Seattle Post-Intelligencer Ditches Print

(CBS/AP)  The future of print journalism took another hit, as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which has chronicled the news of the city since logs slid down its steep streets to the harbor and miners caroused in its bars before heading north to Alaska's gold fields, will print its final edition Tuesday.

Hearst Corp., which owns the 146-year-old P-I, said Monday that it failed to find a buyer for the newspaper, which it put up for a 60-day sale in January after years of losing money. Now the P-I will shift entirely to the Web.

"Tonight will be the final run, so let's do it right," publisher Roger Oglesby told the newsroom.

Hearst's decision to abandon the print product in favor of an Internet-only version is the first for a large American newspaper, raising questions about whether the company can make money in a medium where others have come up short.

David Lonay, 80, a subscriber since 1950, said he'll miss a morning ritual that can't be replaced by a Web-only version.

"The first thing I do every day is get the P-I and read it," Lonay said. "I really feel like an old friend is dying."

Hearst's move to end the print edition leaves the P-I's larger rival, The Seattle Times, as the only mainstream daily in the city.

"It's a really sad day for Seattle," said P-I reporter Angela Galloway. "The P-I has its strengths and weaknesses but it always strove for a noble cause, which was to give voice to those without power and scrutiny of those with power."

Seattle follows Denver in becoming losing a daily newspaper this year. The Rocky Mountain News closed after its owner, E.W. Scripps Co., couldn't find a buyer.

Former staffers of the paper plan to start an online version if they get 50,000 paying subscribers by April 23 - what would have been the News' 150th anniversary.

The founders of InDenverTimes.com said Monday the site will go live on May 4 if they meet the subscription goal.

The Web site would be free but subscribers who pay $4.99 a month would get extra content, including interactive chat and columns.

The site says, "It's an investment, one worth $4.99 a month to encourage a bold, creative effort to continue a vision based on a 150-year Denver tradition."

In Arizona, Gannett Co.'s Tucson Citizen is set to close Saturday, leaving one newspaper in that city.

And last month Hearst said it would close or sell the San Francisco Chronicle if the newspaper couldn't slash expenses in coming weeks.

The newspaper industry has seen ad revenue fall in recent years as advertisers migrate to the Internet, particularly to sites offering free or low-cost alternatives for classified ads. Starting last summer, the recession intensified the decline in advertising revenue in all categories.

Four newspaper companies, including the owners of the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and The Philadelphia Inquirer, have sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in recent months.

While the P-I's Web site ensures it a continued presence in the Seattle news market, it will likely be a pared-down version of its former self - with a heavy reliance on blogs and links to other news outlets.

The P-I had 181 employees, but Managing Editor David McCumber said the Web site would employ about 20 in the newsroom operation and another 20 to sell ads. He said he would not be working on the new site.

Steven R. Swartz, president of Hearst Newspapers, said the online P-I would not just be "a newspaper online."

"It's an effort to craft a new type of digital business with a robust, community news and information Web site at its core," Swartz said.

Hearst said the online edition will include some of the newspaper's marquee names, including sports columnist Art Thiel, political columnist Joel Connelly and Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist David Horsey. Horsey also is under contract to continue drawing for Hearst's other newspapers.

In February, the P-I Web site had 1.8 million unique visitors and 50 million page views, according to Nielsen Online. Meanwhile the newspaper's print circulation was down to 117,000, from nearly 200,000 in 1998, according to the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

It's unclear how the online-only venture will affect the Times, which is controlled by the Blethen family and has a circulation of 199,000. The Times has had severe financial troubles of its own and has cut 500 positions in the past year.

Since 1983, the P-I and The Times have shared business operations in a joint operating agreement in which The Times handles advertising, printing and other business functions for both newspapers.

The P-I has had a feisty rivalry with The Times, which intensified when the Times shifted from afternoon to morning publication in 2000.

The P-I's roots date to 1863, when Seattle was still a frontier town and James Watson founded its precursor, the Seattle Gazette, as a four-page weekly.

The newspaper changed hands, names and offices several times - including when the 1889 great Seattle fire destroyed its office - before newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst bought the P-I in 1921 through a representative. Hearst later revealed his ownership of the newspaper in an editorial, according to the P-I archives.

"Every idea, every movement, every debate in Seattle's civic life was reflected on the front page of the paper," said Leonard Garfield, executive director of the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle.

Some of the newspaper's more famous employees over the years included novelist Tom Robbins, columnist Emmett Watson and Frank Herbert, author of the science fiction novel "Dune."

Former P-I columnist Susan Paynter, who retired in 2007 after 39 years at the newspaper, said the P-I pushed the envelope on stories, running early pieces on abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment.

"The P-I was really on the forefront of telling the average person's story and why it mattered," Paynter said.

Horsey, the cartoonist who won the newspaper's only two Pulitzer Prizes in 1999 and 2003, said much would be lost when the print product ceases publishing.

"A daily newspaper tells the stories of a community and lets the people of a city know who they are, who their neighbors are, and the life and issues they share," Horsey said. "When you lose any one newspaper, you lose a piece of that."

[ozus]

For a newspaper to have a left-wing bias is to bite the hand that feeds them - the advertisers. For the most part, advertisers are businesspeople not interested in left-wing often anti-business causes. Eventually that hand ceases feeding them and the newspapers die.

I'm not advocating that newspapers go conservative to please the advertisers and certainly hate write-ups about how good the advertisers are, but believe that if newspapers stuck to objective news, there might be a chance that a few survive.

[DoubleHappiness88]

Perhaps, if newspapers contained more NEWS, they would not be failing.

Newspapers are too concerned with what bleeds, burns or dies of gunshot wounds for my interest. I want substantive NEWS of the world, US, my state and local news.

For me, NEWS does NOT include sports, religion or socialite parties.

Local TV news is almost as bad as newspapers. Local news leads with what bleeds then gets silly with local TV personalities. Who cares about TV personalities? I would not want to know such shallow people, if they lived next door.

Newspaper publishers think we are all stupid and present on a second grade level

I will not miss newspapers, if they all disappear and there will be a lot less recycling required.

[emperorlotku]

If this newspaper is anything like the Dayton Daily News or Dayton Workers Manifesto like I call it it deserved to die years ago. Our Dayton newspaper spends more time on the daily activities of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan than on serious news. The reporters have all gone to the Joseph Stalin School of Liberal Journalism, couldn't write a story with a centrist point of view if their lives depended on it, and avoid the basics of who, what, where, when and why like the plague. Most of the news is so spun with political bias that it no longer is news but propoganda instead. A professional newsreporter should avoid both conservative and liberal bias and just deliver the news. Our paper in Dayton is dummed down for the masses, has no validity when it comes to fair and unbiased views, and, I suspect, will eventually fail like this paper in Oregon.

[ozus]

tmittelstaed,

I don't understand your attack on classified ads. How can the selling of houses and cars and information about jobs be a public service? The person who places the ad will probably make a profit on the deal, so why shouldn't the paper?

[tmittelstaed]

This is probably a good thing because subscribers will shift to the Times, and that will strengthen it. Portland OR has only had 1 daily paper, the Oregonian, for over a decade now, plus a lot of free newspapers in the city that are distributed through stands and coffee shops. I am glad the daily papers are getting hit by loss of classified ad revenue, frankly. The classified adverts should be more of a community service not revenue generators, the revenue should come from sale of print ads in the paper itself that are put in by businesses, such as grocery stores. Classified ads come from people who have no other place to list them, and the paper has a monopoly on them - at least it did until Craigslist came along.

[olyboy]

There hasn't been any real news in a Seattle paper for almost 40 years, The paper wasn't any good, so it failed. What's the problem?

[dakotaclark]

Hmmm...

'We have met the enemy, and he is us," Pogo, via Walt Kelly, Earth Day, 1970.

People, in the quest for near instant gratification, are eschewing print news of all sorts, preferring to scan the news on their computer monitor, at work or at home.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is just the first big blip on the radar. Fasten your seatbelts, because this will become a bumpitty, bump, bump, ride before it ends.

More than likely, during the next 30 months, many other newspapers and magazines will be suffering the same indignity of stopping print media, mostly due to the costs, in favor of online publication of the news.

Yep, we have seen the enemy, and he IS us, for sure...

[credibility2]

Another tragedy. I refuse to get my news exclusively off of the Internet. I detest having to read stuff off of the Internet. Grant it, there are those young who grew up on one-dimensional computer generated cartoons who think that this form of technology, which is no different than the one-dimensional stuff on the Internet is the be-all and end-all of this nouveau visual arts form, have ruined it for those of us who enjoy reading, then holding and folding and then repeating the process. The only time a printed publication crashes is when a human hand decides to dispose of it. I will not acquiesce this form of my human hand controlling things.

[speakinup]

Perhaps if the Seattle PI had been just a little more towards the middle of the road instead of leaning so far left, it would not have needed a buyer.

The fact is, Washington's Representation in DC has mostly been Liberal in nature, but that doesn't mean that all of its citizens are liberals.

This paper supported the likes of Horsey cartoons and never gave a conservative point of view.

In my opinion, the owner got what he deserved - nothing.


Good riddence to bad trash.

I too live in Seattle.

[platteman]

Great, Another liberal rag that wasted millions of trees to print propoganda to bash any conservitieve idea has bit the dust. Hurray, hurray. Wonder if they got any stimlus money??
The list of rags closing is growing and growing. Soon they will ask taxpayers to pay for their outragious views. Good ridance to bad rubbish. Bird cages will have to use other rags to line they cages now.