Why is it that despite all this, I imagine you'll continue to espouse the same party line as SLOG, Publicola, Seattle Transit Blog, ..., and be yet another megaphone for the droning sameness of the Seattle monoculture.

"or if we should focus on fewer stories published less frequently like The New Yorker or Texas Monthly"

"Presently, just under 15 percent of Crosscut readers are using a tablet or cell phone to read. Nationally, however, one-third of Americans get their news on a mobile device."

I hope you see some incongruity in these two statements.

I think you're taking a very thoughtful, careful approach as you reconsider the future of Crosscut, Greg. Kudos to you and the team.

I think the point of diversity is central to the future of the enterprise, particularly in touching on the topics most experienced in the daily lives of the young, tech savvy crowd you mention: quality education choices, quality environmental stewardship, smart growth strategies that create opportunity for the middle class and small businesses.

You can also play a central role in information distribution, like what you're already doing with the email. I read David Brooks by clicking on him through you. The Atlantic article on Obama's debate performance was striking - and I got to it through you. Keep it up, but I also think the notion of sharing wisdom makes sense to. You espoused in another venue the idea of profiling some of our region's business and civic leaders as a way to share their insight. I think that makes a lot of sense.

And, make photocopies of Peter Jackson. He's top of class.

Perhaps I'm a bit sensitive since the whole "binders of women" thingie...but do you think you come up with a list of WOMEN editors that you admire and would be willing to let lead Crosscut? The guys you list are all great, but in a state and city with a tradition of strong women in politics and business, a news organization with a gal at the helm would be a fantastic new voice. If you can't think of any women suitable for the job, I'm sure your readers can ship you a list or two (no binder, we promise!).

"Food and transportation" are among your most popular articles? I became a member for policy and political news, hopefully less Seattle-centric and with an increased Olympia emphasis.

And DJ is spot on regarding Peter Jackson. Your loss is Everett's gain!

I like Crosscut for getting at the 'why' of things. I think that's the chief fault of TV news, which gives 3 or 6 sentences, mostly about who was killed how, which I find much less interesting.

I do take issue with anyone affiliated in any way with the Seattle Times. I was a long-time PI subscriber. When it stopped publishing I subscribed to the Times for a year or two but in the end cancelled it because I just could not bear it's insufferable editorial voice and choices. I am not interested in any whining from the Blethens about, essentially, how poorly off they are and how we should bust unions, cut government employment, which mostly affects women, and give them more tax breaks. I am not interested in that voice or those issues at all.

As for publishing less frequently, I'm not in favor. I like getting your emails each day and would be sad to see less of you.

I don't care about reading anything on devices besides my computer. I understand that this preference lives in the dying minority, but still, please don't leave those of us who are not interested in using the other devices to access you.

Greg...

This is another excellent statement, in sufficient detail to give us a much clearer idea of where Crosscut has been, where you are, and where you want to go.

Please don't pander to the mobile-device-addicted. They can get plenty even now from Crosscut, by using their mini-mobile devices. But they should be encouraged to be even more adequately informed, and to interact online with Crosscut, by using their laptops (or desktops or iPads or equivalent) -- for the in-depth, detailed reporting and analysis that Crosscut can provide but others don't or won't. By sticking to the guidelines and intentions outlined in your Publisher's Notes, Crosscut will offer a needed contrast to the local so-called mainstream media (print, TV, radio).

Don't get spread thin with spot-news updates or an afternoon update or a hard copy version. That's what everyone else who can do that is doing. You are not in the spot-news or headline-squirting business.
The NY Times online just posts everything as soon as possible. Let them do that 24/7. You can do it 5 days a week. This will help you to get the story right, rather than just first but too often incomplete or incorrect. (The most glaring recent example of early-but-wrong was some of the TV reporting on the Citizens United SupCt decision.) A Crosscut story can and should get it right, provide context, and also point up how and why too-quick reporting was either incorrect or sloppy.)

BTW: Please avoid the use of "incredible" as the all-purpose superlative. For example, say that the Northwest or the Great Nearby is "unusually diverse" or "exceptionally diverse" region. If that's really so. And diverse in what ways?

I couldn't disagree more strenuously. The death of the P.I. and the ongoing diminishment of the Seattle Times has created a gigantic news vacuum in this city. There is more than enough thumb-sucking to go around. This city is in dire need of nuts and bolts news reporting.

I appreciate your thinking, and hope that you can deepen your focus on the 'why' and 'how'. I think to show the rich threads that are part of the whole picture, any theme likely has a number of whys and hows provided by different contributors. In addition, some interesting commentary deserves periodic followup and reframing.

One example of articles I always appreciated, are contributions by Prof. Morrill. Geography, in its social-economic-locational realities, is ever changing. By tracing developments over time, one might get a sort of pulse on where we are going.

An example of an article that shocked and saddened me to the point of no comment as I would sound trite, is the current article about prison rapes. Consider for a moment if the realities created by incarceration, both on individuals and the community, are a theme of sorts. Other articles, other angles, other other contributors, and successes and failures over time, would put this single article in a context that helps me understand 'why' and 'how' and potentially moves me to action.

And we await your comments on the Seattle Times' move to advertise their political proclivities.

Here, here! Covering the Eastside in a deeper and more meaningful fashion will be welcomed by your members on "this side of the pond."

I've probably said this before, but what the hell, repetition is the essence of genius and persuasion. If you are to have any hope of being more than a vanity project for a few earnest backers with money to burn and pathetic pretentions of turning this site into the PBS Newshour of the Northwest, you need to do two things:

Report news. It's the only way to make yourselves indispensable. Focusing your mission on "why" ends up being an excuse for self-indulgence to the point of verbal masturbation. In a world of 6 million blogs, few people are crying out for yet another op-ed section, no matter how scintillating. (And I hate to break it to you, but Crosscut ain't exactly winning any scintillation derbies these days -- not that it matters.)

So forget this pious elevation of "why" above the other four Ws and the H. Report the news, and take some scalps as you do it. (News without blind, unreasoning fear on the part of those you cover is not news at all.) Now, to do that, you will have to hire some real reporters, as opposed to the usual fact-free, agenda-driven hipster wannabes like Josh 'n Erica, along with a tough and perpetually pissed off, tyrannical, old-school city editor of the Chicago school whose only goal is blood up to his ankles, as opposed to some polite, washed-up, pipe-smoking do-gooder from this journalism school or that failed outlet of yesteryear, not to put too fine a point on it. Give 'em a year to generate a steady stream of shocking yet accurate stories, and if they don't perform then fire their unfortunate asses and find a different crew until you get people who deliver the goods.

Change your name. "Crosscut" is awful. It screams op-ed, which in turn screams, "I ought to get around to reading it sometime, maybe after I get around to scheduling that dinner with the people who put out friendship feelers three years ago." So, first turn yourselves into a news operation so people will have a compelling reason to check in here every day, and then give yourselves a name that tells people to come here to learn who stole what and how he accomplished it, and when, where and how politician A knifed politician B in the back. Why? That'll take care of itself.

Do those two things, and you just might succeed. Keep running an op-ed section, and you'll sink in a sea of indifference. Honest. Oh, and if you do succeed on the news and name front, then -- and only then -- you can reward yourselves by hiring a irascible son of a bitch of a columnist who will channel Mike Royko and H.L. Mencken, and make even more people come to your site. But first, the cake. The frosting comes later.

To NOTFAN: you are right about making the site a source of news - but just imagine the cost of that! The name - nothing wrong with that, a Crosscut with a Mossback, all it needs is some Sawdust, some Bilgewater and some Ballast!

I think it would cost about $250,000 a year for the people, i.e. four reporters and an editor. Keep 'em starving until they get to the promised land, and keep 'em hungry after that.

I visit Crosscut when I'm bored stiff. Most times I have to look at the date to see if the calendar has moved because there's a certain sameness to this rag. Essays and op-eds aren't news. Never have been never will be. News=who, what, where, when, and how.

If you're looking for an example of what local news reporting should be that's close to home, try here http://washingtonstatewire.com/ It ain't perfect but it makes Crosscut seem like a whiffle ball bat instead of a vehicle noted for it cultural sharpness.

If you think your mission should be op-eds in any type of format then you have about three more years before you sink into irrelevance.

The real world is a tad more nuanced than "news" or "opinion." Here's an example of that nuance from your example of what local news reporting should be— washingtonstatewire:

"Pollster Scott Rasmussen says you can’t make any guesses about this year’s presidential race, but you can definitely see why it’s going to be close. Addressing the Washington Policy Center’s annual banquet Monday night, Rasmussen says no one seems to believe either Barack Obama or Mitt Romney will deliver the one thing Americans want most — a disciplined approach to government. Which is why Americans seem to be waiting for a new Cincinnatus. Washington State Wire presents Rasmussen’s full speech."

I vote for the nuance of the real world— it furthers critical thinking.

I wish that critical thinking meant something in the great scheme of life but it doesn't. The perfect example just happened, scientists were convicted of manslaughter in Italy because they didn't predict a major earthquake. It's seems that Galileo Galilei never lived and Italians haven't progressed much beyond the 1500's. I'm sure there are many more examples out there, this one just happened to be handy, feel free to pick one of your own.

I click on Crosscut every day to see what's here and to read the back-and-forth in the comment section. I'll probably continue to do that regardless of whatever direction Crosscut moves in.

But I'll tell you this: You need new blood and more of it. Every time I see the bylines Ted Van Dyk, Knute Berger, Steve Clifford, Ronald Holden, Judy Lightfoot, Anthony Robinson, Chris Vance, and today Bruce Chapman (ugh!), I just click on through to the Stranger.

On the other hand I will read anything written by Dan Chasan, Art Thiel, Dick Nelson, and Hugo Kugiya (before he left town, alas).

What is the difference? Another commenter said it best. Navel-gazing. There's too much of it, and most of it comes from someone's bourgeois comfort zone, or from some top-down perspective that, no matter what the subject, the reporter always starts at the top of whatever pecking order the context contains.

Crosscut's reporting and commentary is institutionally based and not people-centric. That makes for a dull read.

And can you please cease, for good and for all, this obnoxious practice of breaking stories up into two or three pages, or at least put a single page option at the TOP of every story? Thank you for reading this rant.

I suspect everyone who took Journalism 101 has a similar memory of a crusty professor who fashioned himself after Jason Robards leaning back in his chair behind the rounded and chipped oak desk set next to the window with the pages of that story, your best work to date, the channeling of Hunter and Wolfe, Terkel and Bernstein written in a late night fugue state fueled by nicotine, caffeine and the contact high from your roomates' seemingly endless succession of bong hits, those bright white pages of brilliance, the ultimate sum of all your experience, hanging briefly in the air to slide slowly, one at a time, back and forth on their way to the institutionalized checkered floor tiles, as he looks up at you over the glasses perched on the end of his nose, exasperation etched in the lines between his knitted brows, and growls for what must have been the thousandth time in his career, "Damnit Hyde, don't tell me, show me!"

My thanks to the person who reminded me of this recently. Bears repeating. Right up there with keep those sentences short and to the point. And avoid cliches.

Julie Gunter's profile of Maureen Walsh is a prime example of the kind of "people-centric" stories I'd like to see more of in Crosscut.

Dan Barry's series in The New York Times on Donna's Diner and Elyria, Ohio is about the struggles of a nation told through the lens of everyday lives. I agree, it's about people.

The institutions we create to serve us, the policies we form, the votes we make, all culminate in the individual lives around us. So, so many stories, and so few are telling them. It seems so odd to me since those are the stories that really matter and ultimately the ones with the most chance to make a difference, to make change, to contextualize the abstractions of civics. Why was The Wire perhaps the greatest television ever made?

Real storytelling like Barry's is difficult to do well, and takes real time, but much more fulfilling than armchair quarterbacking. If you're going to spend the money to produce a "news" site and you wish to differentiate yourself from the rest, then SHOW me.

It's all about "show me."

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/us/this-land-corner-of-hope-and-worry-elyria.html?pagewanted=all

I read Greg Shaw's

http://crosscut.com/2012/10/18/crosscut/110996/public-publisher-vision-one-month/?_cs=1#c38368

with this as an exemplary (!) excerpt

"Our greatest value proposition, however, may be that Crosscut insists on shining a big bright light on the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ in journalism’s formula for complete story-telling and thorough investigation." From a news perspective, our region is doing OK with the who, what, when and where. This is the basic information gathering of reporting and good police work..."

and I am appalled!

A "shining" light, no less? Formulated by a very "dim" light that is unsure how "bright" it actually is?

To do anything of the kind that is proposed at

http://crosscut.com/2012/10/18/crosscut/110996/public-publisher-vision-one-month/?_cs=1#c38368 would require the resources of the Columbia Journalism Review, or at least of a sharpie like Jack Shaefer ex of Slate, now of Reuters. For Greg Shaw's statement

"You may remember the "5 Ws and an H" from high school journalism – who, what, when, where, why and how.From a news perspective, our region is doing OK with the who, what, when and where. This is the basic information gathering of reporting and good police work."

is not the case, as little or less so than in most parts of the country.

Say I am Bill Gates and were approached by Greg Shaw after reading his statement I wouldn't give Greg Shaw a
dime, whereas if Michael Kinsley approached me with the notion to do an in-depth news aggregator for the greater Northwest I would not hesitate.

What is a really good agregator? Artsdaily e.g.
http://www.aldaily.com/
and not chiefly only for its three column approach but
for the links on the left side to a lot of important papers and blogs - not that aldaily.com/ could not be an even better aggregator, especially since it is run under the auspices of the Chronicle of Higher Education.

There would be links to all the papers from Bellingham down to Vancouver. If a show opens, Crosscut would link to
all the not so many or all that scintilating reviews,
and in that fashion it would become an essential site and run a far bigger server bill!

If CROSSUT is ever going to live up to its name, the time may have passed, it has acquired a certain ballast, habits, lethargic ones, that do not stack up well nationally.
Best of luck,

For the record, I'd give Michael Kinsley the money ahead of me as well. Good points (all). Thanks.

Well, Greg, these recent posts seems to have mixed wake-up calls with specific proposals for differences in content and tone.

How about some more comments from you, addressing at least some of these posts? What is worth doing, possible to do? What isn't? Has any of this given you further ideas for strategy?

Please try not just to float trial balloons, with members/readers sitting back, saying yes, no, or maybe. Maybe one possibility: involve members/readers in some way less feckless than klatsches in the office, chatting up staff...