The King County Journal is up for sale. Current ownership says it can't afford to bring the publication and other smaller papers it owns to their full potential. More from the Seattle Times and the the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the latter of which will likely be dead and buried soon, as legal proceedings unfold around the Joint Operating Agreement still keeping the financially untenable fishwrap alive. The P-I's death won't be mourned by any truly sentient being, but the KCJ's impending sale by Horvitz Newspapers Inc. of Kent is sad at first. The KCJ offered a sane editorial voice that often stands in contrast to the entrenched liberal sympathies of editorialists at Seattle's two dailies. But ultimately, it's a smart business move and could offer some hope to readers and an important corner of The Republic, if a well-heeled buyer or purchase consortium materializes. Because despite the occasional story that bested competition from Seattle's dailies, the KCJ was nowhere near its potential. This has been especially evident in poor staffing, too much filler, its failure to do high-impact investigatory reporting and more sophisticated local news coverage, and an inability or unwillingness to embrace the online realm.

Yes, they had a Web site, but until recently it totally stank, and now there's a bit more news but still no real interactivity, especially with respect to the blogosphere. Newspapers need to be allying with blogs and blog readers, because readers increasingly "unbundle" the news from any one purveyor, choosing only the stuff that matters, and then using tools such as Google News and the filtering of bloggers they like to tap other sources. Good "unbundled" stuff from Seattle's dailies sometimes (but not often enough) includes the local news; plus occasionally sane op-eds; and material from Western WA's only newspaper poli-blogger who actually gets it.

McClatchy Chairman and CEO Gary Pruitt tells American Journalism Review that newspapers must leverage off their local print publications a whole range of other assets, "including, most importantly, the leading local Internet site." That involves not only strong usability features, but an avoidance of "Chinese Menu" cross-demographic pandering in favor of news, analysis and opinion content drawn from the regional blogosphere.

In my wildest dreams there are some Net-savvy, blogsmart Eastsiders right now ruminating about buying The King County Journal and the sister publications also up for sale. Already facing pressures in the online era, dailies in Puget Sound and around the U.S. have sometimes helped hasten their own demise with inexcusable errors of omission and bias. True, newspapers do things that most often, blogs cannot. But if the market is not there for an unrealized suburban daily on the Eastside, the challenge then just falls more heavily on some percentage of bloggers within that catchment area to learn how to practice citizen journalism. That's something increasingly part of the mix nationwide, no matter what. It will be especially interesting to see funding strategies evolve in this area over the coming five to ten years. Especially around Seattle, where the circulation of dailies continues to decline.