Mossback TV

Recently, I was a guest on Public Exposure with Stan Emert, a longtime Seattle talk show on SCANtv, the public access channel. Emert wasn't there, however: I went pundit-to-pundit with John Arthur Wilson, the guest host. John and I worked together for years at Seattle Weekly and Eastsideweek, where John was an editor and political reporter. He then left to work for King County Executive Ron Sims and is now a public affairs consultant. John is a TV veteran — he was at KING-TV during the glory years, and back in the '90s he and I were frequent guests on KCTS-TV's old Seattle Week in Review show with Barry Mitzman.

John and I have not been on TV together in a long while, so it was a fun reunion to talk about local issues. It was a friendly, live, informal chat (you'll notice that throughout I am "Skip," not Knute). OK, not totally informal. It also gave me a rare chance to put on a suit and tie — not part of my usual apparel, and not required on KUOW-FM, where I am usually "dressed for radio." The focus was my Mossback columns for Crosscut, but we covered a wide range of stuff in a half hour. The program is now available on YouTube, divided into three roughly 10-minute segments.

When the show was over, I realized we had not answered one of John's first questions: "What is a Mossback?" For those who want to know, I did my best to explain the origin of that term in one of my first Crosscut postings. Despite my appearance and the picture of Ezra Meeker accompanying the article, please note that a beard is not required for mossback status.