3/19: Denver and Seattle Link Roundup

In Seattle:

The early, early reviews of the “new” Seattle P-I are in, and the thumbs are down. Glenn Nelson calls it a “ghost town”: Chuck Taylor writes that, as of mid-day, “the top story at the new online-only Seattle Post-Intelligencer, as it has been for at least 12 hours, is a photo of a cute puppy and a headline and blurb that link to a six-sentence blog item about adopting that and other puppies.” Seattlest says, basically, “give ’em time,” and sure enough, by early evening ET, a new story pops up on a Starbucks meeting.

I agree its early; that said, Hearst’s seeming inability to figure out what it was doing in Seattle forestalled valuable transition time.

In terms of content– by my own count (and I admit, I still need to totally figure out Seattle P-I’s feed system) my RSS feed for the “local news” section of the online PI has racked up one item all day. My Seattle Times feed? 41 stories.

But, as I said, it is early.

Meanwhile, in Denver

Westword continues to own the In Denver Times story (shows what an alt-weekly with a paid staff can do). They snag a really informative interview with Steve Foster, managing editor of the not yet website. For me, the most interesting part of the interview was this exchange where Foster questioned the total applicability of a non-profit model by invoking– sports.

In Denver, sports coverage is a big thing. I have personal doubts that non-profit models should be used to produce sports news. Non-profit news organizations should be providing good government coverage, good investigative reporting — and as big a sports fan as I am, and as much of my career has been devoted to sports coverage, for a non-profit to be producing that, I don’t think it’s for the good of the community that’s supporting it. Sports coverage in particular to me is part of a for-profit model. And I believe that, at least in the city of Denver, to provide in-depth local coverage, it has to include sports.

Read that and the rest of the conversation here.