An Atlantic writer has visited Seattle and talked to several former Post-Intelligencer staffers, including one who went from writing about dive bars to co-owning one (the fabulous Streamline on lower Queen Anne).
I’ve finally let my Seattle Times subscription lapse, after seven months with SeaTimes and 31 prior years with the now-discontinued print P-I. The only thing I’d still used the print paper for, that couldn’t be done online, was to methodically study how much smaller the SeaTimes was getting.
As a print subscriber, I was hardly supporting the newsroom. Subscription fees barely pay for the manufacture and delivery of the physical product. What I was doing was adding to the aggregate eyeballs the SeaTimes could sell to advertisers. That company’s done a lousy job at selling ads the past several years. Even before the Internet killed want ads and the Great Recession decimated home and car sales, they’d already been losing huge accounts to direct mail.
Supporting “newspaper style journalism,” and transitioning from it to something better, is a topic I’ve long written about.
Online ads earn far less income per reader than print ads. This is unlikely to change any time soon. SeattlePI.com has the potential to become profitable once the general economy improves, but won’t likely ever support anything near the news staff the print P-I had.
I currently see three potential scenarios:
1) Print papers continue to shrink, not to oblivion but to the point that they become vulnerable to startup competitors (who suddenly don’t have to pour in $30 million a year in costs and who can target niche audiences in a way old-line dailies can’t).
2) Print papers continue to shrink, to the point where they’re small enough to become subsidized by their big-business community friends (either through contributions or vanity ads).
3) New ebook-esque consumer devices (the long-rumored Apple tablet?) finally make true online publications with paid subscriptions not only feasible but popular.
Another viewpoint: Doug Morrison sees the Incredible Shrinking Newspaper as an issue affecting the exchange of ideas, the flow of facts, and even the future of democracy itself, and wonders if there could be a political solution.
…new news site is now up, christened Seattle PostGlobe. It’s as unassuming at its start as the rump relic of the official P-I site. Let’s hope both grow and blossom.
Joseph Tartakoff offers another look at the Post-Intelligencer’s final days; while Alan Mutter observes Seattlepi.com’s instant startup as a stand-alone site.
…did indeed, according to the hereby-linked story, offer to take over the Post-Intelligencer, keep it going in print, and assume its ongoing losses. But Hearst wouldn’t have gotten any cash under the proposal.
I keep wanting to know what Go2Guy thought of the Huskies’, Zags’, and Sounders’ spectacular wins. He’s not there. What entertainments do Gene Stout and William Arnold want me to feel guilty about missing this weekend? No way to know. Tomorrow, the Sunday preview paper will bear only the Seattle Times name. Which, if any, P-I comics will be carried over into it?
…asks the musical question, “Why didn’t the P-I fold sooner?”
The simple answer: The Joint Operating Agreement with the Seattle Times, proposed in 1981 and first enacted in 1983, kept the P-I alive lo those many years, despite all the subsequent efforts by the Times to kill it.
There’s another question others have asked in recent weeks: Why didn’t the Times die and the P-I live?
For that answer you have to go even further back in time.
When Wm. Randolph Hearst Sr. bought the P-I in 1921, it was the dominant local paper. By 1930, the Times had more readers, and would always have more readers thereafter.
The Times successfully marketed itself as the local paper run by local people. Hearst, by this time, had turned his papers into cookie-cutter local variants on the same chain-imposed formula, from the typography and the logos to the emphasis on celebrity gossip and hard-right politics (hmm, sound like any current media firms we know?). While the Times shared many of Hearst’s editorial stances, it was run by a local family that hobnobbed with the local business titans and kept close ties with local politicians (especially the Republicans).
Hearst Sr. died in 1951. His heirs were generally more interested in magazines than in newspapers, and gave their local publishers more leeway. (They still had to run W.R. Hearst Jr.’s weekly “Editor’s Report” column, which (heart symbol)ed the Vietnam War and Augusto Pinochet.)
But caring less about newspapers also meant the Hearsts underfunded them. The pre-JOA P-I was manufactured on creaky old presses. They could only print and distribute so many papers between the end of evening sports events and the start of morning rush hour. The P-I never regained the natural market advantage of a morning paper.
But, while Hearst closed up shop in most of the cities in which its newspapers operated, it stayed in Seattle through thick and thin. As late as 2007, when it legally forced the Times to keep the JOA alive, Hearst wanted to hold on to its position in the Seattle media marketplace.
It was only with the national collapse of the daily-newspaper business model that Hearst’s current management swooped in and gave the order to surrender.
…agrees that the new Seattlepi isn’t new enough, but adds that its independence-from-paper can allow it to become a better online product.
Today is the day many of us have dreaded these past nine and a half weeks.
Found a newspaper plopped down outside my door upon awakening. But it was the wrong one.
When this happened in the past, I could call a voice-mail tree system to get the paper I actually wanted.
But I can’t do that anymore.
I can only accept the large-print, smugly conservative rag aimed at the suburban white elderly market.
Or I can quit it.
As I’d expected, the new Seattlepi.com is no substitute for the P-I paper and website that were. Its “front page” photo today is a cute puppy. The long list of local headlines on its still-cluttered home page links mostly to wire copy, short police-beat briefs, and stories on other sites.
But that’s what Hearst apparently wanted all along during this tragedy—to keep the P-I brand alive as cheaply as possible, while breaking both the Joint Operating Agreement and the Newspaper Guild.
The new Seattlepi (and we might as well call it that, instead of the beloved two-initial nickname of its already mourned predecessor) has nowhere to go but up.
How much better can it become, and how quickly?
Specifically, can it get its online-only act together before one of the proposed indie post-P-I sites gets going? (If any of them do get going, that is.)
