For more information or updates, visit Highline’s website here: http://www.highlineschools.org/Pages/Home.aspx

Click image to download your own PDF of our print version you can print yourself.

We’re trying an “experiment in irony” here at your normally online-only B-Town Blog – we’re printing up free weekly one-page, double-sided, 8-1/2 x 11 inch condensed versions of our online publication, and distributing them around various Burien businesses.

Edited and Designed by Nicholas Johnson, if this experiment fails, these are surely to become collector’s items – so get yours today!

You can find ‘em at the following area locations (with more to be added if it “takes off”):

• The Tin Room
• The Mark Restaurant & Bar
• Burien Press
• Mick Kelly’s Irish Pub
• Elliott Bay Brewery

As we said, this project is an “experiment in irony” (WTFH?! an online-only publication doing print?!), and it’s meant to supplement our regular, daily edition, oftentimes with bonus content and photos.

But don’t worry, we’re not switching our business over to a dying medium – we’re simply trying something new; plus, it’s only one (double-sided) page so just chillax will ya?

And we know a lot of folks still enjoy reading tree-based products, especially since not everyone has an iPad yet. Heck, we even enjoy reading ink on paper occasionally (as well as risking those oh-so-painful paper cuts…) and we promise that we’ll only use 100% recyclable paper.

If you’d rather just download and print your own PDF and kill part of a tree yourself, click here to get your very own collectible version of Edition #1.

There is dedicated advertising space in it, so if you’re an area business and want to hop on board our newfangled old-world experiment, please email Janet Grella: janetgrella@msn.com.

We’re proud to announce a news partnership with a Seattle-based media outlet you may have heard of – The Seattle Times – as The B-Town Blog and four of its sister sites (along with three other local blogs) are now part of The Times’ innovative local news site partnership!

What does this mean for us? Hopefully, more exposure for our stories (as well as for Southwest King County area news), as The Times will now be posting and linking to content originally created by us. Also, we will now be “official” partners with them, which means we’ll be posting more relevant stories from their outstanding staff, including such luminaries as Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter Susan Kelleher, who just happens to be the sister of one of our best friends (screenwriter Tim Kelleher).

We see it as a definite win-win for both parties, as well as for our Readers.

On a personal note, just seeing the iconic, classic old-school Seattle Times logo on this site gives me goosebumps. When I was a kid in sixth grade, I “published” my first “newspaper” called The Seattle Star (yes, I stole the name from a defunct old Seattle paper), and I remember spending hours hand-drawing its logo to look just like the font used by The Times. I think the logo was the best part of that publication, which consisted mostly of jokes stolen from Mad Magazine, and for which I charged 25-cents to any sucker family member who’d take pity on me.

Amazing how life comes back at you with surprises isn’t it?

Here’s what The Seattle Times has to say about our partnership (here’s a link to their announcement):

The Seattle Times is expanding its partnerships with local news Web sites with the addition of eight more sites today. That brings the total number of partner Web sites to 27. (See the complete list, along with their latest headlines.)

Partnering with The Times today are:

• Shoreline Area News and editor Diane Hettrick.
• My Edmonds News and editor Teresa Wippel.
• The B-Town Blog (Burien), as well as four other sites operated by Scott Schaefer: The Waterland Blog (Des Moines), Normandy Park Blog, Tukwila Blog and SeaTac Blog.
• Surrounded By Water (Mercer Island) and editor Ellie.
  

The Times’ effort to build community-news relationships began last August with the launch of the Networked Journalism project. Read about that project here.

The other partner sites are:

• Capitol Hill Seattle Blog
• Central District News
• Fremont Universe
• Magnolia Voice
• My Ballard
• PhinneyWood.com
• Queen Anne View
• Rainier Valley Post
• Seattle Local Health Guide
• West Seattle Blog
• White Center Now
• Aurora | Seattle
• Beacon Hill Blog
• Eastlake Ave. Blog
• Kirkland Views
• MLTnews.com
• Redmond Neighborhood Blog
• Seattle Beer News
• Three Sheets Northwest

Grand Central Bakery, a longtime bakery in Seattle and Portland, is building its newest location in downtown Burien, at 626 SW 152nd Street, in the building formerly occupied by Restaurante CentroAmericano.

Employees from the bakery were on hand at the finish line of last Sunday’s Cove to Clover 5k race, passing out Oatmeal Stout Cake and bread with jam. Rumor has it that some runners even ended up “hitting each other with baguettes.”

It’s nice to see an established bakery come to Burien, and on a personal note, we have many fond memories of eating at their original location in the Grand Central Building in Occidental Square in downtown Seattle.

Here’s a pic of their Burien space taken Tuesday (Mar. 16), currently under construction but moving towards a summer opening:

Here’s a blurb from their website:

COMING SUMMER 2010!

Freshly baked artisan breads, hand-made pastries and delicious sandwiches will soon be available in charming downtown Burien.

Soon we’ll pick up our hammers and get to work building a café that is as warm and inviting as the food we serve.

We can’t wait to meet you!

Here are some links:

• Grand Central Bakery website
• Facebook Page
• Twitter

[EDITOR'S NOTE: On March 17, 2009, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer published its final print edition, completing a more than 145-year run. Its online presence continues. We at The B-Town Blog, while excited about the future of neighborhood blogs such as ours, lament the folding of great US newspapers, particularly those with such rich histories and stellar legacies as the P-I.

Scott Schaefer and Mark Neuman, of the B-Town Blog, worked together on their high school newspaper, The West Seattle High Chinook, a few decades back. They were fortunate enough to have as their advisor and journalism teacher a lady who truly is one of the very best in the state of Washington, Miss Dorothea Mootafes, known a little better as Dorothy, and affectionately as Miss Moo. Miss Moo has been retired from the Seattle School District for over twenty-five years, lives in the Roosevelt area of Seattle and is quite active in her church and various teacher organizations.

We recently asked her to reflect on the passing of the P-I, and let us in on her P-I memories.

This four-part Sunday series, which concludes today, began with Miss Moo recalling taking her students to the P-I building on Sixth and Wall Street in the mid 1970s.

“In the lobby were the words of Thomas Jefferson which continue to imply what the role of the newspaper should be in a free society:

‘If it were left to me to decide whether to have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.’”]

Part Four:
by Dorothea Mootafes

When Kennedy was nominated, the Thursday July 14, 1960, P-I read “It’s Kennedy” and the front page included one of Jim Bishop’s stories in his traditional writing format, “The Day Kennedy Was Nominated.”

Westbrook Pegler was still writing his opinion column but better balanced by “On The Line” with Bob Considine, one of Drew Pearson’s “Washington Merry Go Round” columns and David Sentner of the Hearst Headline Service with “Convention Window.”

The November 10, 1960 election issue had a full-page photo of the young president-elect whose election margin was described as the “Tightest in Nearly Half A Century.” Frank Conniff of the Hearst Headline Services gave his observations on Kennedy.

Kennedy’s inauguration was the Hearst Headline Service story on January 21, 1961. His now famous words were at the top the page:

“Let every nation know, whether it wish us good or ill, that we will pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend or oppose any foe in order to assure the survival of liberty.”

The P-I of November 8, 1980 proclaimed the “Reagan Landslide.” Editorial columnists that day included Jack Anderson and Flora Lewis. OP Ed writers were Russell Baker, William Safire, and T. D. Allman of The New York Times. A David Horsey cartoon appeared, a congratulations to the new President.

Many Horsey cartoons followed including two Pulitzer Prize winners in 1999 and 2003. I recall when Horsey was an outstanding staff member of the excellent Ingraham High School Cascade.

These reflections of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer are becoming longer than the final edition of the P-I a few weeks ago. In conclusion I’ll borrow some words of the P-I headline on Wednesday, October 18, 1995, referring to the “Refuse to Lose” season of the Seattle Mariners. Etched in the minds of every Seattle fan was a front page photo of a compassionate Alex Rodriguez consoling a weeping Joey Cora. “Thanks for the Ride, M’s,” the banner headline read. We have been provided with a lifetime of P-I editorials, news stories, and features, not to mention comic strips which live In our memories, at least one of which fortunately has moved on to The Seattle Times (Blondie). There are those hoping Dennis the Menace also will find a home there. For all of the years of information, entertainment, and thought, to The P-I -“thanks for the ride.”

Even more important than the pleasure and thought The P-I and other vanishing newspapers have brought us are these facts:

• Up to the present, even other media tell us, newspapers are still responsible for 65 per cent of the news.
• A free press is a constraint on those who would impose their will on an uninformed public.
• When The P-I folded, it was said that Tim Eyman, the perennial initiative writer, would dance on The P-I’s grave. There would be one less critic of his over-zealous initiatives.
• Just before he died, Peter Jennings reported on a survey of young people which showed a large number thought a newspaper should send its stories to the government for approval before printing them. Every high school journalist would cringe at that idea of prior review!

Although history tells us that Thomas Jefferson read few newspapers himself after eight years of being criticized by them, in the end the saddest part about losing The P-I and all the other newspapers which have folded already or will soon stop publication is we may soon be left with the society the third president rejected: a government without newspapers.

- 30 -

[EDITOR'S NOTE: On March 17, 2009, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer published its final print edition, completing a more than 145-year run. Its online presence continues. We at The B-Town Blog, while excited about the future of neighborhood blogs such as ours, lament the folding of great US newspapers, particularly those with such rich histories and stellar legacies as the P-I.

Scott Schaefer and Mark Neuman, of the B-Town Blog, worked together on their high school newspaper, The West Seattle High Chinook, a few decades back. They were fortunate enough to have as their advisor and journalism teacher a lady who truly is one of the very best in the state of Washington, Miss Dorothea Mootafes, known a little better as Dorothy, and affectionately as Miss Moo. Miss Moo has been retired from the Seattle School District for over twenty-five years, lives in the Roosevelt area of Seattle and is quite active in her church and various teacher organizations.

We recently asked her to reflect on the passing of the P-I, and let us in on her P-I memories. Today we continue a four-part Sunday series by Miss Moo.]

by Dorothea Mootafes

Some columnists are associated with presidents. I always thought of Marianne Means as beginning with John F. Kennedy, but she actually wrote for 50 years for the Hearst newspapers from Harry Truman to George W. Bush. On October 5, 2008, in her farewell column, she wrote:

“It’s a new world, for someone else to figure out. So I bid you fine farewell, and I will miss you all terribly particularly my great mentors at the Hearst newspapers.”

Marianne Means was among the first women whose opinion columns appeared in The P-I. Maureen Dowd, Helen Thomas, Ruth Montgomery, Marcia Freeman, and Mary McGrory were among the others.

Men expressing their thoughts through the years in The P-I have been many: Frank Conniff, Jack Anderson, Shelby Scates. Jack DeYonge, George Will, Fendell Yerxa, Drew Pearson, Westbrook Pegler, Fulton Lewis, Jr., Jack McCoy, David Horsey, Jack Hopkins, James Reston, Paul O’Connor, Richard E. Thompson, Patrick J. Buchanan, Jack Douglas, William Safire, Russell Baker, Charles Dunsire, O. Casey Corr, Charles Sykes, Dan Coughlin, Bob Considine, Charles Osgood, Bill Prochnau, Joel Connelly, Sam Angeloff, George Dixon.

For this article of remembrance, I entered my basement with its myriad of yellowing and aromatically scented Post-Intelligencers proclaiming presidential nominations, elections, and inaugurations as well as the rare times when Seattle sports teams triumphed nationally (the Seattle Supersonics in 1979 when they won the NBA Championship and the Seattle Mariners in 1995 when they stopped one game short of playing in the World Series).

The Thursday, May 5, 1977 issue described David Frost’s interview of Richard Nixon which just last year was remembered with the Academy Award nominated movie “Frost-Nixon” based on that historical event.

“Ike New President,” a banner headline on November 5, 1952, announced the nation’s return to rule of the Republican Party for the first time since the Depression, twenty years earlier. The lead editorial that day was a full page in length by the regular editorial width with the title “It’s Ike,” written by William Randolph Hearst, Jr.

In a call for unity, the younger Hearst wrote in one section:

“The Hearst Newspapers and this writer share in the elation of General Eisenhower because we were on his side.” He quoted his father with the following: “The Hearst newspapers are not Democratic in the party sense, nor again are they Republican. In fact, they are not party organs of any kind.”

“The Hearst papers hold as their guiding policy Lincoln’s injunction to support any man when he is right and oppose him when he is wrong.”

“This was Pop’s policy.

“This is our own.”

In the logo of the editorial page that day was a thumbnail photo of the elder Hearst next to his words: “Great issues are never invented or created by political leaders. Real issues make themselves.”

I could not help but remember that the elder Hearst, because of his sensational yellow journalism, was one of those blamed for creating the issue of the Spanish-American War.

The editorial page that day in 1952 included Westbrook Pegler’s “The Republic Is Badly Damaged,” and Fulton Lewis, Jr., “Truman’s Last Order.” The man from Missouri’s flaws were tempered only by Drew Pearson’s “Bitter Campaigns of the Past,” reviewing some of history’s “hottest political campaigns.” The Op Ed page had a soothing effect with E. V. Durling’s “On the Side,” “The Mirror Of Your Mind,” “City Bred Farmer” with Clarence Dirks, and Ph. D. Richmond Barbour with “Parents’ Corner.”

The full page advertisements scattered throughout could have enticed readers in our own era to spend the country out of our recession.

THANK YOU READERS!

As you can see in the statistics chart below, our April traffic continued to grow to record numbers, at a steady clip of +24% for Unique Visitors (19,108) and +18% for Pageviews (over 33,000!):

Since January of this year, the number of Unique Visitors for The B-Town Blog is up by nearly +49% and +55% for Pageviews.

And since launching, our daily traffic growth has been an almost-unfathomable +7,249%!

We credit our recent traffic surge to a few things:

• Our ridiculous Aprils Fool’s issue became a viral hit, tripling our traffic over two full days.
• After doing an online survey, we decided to re-focus on frequently-updated Local News and Event Listings, something we strongly believe our local media competition isn’t doing well.
• Our continued, focused online paid Advertising efforts using Google AdWords.
• Our ongoing focus on being involved in the community, from being an active member of Discover Burien and the Southwest King County Chamber of Commerce to holding various fundraisers.
• Viral marketing efforts using Facebook and Twitter (we have some secrets too that we’re now offering on a Social Media Consultation Service, where we’ll help your business utilize these amazing tools).
• Our recent :30-second TV spot that aired locally on CNN via Comcast Spotlight.
• Sponsorship of the Highline Vintage Jazz Festival, which gave us eight radio mentions on KPLU.
• The hiring of freelance journalists who bring more unique, credible coverage exclusive to The B-Town Blog (you can help us continue this cause by donating to our “Freelance Fund” which goes directly to them).

Like last year, we have a booth at the Burien Farmer’s Market, where we will serve as the one and only “official blog.” Come on by every Thursday between 11am and 3pm – we’ll be on 10th Ave SW between SW 151st and SW 152nd (and at the new location when it moves to Burien Town Square), so come over and say hi!

We’d also like to extend a special shout-out to all our Advertisers, as they are the ones who have taken a chance on our product, and hopefully are seeing rewards.

If you’re a business considering Advertising, email us for our brand new Media Kit, which includes some amazing testimonials from happy Advertisers like the Highline Athletic Club and others.

Again, thanks for being a Reader of The B-Town Blog – keep in mind we’re still in our infancy and there are a lot of great new elements coming soon!

Tuesday, March 17th, 2009, will be the final print edition of The Seattle P-I, which is transitioning over to an online-only venture.

The local angle for this area is that several P-I staffers live in the Burien area, including Managing Editor David McCumber, as well as Layout Editor Gene Achziger, who is a Des Moines resident.

We met Gene at the Poverty Bay Wine Festival, where we spoke with him about his job at the P-I, the future of newspapers, websites, blogging and much more.

One interesting thing we learned about Gene is that his Redondo house is rather prolific, as it’s got the old Bubbleator Elevator dome from the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair in the front yard as a greenhouse!

We wish Gene and any other former P-I staffers the best of luck, and being true journalists at heart, we’ll miss the printed version, and we wish the online one the best of luck!

Here’s some info on the Bubbleator, courtesy Wikimapia.org:

The Bubbleator, a plexiglass sphere that worked as an elevator between floors of the fair’s Washington State Coliseum (now KeyArena), has been flourishing as a greenhouse built into a Des Moines residence since 1987.

After the fair, the Bubbleator was moved to the Center House, but was removed during a remodel.

Current owner Gene Achziger, a P-I layout editor, located the structure, stored in pieces, in a warehouse in 1984. At that time, it was owned by Children’s Hospital. The hospital was unable to come up with a life for the dome, so it was sold to Achziger for $1,000.

Here’s a Google Street View of Gene’s Bubbleator, which we rode when we were kids, and to us is as iconic as the P-I’s globe, the Space Needle, Bobo the stuffed gorilla, hydroplanes, J.P. Patches and about 100 other local northwest treasures:

View Larger Map

The result?

A little blurb in the P-I’s “Big Blog,” which can be read right here.

Thanks Monica!