Seattle’s 43rd Legislative District Democrats hosted an interesting panel discussion last night about the imminent demise of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which is due to close next month if no buyer steps forward. Panelists included the managing editor of the P-I, editors from the paper’s print rivals, the Seattle Times and alt-weekly The Stranger, a city councilman, and the chair of an organization trying to preserve Seattle’s status as a two-paper town.

As I listened to the panelists I was thinking about the writings of Clay Shirky, and about two ways in which the web has fundamentally undercut print journalism:

1. Craigslist has destroyed the financial foundation of the daily newspaper, by taking away the main source of advertising dollars: Classified ads. Nobody starts a job search these days by cracking open the local paper and skimming the want ads, and every year more people turn to the internet when shopping for cars, real estate and other goods that used to dominate print advertising.
2. Print newspapers require editors and fact-checkers to maintain the quality of their product; the printed page necessarily limits what gets published, and gatekeepers are required to filter out dreck and errata. The web allows anyone to publish anything, and makes no up-front effort to screen out nonsense; instead, it relies on an army of volunteers to find quality articles after the fact. People like Jason Kottke are the 21st century’s newspaper editors, trolling the web and linking to interesting or “newsworthy” stories, and the web makes that job both easier and less financially rewarding.

So the question isn’t really whether Seattle will become a one-paper town: It is, as the panelists agreed, what will happen when Seattle (and most other cities) become zero-paper towns within the next decade. The panel’s concern was that in-depth local reporting of, say, political corruption or city schools — stories that required months of legwork — would be lost; the web is ruthlessly efficient at wide-and-shallow reporting, on everything from sports scores to presidential campaigns, but no one has figured out how to make narrow-and-deep investigative journalism profitable in a post-newspaper world.

I think the answer, which probably won’t please the professional journalists on yesterday’s panel, is that we need to start making reducing the effort required to expose corruption or research the performance of city schools — that it’s time to bring tools like the Freedom of Information Act up to date, such that any information subject to a FOIA request is already online and available to armchair journalists. Publicly traded companies should be required to keep “live” financial reports online, instead of offering mere quarterly reports to under-informed investors — and a scam like Bernie Madoff’s should be impossible to pull off because everyone can see what he’s doing.

This is, unfortunately, not the best news for today’s professional journalists: The majority of them will be forced to find paying work in some other field. The market is unwilling to pay professionals for work that a swarm of amateurs will perform for free, whether it’s an opinions-page article on the city council meeting or an interview with the coach of the Seahawks — so it becomes a question of what amateurs aren’t doing for free, and how we can allow the amateurs to do those things cheaply and effectively.

The panel’s suggestion, in fits and starts, was to find ways for the public to fund investigative journalism as a public good — but I think that approach is a dead-end, and indeed one of the panelists was vocal about the dangers of allowing public officials to fund investigations of public corruption. It’s possible to imagine a PBS-like entity which performs the in-depth journalism functions of a city newspaper, but it’s also easy to imagine the conflicts of interest that would arise.

I’m also not thrilled with the right-wing Seattle Times being the only paper in town, but unless I come up with several hundred million dollars in the next thirty days, I don’t see how that’s going to be avoided. If I’m right, though, it’ll only be that way for a few more years.

Over at Andrew Sullivan’s blog, a reader writes that he believes Obama is unlikely to prosecute former Bush Administration officials for war crimes, and cites Abraham Lincoln to make his case:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

This analysis bothers me, because it implies there could only be one motive — vengeance — for enforcing our nation’s laws.

I think Obama urgently needs to prosecute lawbreaking members of the Bush Administration: Not as payback, but as a critical step in restoring the rule of law. As a step toward preventing the next generation of Nixonistas from romping into the Oval Office and violating laws with impunity, relying on Obama’s precedent that “bipartisan outreach” means forgiving the other party’s crimes.

I don’t want vengeance. I want the law enforced without regard to party affiliation, which would be a welcome change from what the party of Rove and Gonzales has wrought these past eight years. Instead of heeding Lincoln’s call to forgiveness, Obama’s Justice Department should follow a more recent creed: There are no Republican criminals and no Democratic criminals. There are just criminals.

Two observations, after watching Barack Obama’s first post-election press conference:

• It is, as others have noted, a genuine pleasure — after eight long painful years — to hear our new President speaking in complete sentences and giving intelligent answers to unscripted questions.
• My expectations for Obama have always been realistic: I thought he was the right candidate at the right time,1 and I supported him from day one, but I didn’t think he would lead us to the Promised Land or anything.

  That said, I’m starting to get the impression that we’ve all misunderstood — or underestimated — what Obama meant when he called himself a community organizer. At first I thought this meant merely that Obama had done hard yards in urban neighborhoods, had worked to bring jobs to communities, pull together voter registration drives, and so on: Good work, necessary work, but not an unusual activity or a sign of exceptional talent.

  Now I’m starting to think Obama meant community organizer as “a person who organizes communities” — that is, a person who recognizes (or creates) a shared purpose, and then organizes a community to achieve it. And, I’m starting to think, Obama has Einstein-level talent at this type of organizing: He’s rolling straight from the best-organized presidential campaign we’ve ever seen to the best-organized transition team we’ve ever seen, and shows no signs of stopping there.

  And this is Obama’s hidden talent. When all is said and done, Obama’s speech-making skills will be measured against Churchill and King and Lincoln — and I think people underestimate Obama because they pigeonhole him as a great public speaker, and assume his organizing skills are a secondary talent. In fact, the opposite is true: Obama’s soaring speeches are a gateway talent, and Obama’s real strength is that he’s devastatingly efficient at turning inspiration into action.

(Via Talking Points Memo.)

1. Specifically, I thought he was the first vote-with-your-heart candidate the Democrats had put forward in a long time, as opposed to vote-with-your-head candidates like John Kerry and the 2000 edition of Al Gore. [↩]

Listen to this excerpt from Barack Obama’s latest speech, in particular his choice of words at 0:52:

…and then read this:

¹² For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.

That’s Ephesians 6:12. When Obama talks about powers and principalities dividing us, and says it’s “the oldest trick in the book,” he’s talking about the Book, and he’s paraphrasing Scripture.

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

Ever wonder what would have happened if Luke had said yes when Vader offered to make him co-Emperor?

I think John McCain is finding out this week. I’m not sure where Obama fits into this analogy (though I suspect Obama’s Star Wars name actually is “Barack Obama”), but my impression of McCain has gone this route.

In 2004 I got off the sidelines and volunteered for the Howard Dean presidential campaign, and then for Democrats Abroad in Australia. I spent a lot of time volunteering, but kept my employer and my co-workers in the dark about what I did after hours. 1

In 2006 I did a little volunteering for Steve Young‘s congressional campaign, in California’s 48th District (which, unfortunately, was an hour’s drive from where I lived), and did some phone-banking against anti-union propositions on the California ballot that year. I didn’t do enough to attract anyone’s attention, so my politicking passed unnoticed by my colleagues. (Some of them found out later, after the company shut down our project and we all parted ways, but they didn’t know at the time.)

This year I was a delegate to the Washington State Democratic Convention in Spokane, so I took a day off work to attend; I didn’t really keep secret where I was going and why, and so — for the first time in my career — some of the co-workers around me became aware that I’m politically active.

And then this happened.

I happened to be volunteering at Darcy Burner‘s campaign office the day she was shooting “stock footage” for commercials — Darcy sitting with a crowd, Darcy walking down the street, etc. — so there are now several ads, airing on local television, in which Darcy Burner is walking down the street talking to… me. (I’m the guy walking next to her at the 0:16 mark.)

This did not escape the attention of my co-workers.

So, for better or worse, it’s now common knowledge at work that I’m a Democrat, and that I do Democratic things during the off hours. I’ve always tried to separate work and politics, in part because I don’t want to make any co-workers uncomfortable,2 and in part because of horror stories about people who find out their CEO is a vindictive McCain bundler or something, but this year I’m a Democrat even at the office.

1. My Australian employer barely noticed what I did during work hours, much less afterwards, which was one of the reasons why we parted ways in 2005. [↩]
2. …which hasn’t happened yet, as far as I know, since my colleagues are all passing around Palin jokes (is that a redundant phrase?) and if anything seem supportive. [↩]