In the last year, Mark Matassa left journalism behind to steer Mayor Mike McGinn’s communications staff through controversial budget cuts, bike-friendly road policies, and tunnel debates.

And he’s done it all while fighting brain cancer.

Remarkably, Matassa expresses only optimism and gratitude for where he’s at. He’s embracing his hectic life, stress and all.

“I really love working for the mayor,” Matassa said. “I feel lucky to have landed here.”

Matassa didn’t set out to become McGinn’s director of communications. When the mayor’s office reached out to him last December, he’d been working as an editor at online news site Crosscut for only a few months. He’d been a reporter and editor at news outlets up and down the West Coast his entire life, and hadn’t given much thought to leaving journalism.

But out of pure curiosity, Matassa decided to take the invitation for an interview at the mayor’s office anyhow. Upon meeting with McGinn, Matassa instantly took a liking to the man, both for his values and his open, comfortable attitude.

“If Dino Rossi had called looking for a communcations director, I would not have taken the job,” Matassa said. “But I felt a political and personal connection with McGinn.”

Matassa also became intrigued by the idea of witnessing behind-the-scenes operations of city government for the first time. He’d covered politics throughout his journalism career, and wondered about the view from the other side.

Almost a full year later, Matassa isn’t sorry he took the leap away from journalism. For the first time in decades, he feels he can engage in political debate at a party. After years of trying to be objective, he’s happy to say that he feels McGinn’s budget is brilliant, agrees with the mayor’s anti-tunnel stance, and advocates for cycling and mass transit.

“I’ve found it really refreshing to come out and say what I think about stuff,” Matassa said.

Matassa won’t talk politics, however, in his own home. His longtime partner, Michelle Nicolosi, is the executive producer at Seattlepi.com. To counter any potential perceived bias in Seattlepi.com’s coverage of City Hall, Matassa and Nicolosi steer away from business and political discussions. Nicolosi, in turn, won’t work on or edit stories that involve the mayor’s office, and Matassa communicates with other reporters at Seattlepi.com.

While Matassa’s political gig marks a shift from the attempted objectivity of reporting to clear bias, he also finds similarities between City Hall and a newsroom. Both jobs carry equal pressure. In the news business, he hurried to meet deadlines, report stories accurately, and produce copy quickly. At the mayor’s office, his stresses come from managing relationships with various groups and people. Both types of pressure, Matassa has found, suit him well.

“I’m good under stress,” Matassa said. “I find the challenges in journalism and at the mayor’s office incredibly invigorating.”

Day to day, Matassa also finds his role as communications director not so different from being an editor. In both jobs, he spends significant time managing other people and sitting in meetings.

For Matassa, the challenge of adapting to a new career pales in comparison to his larger fight. Since 2006, he’s been battling brain cancer. He’s gone through two surgeries, chemotherapy, and radiation.

This summer, Matassa took two months off from his duties at the mayor’s office to undergo radiation therapy. He’s been back at the office for four weeks now, but struggles with fatigue. Matassa credits coworkers with filling in for him when needed.

“Everyone at the mayor’s office has been so cool and helpful,” Matassa said. “They’ve all pitched in.”

Even though he’s constantly tired, Matassa embraced his return to work. He loves being part of Seattle’s political scene, and he missed the action while on sick leave.

“I wake up happy,” Matassa said.

When I last checked in with former Seattle P-I columnist Mike Lewis, he was spending most of his time pouring drinks and growing business at the Streamline Tavern, the Lower Queen Anne bar he purchased with three partners last year.

Lewis, who lost his job at the P-I when the paper ceased publication as a print news product, admitted to missing journalism. Though he still wrote freelance articles, he longed for the chaos of a newsroom and the excitement of regularly chasing down scoops.

He didn’t have to miss the news biz for long. Lewis recently signed on as Seattle regional editor for Patch, AOL’s new neighborhood news network. He’ll oversee 12 local Patch sites south of Seattle. AOL still needs to hire a second regional editor to run 12 blogs north of the city.

Today, Patch launched the first of its Seattle sites, University Place Patch. The next sites slated for launch in the Seattle area are Bellevue, Mercer Island, Bonney Lake-Sumner, and Lakewood. They will likely go live at the end of October.

Lewis didn’t seek out the Patch position on his own. He only heard about AOL’s ambitious nationwide neighborhood news efforts in July, a full year after AOL acquired the start-up Patch Media and began growing the network. One of Lewis’ former Seattle University journalism students had been speaking to a Patch recruiter about becoming a local editor, and she recommended Lewis for the regional editor position.

When Patch’s hiring team called up Lewis, he wasn’t sure if he wanted the job. But he met Patch’s west coast editorial director, Marcia Parker, at the Seattle Marriott, and after a few hours together he became convinced that AOL was serious about the venture.

Lewis learned AOL planned to spend $50 million to build Patch this year alone, and another $50 million next year. He sensed the company’s enthusiasm for the project and dedication to hiring good people.

“I like the way they are running things,” Lewis said. “AOL is taking a big gamble on this and putting a lot of money into it.”

Lewis hopes his role as regional editor will allow him to do some writing down the road. Right now, he’s working on hiring local editors for the 24 community sites around the region. Patch will also bring on board a roving editor, copy editor, sports editor, and calendar editor for each of the 12-site clusters in the Seattle area.

Patch offered Lewis his choice of north or south Seattle, and he selected south, mainly because he spent more time there reporting when he was at the Seattle P-I. Should the company hire a second regional editor with strong preference for the south end, however, Lewis is also willing to work with the north communities.

AOL has no plans at the moment to start sites for any of the urban Seattle neighborhoods, and Lewis said the city is already saturated with local blogs. Patch can compete in the suburbs, Lewis said. He could see the company eventually starting another 12-site cluster in another populated region of the state, however.

Nationwide, Patch currently has 220 sites in 17 states, with 16 more sites slated to go live this week. By next year, AOL plans to have 1,000 editors, making it one of the largest employers of journalists in the country.

Working for Patch reminds Lewis of being at a fast-moving, well-funded start-up. He’s juggling the time consuming new gig with finishing up several freelance projects and working one night a week at the Streamline.

“I’m running as hard as I can to get everything out,” Lewis said. “But that’s the nature of modern journalism.”

With lips sunburned from a recent fly fishing trip in Jackson Hole and a baseball cap on his head, Tom Skerritt looked every bit the unassuming Seattleite sipping tea from his Starbucks mug last week.

And as he began talking and his enthusiasm grew, it was not to promote his own movie star projects, but to share the latest progress made by TheFilmSchool.

“TheFilmSchool has had a really great year,” Skerritt said.

I met Skerritt at the Madison Park Starbucks to catch up on

TheFilmSchool, the screenwriting program Skerritt helped found six years ago. I’ve kept in touch with Skerritt since attending TheFilmSchool several years ago to learn about script writing, and I’m always eager to hear about the school’s progress.

By Skerrit’s account, TheFilmSchool has never been stronger. Applicant numbers have been rising each year, and the school now has 350 graduates. TheFilmSchool will for the first time offer three separate three-week intensive sessions this year, up from two in years past. In addition, this summer marked the inaugural Prodigy Camp, a week-long summer program on Whidbey Island for teens.

Each of the adult sessions attracted 20 to 30 students, and Prodigy Camp hosted 15 kids. TheFilmSchool drew applicants from around the world, including Australia, Estonia, and the United Kingdom. Students receive instruction from Skerritt and fellow school founders Warren Etheredge, John Jacobsen, Rick Stevenson, and Stewart Stern.

TheFilmSchool is also gearing up for next year’s move into its own space. The school teamed up with the Seattle International Film Festival to lobby for city matching funds to renovate the Seattle Center’s Alki Room.

Construction will begin in October and wrap up next July. SIFF and TheFilmSchool will share office and classroom space and a film screening theater. Right now, SIFF has offices in South Lake Union and TheFilmSchool uses rooms in the Seattle Center’s Northwest Rooms and Center House.

Skerritt believes TheFilmSchool’s new shared space and partnership with SIFF will strengthen the local film community. SIFF’s mission to showcase quality films fits right with TheFilmSchool’s aims, Skerritt said.

“We can work together to legitimize the Seattle film community,” Skerritt said.

Skerritt and the school’s other founders started TheFilmSchool because they wanted to teach students how to become better story tellers, and produce the kind of scripts worth turning into films. At the time, Hollywood was bypassing Seattle as a filming venue for cheaper locations in Canada. If Seattle couldn’t attract movie projects, Skerritt and the rest of the team figured, the city needed to create its own.

Skerritt continues to make TheFilmSchool his priority, even though his life is hectic. He also juggles continued onscreen roles and his own screenwriting projects. Right now, Skerritt is trying to find funding to turn one of his screenplays into a feature film. The story surrounds a wounded World War II veteran passing on life knowledge to a young man.

In addition, Skerritt spends much of his time being a father to three-year-old Emiko. Skerritt, who also has grown children from his first marriage, adopted Emiko with his wife, Julie. Their quiet family life suits Skerritt well.

“I never thought I’d do fatherhood again, but here I am, and I absolutely love it,” Skerritt said.

On the air at KING-FM 98.1, classical music continues to play 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Just like always.

Behind the scenes, though, station staff members are hard at work to transform KING from a commercial venture to a listener-supported station.

Beginning next July, KING-FM will no longer operate on advertising dollars. At that time, the station’s seven-year commercial partnership with Fisher Communications ends. KING decided against renewing the relationship.

In September, KING plans to kick off its first major capital campaign. The station will approach major donors with the goal of raising an initial $2 million. KING is also already in the process of becoming a 501c3 and obtaining a nonprofit radio license from the FCC.

Next year, the station will start appealing to listeners for donations. KING-FM is still developing a target fundraising goal for audience pledges.

According to KING general manager Jennifer Ridewood, the station first started contemplating breaking ties with advertisers last year. Ridewood took a road trip to visit listener-supported classical stations in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, Washington D.C., and North Carolina.

She found that the stations were thriving on donations, even during the recession. While grant funding dipped when the economy took a nosedive, listener support did not.

Classical music stations work with the nonprofit model, Ridewood said, because the typical listener – an affluent individual age 55 or older – is the sort most likely to make a donation. Advertisers, on the other hand, prefer a far younger audience, meaning they’re less likely to want to support a classical station than the listeners themselves.

“We have a great demographic because they are committed to their community and classical music,” Ridewood said.

Ridewood also talked to Seattle NPR stations KUOW and KPLU, both of whom expressed support for the idea. The station managers told Ridewood that Seattleites are eager and willing to support radio they care about.

In April, the KING-FM board voted to become a nonprofit. Since then, in addition to building the future financial structure, the station has launched ventures that Ridewood feels befit the listener-supported model.

At the end of July, KING-FM started the Arts Channel. The station records interviews and conversations with musicians and arts groups and streams them online. KING-FM also began a larger push to record live music. The station plays some of the shows on the air, and puts others on the web site. Both Arts Channel and the live music initiative came about because of listener feedback and requests, Ridewood said.

This is the first time in KING-FM’s lengthy history that the station will attempt to be supported by listeners. The commercial venture dates back to 1947, when Dorothy Bullitt started the KING radio and television broadcasting empire.

Dorothy Bullitt

In 1995, Bullitt’s two daughters donated KING-FM to the nonprofit Beethoven. At that time, KING-FM teamed up with commercial communications company Entercom, allowing the radio giant to sell ads for them.

When that agreement ran out seven years ago, KING paired up with Fisher. Now, KING-FM is venturing out on its own, and creating the next chapter for classical radio in Seattle.

Josh Feit, Photo courtesy of PubliCola

When Scripps Newspapers asked me to profile a new media venture in Seattle for a series they’re running in papers across the country, I immediately thought of PubliCola.

Unlike some of the newer start-ups, the online political site has been around for a year and a half. In addition to that track record, PubliCola is attempting to make it as a for-profit company. Many of the journalism experiments emerging in Seattle are opting for grants and donations. I wanted to see how PubliCola, in this new age of media, was attempting to make it on old-fashioned advertising sales.

I discovered that PubliCola is hanging in there because founder and editor Josh Feit created a lean staff with a very focused mission. The site appeals to political junkies hungry for City Hall, Olympia, and Washington D.C. coverage. When PubliCola experimented with additional, broader content earlier this year, they spent more and didn’t attract more advertisers. And because of this, they retreated back to their original niche.

Scripps Newspapers targeted Seattle for one of the stories in its media coverage because this city is full of journalists who are experimenting. We can’t say for certain yet which ventures will take root, but PubliCola is an interesting study of a work in progress. They aren’t profitable just yet, but Feit believes he’s steering the operation in that direction.

The article on PubliCola appeared in the Kitsap Sun this week and will run in other Scripps papers and online. Here is a link to the piece.

A month ago, Kirsten Grind pounded out daily banking industry updates in the hectic downtown Seattle Puget Sound Business Journal newsroom.

These days, she’s more likely to be found driving around the state to the homes of aging former Washington Mutual executives. Grind spent an entire recent weekday in Skagit County with onetime WaMu CEO Lou Pepper. The two talked for hours.

“It’s therapy for them,” Grind said. “There’s a lot of anger and sadness about what happened.”

Grind’s life took a dramatic turn this summer when she began a nine-month leave from the PSBJ to write a book about the demise of WaMu. She landed the book contract after covering WaMu’s story extensively for the Business Journal, and receiving a prestigious Pulitzer nomination for her efforts.

(Full disclosure: I worked with Grind at the PSBJ and remain good friends with her. I’ve been hearing about her journey into the book writing world for the past several months, and found the project so interesting that I thought others would enjoy reading about it as well.)

Grind stumbled into the book world by chance. While she loves journalism, she’d never dreamed of penning her own book. But early this year, Seattle literary agent Elizabeth Wales heard Grind talking about WaMu on local public radio station KUOW. This could be a book, Wales thought.

Grind’s story with WaMu began when she took a job as the banking and finance reporter for the PSBJ in spring of 2008. A relative newcomer to Seattle, Grind knew very little about WaMu.

Six months later, on Sept. 25, 2008, federal regulators seized the bank. Grind was at a best friend’s wedding in California. She came back to Seattle, figuring the story was over. Not even close.

At the urging and support of PSBJ managing editor Al Scott, Grind spent the next year doing extensive investigative reporting on why WaMu failed. At times, she wanted to give up. She requested thousands of documents through public information requests, and received many back with pages blacked out. Since many sources refused to talk to her on the phone, Grind tracked down the addresses of former executives and bank regulators and drove to their homes.

“It was pulling teeth the entire way,” Grind said.

Grind’s efforts paid off. On a Friday in April, she signed on with Wales. That Monday, she found out she was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Two months later, several publishing houses entered a bidding war for her book, with Simon and Schuster winning out.

“I had a really lucky few months,” Grind said. “I worked really hard to get to the bottom of WaMu, and it set me up as someone who really knows the story.”

Grind believes publishers were eager for the book because readers want to understand the financial crisis. The WaMu story in particular sparks interest, Grind said, because unlike a massive New York City investment firm, the average person had a WaMu account or worked for the bank.

“People can relate to WaMu,” Grind said.

On a recent Green Lake walk, Grind and I talked about why someone like myself – an avid reader, but not a banking or finance guru – would buy her book. We agreed that the various tragic personalities behind WaMu, from former CEO Kerry Killinger to the shareholder who lost everything, would sell the story.

“I don’t want to write a book only for people interested in banking,” Grind said. “I think a lot of people could find this fascinating because WaMu has such a great cast of characters.”

Grind began her nine-month leave from the PSBJ on Aug. 2. She’s adjusting to life away from a bustling newsroom, and learning how to plan her own daily schedule.

“It’s hard to not have coworkers running around and an editor breathing down your neck,” Grind said. “I miss the newsroom activity, but I also love having this big project I’m working on.”

Since Grind’s book covers the last 30 years of WaMu, she’s beginning with the 1980s. For the past few weeks, she’s been spending days with the former executives, driving to everywhere from Carnation to Anacortes.

When Grind begins researching the bank’s more recent past, she’ll make trips to California and the East Coast to talk to the bank’s former mortgage executives and federal regulators. WaMu’s onetime home loan center is just a half hour from her parents’ home in the San Diego area, so she’s planning on research time in California.

As for her own next chapter after WaMu, it’s too early for Grind to know.

“I never thought I’d write a book,” Grind said. “This has really been a surprise.”