Eat All About It has a list of all the new websites that are being started by former P-I staffers. Turns out there’s quite a bit, and the list does go on and on. Eat All About It itself is written by Rebekah Denn, who used to be a food writer for the P-I. It’s only been a week, so I expect we’ll see this list get bigger as time goes on. Rebekah promises to update it as she finds out what her former colleagues are up to.

Hat tip to Lost Remote.

The Alaskan Way Viaduct is closed off and on this weekend for regularly-scheduled inspections and maintenance. It was also open for tours yesterday. This video shows parts of the viaduct and the Battery Street tunnel when they’re closed to cars and open to people.

Alaskan Way Viaduct Tour from cjboffoli on Vimeo.

Also, photos on Flickr from user joeszilagyi.

It would be tough to find someone more pro-digital than me. But at the same time there’s one bit of being all-digital that always makes me uneasy when I think about it, and that’s archiving. A digital datastore can contain an entire warehouse worth of documents and photos, all squeezed into the physical space of one hard drive. And that’s amazing. But it’s also amazingly easy to lose that hard drive, or to drop it and damage it, and doing so is the equivalent of an entire warehouse burning down in a matter of seconds.

So we make backups. And so we keep data off site, and sync data to the internet. I have my personal photo collection stored on two hard drives in my house and one at my office. But even that makes me uneasy, because I have to keep that collection going through active effort. It’s all tied to me, and if I’m gone there’s no one around who will know what to do with this stuff. There really is no digital equivalent of coming across a shoebox of old photos in Grandma’s attic. I wonder what we’re losing because of that.

Newspapers, too. It feels like the one thing we’re losing in the transition to digital news is the archives.  If you have a daily print run of a newspaper, it’s simple for a someone to grab an extra copy every day and put it in a box somewhere. Enough boxes and you’ve got a library with every issue of the newspaper going back for decades. Some newspapers are scanned into microfilm, so they take up less space and are more durable than paper. With modern technology you can even save a PDF of the paper every day.

But when the “paper” part of the newspaper goes away, how do you do that same kind of archiving? What kind of “daily unit” is there for a blog that can be updated at any time, or a sprawling website with dozens of people contributing to it? What is there that you can take and put away in a box, or on a hard drive even, that will serve as a record for the future? There’s not a lot of money in archiving. Libraries and museums do it as a public good, but they need money from other sources to keep it going. Newspapers sometimes have a staff person responsible for archiving, but that person doesn’t add anything to the bottom line and when it’s time to cut costs that position is at risk. Sure you can build a website where the archives are available electronically for all time, but all it takes is one decision to dump the archives, or for the website to go out of business and the hard drive to get erased for all of it to be gone. If a library burns down it’s a major event. But if a website goes offline and the one backup of the database is deleted, it’s scarcely noticed until it’s too late.

John C. Dvorak wrote about this recently, in an article called Our History: Error 404.

This doesn’t keep me up at night, but it gives me pain in the bottom of my stomach when I think about it. I also get pain reading this story from Benjamin Lukoff, referencing a Seattle Times article, where they say that in the last days of the P-I people were throwing boxes containing decades worth of research, records and documents into the trash.

In other corners of the newsroom, documents and sacred records that took years to accumulate were pulled from filing cabinets and discarded into dumpsters, gone in a matter of minutes.

In some ways this is worse, because it’s being done willfully. This is like a mob of arsonists torching the library. These documents are seen as trash, but then again just about every historic artifact probably was considered trash at the time. These documents could have been scanned, they could have been archived, they could have been donated to a museum or a library, but that all takes time. Time, money, and people, three things that are in short supply at the P-I during the transition.

Who knows what was lost. It could have actually been trash, much of it, documents that will have no significance tomorrow or in a hundred years. But it’s not for us to decide what will be important in the future, it’s our job to keep this stuff safe so others can decide later. But even then sorting through boxes and boxes of paper will take time, money, and people as well, and who’s to say those won’t still be in short supply 100 years from now?

I don’t have answers, and I don’t have ideas, but it seems like this is a big missing piece in the transition to digital that we’re making, and if a solution doesn’t show up soon it’s not going to happen and the concept of archives that can last across generations will go away.

The question of what will become of the P-I globe has finally been answered. Since the P-I will continue publishing, just on the web instead of on paper, they will keep occupying the same offices. They have a couple of years left on their lease, so they’re not going to move out of the building. And the globe will stay put on the roof, right where it’s been for over 20 years.

But don’t get too complacent about the globe. There’s always a chance this new venture could fail, or could choose to cut costs by moving into more cozy quarters. So let’s consider this the trial run for the next time the fate of the globe is called into question, so we’ll be ready to jump into action again.

It’s official: The Seattle P-I will continue as an online-only venture. The last paper edition will be printed tonight, and tomorrow will dawn a new day with a hopefully renewed company. This of course was the right decision, not to close shop and give up but to try to change with the times and offer a more relevant product. About 20 of the staff are staying on, down from a roster of over 150. That’s the worst part of this story, and maybe if they had considered going online-only a few years ago they could have saved more jobs. But by waiting until the last minute, until it was an emergency, they did themselves and their employees a big disservice.

The new executive producer, Michelle Nicolosi, gives some details of what the reborn site will be like. One change I’ve already noticed is that they’ve tidied up the URL. Instead of the cumbersome seattlepi.nwsource.com domain that they were trapped under forever, they’ve gone back to the URL they should have been at all along, www.seattlepi.com. Good first move. They’ve also kept a lot of the younger staff on board, like Monica Guzman, who will probably be better suited to a fast and lean online-only operation. Gone are the likes of copy editor Glenn Ericksen, who said the Web “lowers the standard of literacy all around. Who needs copy editors on the Web?” And Hector Castro, who said working online is “too tech-oriented.” Good people, probably, and great newspapermen, but overall probably not the kinds of attitudes that are needed at the New P-I.

So we’ll watch the P-I, and see what they tranform into. I don’t mourn the old P-I because I don’t think there’s anything special about news being delivered on paper that needs to be preserved. Online news is perfectly capable of being good news, and that’s what the P-I is going to have to be focused on from here out. This is a rough patch for the company that they need to climb out of, but beyond that it’s a chance for them to set an example for the rest of the nation that newspapers can work online. Everyone will be watching; they better not screw it up.

It looks like a grassroots movement is starting up to support the P-I globe, which is exactly what is needed to put public pressure on the company to make sure this Seattle landmark sticks around. I talked some about the globe last month, and since then it’s been getting a lot more attention. Just this week an online petition was started to urge the Hearst Corporation to save the globe, no matter what may happen to the newspaper itself. It was started by Robert Raketty of SeattleBlogger.com. There’s only 170 signatures so far, but more important than the number of signatures is how it’s serving to get people talking about the globe, which is what’s really needed. Monica Guzman blogged about it on the P-I’s own site. P-I photographer Joshua Trujillo paddled a kayak out into the bay to get a photo of the globe that he’s wanted to get for years (completely awesome by the way. I give you permission to stop reading and click on that link right now). And just yesterday the globe itself “wrote” an editorial making its own case to be saved.

This is the kind of grassroots support that was around back in the 80s, which resulted in the globe being moved to the new offices instead of being scrapped with the old building. It seems like there’s another movement starting around “Save the Globe” now, and hopefully Hearst is paying attention. Far too many Seattle landmarks have been lost; there’s a whole book chronicling the things that have come and gone. We’re at a point now where maybe we’ll have some influence in making sure the globe isn’t part of “Vanishing Seattle, Volume II”.

Ari at Ari Takes Pictures has photos of the demolition work that has started for the Capitol Hill light rail station. The station will be underground, but they need to demolish everything on the surface so they can start construction. It’s a couple of old houses and apartments one block east of Broadway, at John.

View Larger Map

Hat tip to Seattle Transit Blog.

Update: And video:

Demolition of three houses for light rail station on Broadway from Brad Kevelin on Vimeo.

Update: a look at the parcels where construction will be happening. Red areas will be the surface entrances to the station, blue will be available for development after the project is completed.

View Larger Map

It’s my estimation that there should be a Trader Joe’s on every street corner. Like Starbucks. Here in Carson City we only have one, but luckily it’s along my commute in and out of work, and only a short 10 minutes from my house. In the Seattle area there just aren’t enough for my tastes, so when I’m job hunting I’m going to have to pick a place to work based on if it’s in a neighborhood with Trader Joe’s.

But now there’s one more TJs to add to the list. The new Trader Joe’s in Ballard just opened this week. So now I can add Ballard to the list of places it’s OK to live.

Seattle Transit Blog reports that testing on the Link Light Rail line is becoming a regular occurrence, with operator training well underway. I think he said that they haven’t yet done a full downtown-to-airport run on the line, but trains have been running back and forth between stations all over the line. I can’t believe it’s taken Seattle this long to get a light rail system up and running, but I’m sure most of the people who have been following this saga for the last couple of decades can’t believe it either. It’s supposed to be open to passengers before the end of the year. Probably even this summer.

And there’s more good news. The airport line hasn’t even opened yet, and already they’ve broken ground on the University Link, heading north from downtown to the University of Washington campus. Where the airport line is mostly above ground, the line to the university will mostly entirely be underground, drilling a tunnel deep underneath Capitol Hill. That line is supposed to see its grand opening in 2016, a mere 7 years away!

So the newspapers may be starting blogs, but now also the blogs are starting newspapers. Check out the “print edition” of the Capitol Hill Seattle Blog, an automatically-generated PDF of the week’s top stories, laid out like a newspaper. It’s a little wonky and won’t win any design awards, but it’s definitely a fresh idea. I’ve long said that the newspaper business was upside down anyway. Instead of having the website be an electronic version of the newspaper, the paper should be a print version of the website. Once again it takes enterprising bloggers to make the risky moves.