Hey so you didn’t live-blog my question to Ryan Blethan which was basically “Family newspapers are better?! The fuck?! Like the Seattle Times Editorial Board — and your dad — didn’t overule its own editorial board in its 2000 endorsement of George Bush because Frank Blethen wanted the Estate Tax abolished so he can make sure his kids inherit his paper. Like the Seattle Times didn’t have MORE aggreious behavior during the newspaper strike of 2001 because the Hearst corporation was ACTUALLY MORE WILLING to grant the strikers their wishes but the BLETHEN FAMILY didn’t want to pay out for 401(k) accounts for reporters.”

I’m only 32 and I have a LONG memory of the Blethen family ownership of the Seattle Times and I think to outsiders it SOUNDS good in theory but Seattlites know that the the Hearst-owned Seattle Post-Intelligencer is actually a better paper. I actually shudder to think what would happen if there were TWO strong alternative weeklies in Seattle and TWO dailies.

Sorry, NewsCat. I was too busy trying to get the moderator to call on me to liveblog at that point. But it’s a good point. Neither family ownership nor a nonprofit business structure is necessarily “the answer” to making a news org that will thrive in this environment … or produce good journalism, for that matter.