping to catch news from the outside world during a dinner break.

As it turned out, there wasn't anything worth reporting when the dinner break came, shortly after 4 p.m. PST. The NPR airheads simply blathered tastefully about what might or might not happen within the subsequent hour.

Back inside the secure enclave of the tabulation room, the folks in charge decided to hold us for an extra hour. But they gave us tabbers an extra 15-minute break.

Two sheriff's deputies sit guard at the only entrance to the ballot floor whenever "live" ballots are on the premises. Unlike all the rest of us on the floor, they get a laptop PC with Internet access. So it was thanks to them that, upon leaving for that extra break at 7-ish, I saw the electoral-vote headline OBAMA 200, MCCAIN 85.

We finally got out for the night just before 8. I was carpooling the long lonesome highway back into Seattle when the droning NPR voices announced Obama as the projected winner.

Our vehicle made it up to First and Pike in time to see the overflow crowds starting to form outside the Showbox's election party. But I chose to head for the Westin Hotel, where the Democrats had their regular post-election shindig. Even before I got there, I witnessed happy shrieks and saw people hugging and fist-bumping all along Virginia Street. Inside, the size of the crowd was exceeded only by its joy. Not only had Washington voters helped Obama over the top, but Gov. Chris Gregoire was winning an unexpectedly not-close re-election campaign. The money issues for parks, transit, and the Pike Place Market were all comfortably in the "Yes" column. The only close big race in the state was Darcy Burner's second drive to unseat U.S. Rep. Reichert on the Eastside.

I decided to spend someof my little remaining energy trekking to another election bash, at Spitfire. It was also filled close to capacity, and was also outrageously happy. I stayed there just long enough to hear Obama's oh-so-elequent acceptance speech. During it, the previously raucous crowd stood and sat in total silence, only to wildly applaud at the end.

So that's what it's like to to have someone, something, to vote for, not just against.

By 10 p.m. I was already on my way home toward a waiting bed and an alarm clock set for 5 a.m.

It took six days for our county tabulation crew to work through the massive backlog of mailed-in ballots. (The ancient (1994 vintage) server hardware and MS Access database software didn't help speedwise. The county's got newer and faster equipment, but the feds haven't certified it for use.)

People tell me they saw me on KOMO-TV's election night coverage, gently pushing ballots through a scanning machine. It was one of three stations that sent camera crews to the elections complex that day.

Hundreds of us (mostly temps) worked this election, at the Renton complex and (for probably the last time) at in-person polling places. For me, it was the chance to go somewhere, do something, do it well, and get paid for it--and to apply my compulsion for geeky detail to a worthwhile cause.

As a tabulator, I had about as much to do with the election's outcome as a stadium scoreboard operator has to do with the making of a big play. I could only properly document what had been done.

Still, there's some sense of accomplishment in having played one small part in perhaps the most important election of our lifetimes.

Even if I didn't get to personally witness its most exciting parts.

posted by clark 12:11 PM

Wednesday, November 05, 2008

I'LL WRITE ABOUT the week's big events when I have more sleep. Perhaps Thursday.

posted by clark 9:06 PM

Thursday, October 30, 2008

ELECTION SPECIAL: Here's what I'm writing for the November Belltown Messenger:

Due to the vagaries of newsprint periodical publishing (a threatened but still noble industry), this is being written before the big humongous election, but most of you will read it afterwards.

Thus, I cannot exhort you all to get out and exercise your citizenship (or, thanks to vote-by-mail, stay inside and exercise your citizenship).

Nor can I offer up expert analysis of what will surely be the fantastic and history-making results.

What I can give you are some verbal snapshots of the tense pre-election weeks:

• The sprawling beehive of activity that is King County Elections, in an otherwise quiet strip-mall and car-lot district just east of the former Longacres horse-track site, where I've worked as a temp this past month. The place was especially exciting on the last day of in-person voter registration, when the line snaked outside the lobby and deep into the parking lot.

• The reduction of the once-mighty right-wing propaganda machine into ever increasingly-shrill and decreasingly-sane appeals to naked fear and bigotry.

• The satire industry's ease at mocking the McCain campaign's crash and burn, combined with its collective inability to find anything to mock about Barack Obama. (That infamous New Yorker cover spoofed the right's fictionalized Obama, which had already become absurd.) Bill Maher said it best when he pleaded with Obama to reveal at least one slight aspect of imperfection. (Fret not, Bill: His flaws will appear soon enough.)

• A tearful late-night phone call I took from a disillusioned Obama supporter. She was fearful that her year of activism and fundraising was all for naught, just because Obama had supported the Wall Street bailout. I tried to console her that bigtime politics has always been a realm of compromise and deals, but it's far better to have a politician who sometimes betrays his higher ideals than one who doesn't have any.

• The various fearful "we're doomed" cries and sobs in the last weeks, with decreasing relation to the polling trends or the early-voting statistics. These desperate progressives absolutely know the Bushies will steal another election, no matter how improbable.

  Apocalyptic dread has been part of the American psyche, particularly the left-O-center American psyche, since before I was born. The Bomb was gonna doom us all; then it was the energy crisis; then it was inflation; then it was the Nixon junta. Since then we've feared nuclear meltdown, expensive oil, cheap oil, peak oil, the New World Order, Y2K, and the end of the Mayan calendar (not necessarily in that order).

  But what if we're not doomed?

  What if every Bush-junta attempt to destroy democracy from within proves futile?

  What if we win?

  In the immortal words of Robert Redford in The Candidate, "What do we do now?"

posted by clark 9:10 PM

Wednesday, October 29, 2008

TODAY WE MOURN the end of The Christian Science Monitor as a daily newsprint product. The website, and a print weekly, will continue.

The Monitor was seldom, if ever, a moneymaker. It was subsidized by the CS church, which has faced dying-off memberships and financial belt-tightening in recent decades.

Its circulation peaked in the 1970s, before the NY Times was widely available outside the Northeast. To tens of thousands of readers over the years, it was a small but assured voice of reason and solemnity.

As an anomaly of the U.S. newspaper biz, the Monitor's very existence attested that serious "boutique" journalism was feasible in this country, so long as it didn't have to turn a profit. These days, some industry analysts have offered up the idea that local daily papers might turn to nonprofit models as a means to preserving themselves.

In recent years, the printed Monitor hasn't been widely available at newsstands or vending machines, only at CS Reading Rooms. It was still available by subscription; but if dead-tree journalism was becoming passé in the Internet age, a dead-tree journalism product distributed five days a week via the Postal Service was even more behind the times. Which simply added to its image as a charming oddity.

posted by clark 9:15 PM

Monday, October 27, 2008

H'WEEN COSTUMES I'D LIKE TO SEE: I write this item most years. This year, my first impulse was to simply call for anything but Palin (or Joe the Plumber). But there are other alternate suggestions: Mad Men's retro-swank dudes and dudettes. Keith and Rachel. Rachel and Pat. Darcy Burner's "" T-shirt. Wall-E. A ruined stockbroker. The young Kirk and Spock. The geezer Indiana Jones. And kind reader Eric Scharf suggests, "You gotta give props to anyone industrious enough to fabricate a giant acorn costume."

posted by clark 7:43 PM

Monday, October 20, 2008

I'VE BEEN RISING at ungodly predawn hours this past month, schleppin' to a suburban temp job. Writing hasn't been among my biggest compulsions upon arriving home. Sorry.

There are still things worth mentioning, to be sure:

• ANDY'S DINER IS SAVED! Well, at least the historic building on Fourth Avenue South, assembled from vintage railroad cars. It now houses a Chinese restaurant, bearing the appropriate title of Orient Express.

• OUR PAL DAVID NEIWERT has done his own Sarah Palin research, direct from Alaska. It confirms just about the worst you've heard about her.

• I'VE BEEN SILENT about other election stuff, but someone else has handily provided a Sensible Guide to Voting in Washington.

• A FOOD DELIVERY TRUCK tipped over on a Tacoma highway, spilling 45,000 pounds of chocolate, ice cream, deli meats, and hot dogs. Mmm, the four great tastes that taste great together.

posted by clark 7:52 PM

Thursday, October 09, 2008

DESPITE WHAT YOU MAY HEAR in certain paid political announcements, we know who the true original Mavericks are--James Garner and Jack Kelly.

posted by clark 7:53 PM

Tuesday, October 07, 2008

WITH THE BIG NEWS of Washington Mutual Bank's sale to JPMorgan Chase, another local end-of-an-era moment has received less attention. It's the closure of the Rite Aid Pharmacy at Fourth and Pike in downtown Seattle, on the ground floor of the Joshua Green Building.

The store first opened in 1947 as the original location of Pay 'n Save Drugs, founded by local businessman/philanthropist Monte Bean. Pay 'n Save eventually grew to some 150 stores in five states; while the Bean family's "Family of Stores" grew to encompass Ernst Hardware, Lamonts Apparel, Schuck's Auto Supply and more.

Pay 'n Save Corp. was taken over by New York investors in 1984. Nine years and two buyouts later, the remaining Pay 'n Save locations became Payless Drug branches. Five years after that, Rite Aid acquired them.

Through all these changes, and while downtown's fortunes ebbed and flowed, the Fourth and Pike store survived and thrived.

This summer, the Green Building's owners announced a massive remodeling. The changes included the displacement of its other street-level tenant, Carroll's Jewelers.

Rite Aid management still hoped to get a lease renewal. The store received its requisite stock of Halloween candy and costumes.

But the building's owners decided in mid-September to divide the space into several smaller storefronts. Rite Aid's pharmacy counter immediately closed Sept. 16; prescriptions were transferred to its Belltown store. The store's other merchandise is being liquidated through October or until it's all gone.

posted by clark 4:27 PM

Sunday, September 28, 2008

DON'T TELL ANYONE, but I'm still not panicking about the supposed verge of national economic collapse. However, one Dmitri Davydov sees parallels and differences between what happened to the ol' USSR and what might happen here. One big diff, according to Davydov: Soviet citizens were used to making do without material plenty or the prospect of material plenty.

posted by clark 10:49 PM

Thursday, September 25, 2008

'THE FRIEND OF THE FAMILY,' R.I.P.: Last week acquaintances boasted to me of withdrawing all their deposits out of Washington Mutual. I tried my best to assure them WaMu would not collapse. It would survive, it would be sold whole, or it would be sold in pieces. And its most valuable, most saleable pieces were its bank branches and its individual accounts.

Today, this point was proven. The FDIC just arranged to have these assets sold off to JPMorgan Chase for $1.9 billion.

It might not have been so necessary, so imeediately, had there not been so many sudden withdrawals from WaMu accounts--more than $16 billion in less than two weeks!

Thus ends the rollicking saga of the little Seattle thrift institution, a secondary player in the local banking market back during the days before interstate banking giants, that became the biggest institution of its type in the nation.

It effortlessly subsumed such former giants as Dime Savings in New York and Home Savings in California. Like a dot-com (only using real money), its business model was to Get Big Fast. At the peak of America's housing bubble, WaMu was the nation's biggest home-mortgage originator, with some 2,000 branches coast to coast.

But all that growth was predicated upon one gamble-- that the national home-buying mania, abetted by lax government regulations and the massive trading of obscure "mortgage-backed securities," would just keep on a-growin' forever. Or at least for five or six more years.

It's easy to say they should have known better.

Which I just did.

But think of it this way: Imagine you were running the last big financial outfit still based in the NW region. Imagine you'd come to believe you had two options. You could remain a local player, slowly but surely losing ground against the consolidating industry giants. Or, you could become one of those consolidating industry giants.

Yeah, I would have picked (a) also.

WaMu's shotgun marriage creates another addition to the roster of big companies that used to be based in Seattle but aren't anymore. Some others:

• United Parcel Service: Begun as a delivery service for local department stores in 1907. Now based in Atlanta.

• Carnation Foods: Turned evaporated milk into a pantry staple; moved to Los Angeles; got absorbed by Nestle.

• Airborne Express: Taken over by DHL. Seattle HQ closed. Ohio central air-freight depot threatened with closing.

• Westin Hotels: Originally a regional circuit called Western; then a major global chain called Western International; merged with and de-merged from United Airlines; now just one of Starwood's constellation of brands.

• Boeing: You probably know about this one.

posted by clark 9:36 PM

Saturday, September 20, 2008

SOMETIMES THE STARS ALIGN. Sometimes the Mariners win. Sometimes that perfect song comes on the radio just as you're about to make your move. Sometimes the bus comes right on time, right when you've stepped out for it.

And sometimes the Seattle Times editorial board endorses the better candidate.

posted by clark 8:54 PM

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