NPR’s On the Media, which airs each Sunday at 6 p.m. on KUOW-FM, is usually one of the most incisive shows on the air. And with media undergoing cataclysmic upheavals, it’s got plenty to be incisive about. But even the best can succumb to the general tendency to view media markets as monocultures. Two weeks ago OTM looked at how the demise of the print Post-Intelligencer had affected Seattle’s news ecology. Host Bob Garfield put the question to Eli Sanders, political writer at what Garfield called "Seattle’s alt weekly, The Stranger," as though it were the only one. Love ‘em or loath them, Seattle Weekly and The Stranger are both hitting the stands each week. Garfield also described The Stranger more accurately as "Seattle’s largest alt weekly," but I still felt a frisson of both foreboding and déjà vu. For decades I heard out-of-towners, and sometimes locals, refer to the Times as "the" Seattle newspaper. They never noticed the P-I, whose writing and reporting often smoked the Times’,.

The problem with myopia is it tends to be self-fulfilling. If enough people write papers off, they disappear. Seattle suffers from a similar geographic myopia: How may of your friends from Capitol Hill and points north would be as lost in Delridge or Hillman City as in Montevideo?

Sanders showed a touch of that myopia when he noted that the notable neighborhood blogs" that have filled the news gap tend to be in "wealthier" neighborhoods-—i.e the "West Seattle Blog, My Ballard, and CapitolHillSeattle.com.

No knock on those sites, especially not on the the exemplary West Seattle Blog. But the Beacon Hill Blog can match them for coverage and spunk, and the Rainier Valley Post is "well known" and indispensable in its territory. There are more media mediating between reality and readers than are dreamed of in our mythologies.

Oh yeah, whatever you may think, Seattle Met is not this town’s only magazine.