What is the Pubs?

For many years, the proportion of the newspaper budget that has gone into reportage and writing seems to me to have been in decline, esp. if you measure pay by the relationship of reporters and writers salaries to the income of comparable people in other professions. If I am correct than it was inevitable that the enterprise(s) would collapse.

I find it difficult or impossible to believe to believe that there is not a demand for local news. The question is what is it worth to the consumer and how does one pay for it?

In the current chaos how can one determine what people will and will not pay for? One answer is to look in a mirror. In my own case Huffington has become my major news portal. I look there first thing in the morning for links to more traditional media. Besides whatever HP is making from click throughs, I suspect eventually HP will become a part of the NYT or WP .. or even merge with Politico to offer both the free portal service AND content that people will be willing to pay for.

If I am correct, then we should expect to see real competitors for HP soon. Drudge is sort of a competitor .. in the sense that the NY Post competes with the NYT. However, Drucge and Huff represent a very limited taste of what could exist. A group of similar minded folks are founding something si ilar to the Huff for Seattle, we call this the Seattle PUB.

PUBS are like the Huff or Drudge .. a mix of portal and multi author blogs with some overall editorial point of view. The analogy to Drinking Liberally is intended. Imagine something based on a mix of fairly rational but very well informed people who represent some of the intellectual, political, social and corporate mix that is Seattle?

The Pub will not be right or left. Among our contributors we already have a profound social activist working in the African American community, an economist, a member of the Nobel committee who studied in Seattle, two working artists, a Seattle Historian, a leading environmental scientist, a biblical literalist, a militant atheist, a Microsoftie, … etc.

Hopefully a lot of folks will see our effort as appealing to their POV and use SP as a portal. The underlying challenge, however remains can a PUB, like HP, Drudge, or generate money to support reporting and writing. All of the SP and most of the HP writers are not paid. We hope to bring traffic to our contributors websites and blogs where different for profit models can be developed by individual entrepreneurs.

Finally, the effort of Seattle PUB is obviously synergistic with Goldy’s effort to create an interactive web of blogs and SP will be part of the JOA.