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.
I was in the downtown library yesterday with my MacBook (which doesn’t get out much anymore, now that I have an iPod Touch).
Some dude I’d never met before came up and started talking to me. At the downtown library, this happens rather often. But this guy wasn’t trying to sell me a bus pass or tell me a long story that would start by asking for directions and end by asking for money.
He just wanted to alert me to something he’d seen on an Apple rumors site. It was another variant of the long-rumored Apple tablet device. “It’s like a MacBook without the keyboard, or a big iPod Touch. It looks great!”
Now I’ve seen one of these new rumor articles. And I must say I like the specs the article mentions. This is almost exactly the device I’d dreamed of earlier this year, when I speculated that the future of the online written word (including journalism) lay in .pdf documents formatted for tablets and netbooks.
(My caveat: While I’m intrigued by the concept of an Apple tablet as a full-page-size iPod Touch, I suspect many users will also want to use it for more traditional home-computer functions, including functions at which the iPhone OS and its available apps are still insufficient.)
Meanwhile, closer to home, other tech rumor sites are spreading an internal Microsoft video, demonstrating the features of what might be that company’s next-gen tablet computer concept, code named “Courier.” Like the rumored Apple device, the rumored MS device wouldn’t run a regular home-computer operating system. Instead, it would operate its own integrated suite of apps, based on the metaphor of an “infinite journal” where the user could clip and paste anything from/to anywhere.
The warning here is that MS has whole teams of “futurists” and conceptual designers working full-time on the personal-tech version of “concept cars”—items that, in their initial iterations, will never see a sales shelf, but which are used to work out ideas that may eventually find their way into real products. Courier might be one of these.
Thanks to the kind Lori at Espresso To Go in Fremont, I recently got a look at the SeaTimes’ Washington Territorial Centennial supplement.
This was an eight-section addition to a Sunday paper in the summer of 1953. Each section ran twenty pages or more. (Remember, newspaper pages then were one-third wider than they are now.)
There’s little to no content about the state’s pre-Statehood past. Instead, what little “editorial” content there is consists of puff pieces for the advertisers.
Most of these advertisers aren’t companies selling consumer goods. They’re construction firms, timber giants, commercial truck dealerships, shipyards, cement plants, fishing-rig outfitters, metals processors, agribusinesses, restaurant-supply companies, etc. Their common, simple message: They’re proud to be part of the Evergreen State’s great industrial infrastructure.
OK, there is one huge ad for Fisher Flouring Mills and its about-to-launch subsidiary operation, KOMO-TV. The ad juxtaposes a drawing of the big Fisher plant on Harbor Island with a glamour image of that fresh, new television talent Betty White, who could be seen in her sprightly comedy series Life With Elizabeth once KOMO-TV started telecasting later that year.
Can you imagine today’s SeaTimes managing to sell even a fraction of all that ad space to local companies that have nothing to sell to a mass audience?
This morning brings another skinny 26-page SeaTimes, with only eight major staff-written news stories. Nevertheless, a laudatory NY Times piece relays that the SeaTimes is now claims to be “operating in the black,” though the Blethens are quiet about the financial metrics they’re using to make this claim.
The NYT story also notes the SeaTimes circulation has risen from 200,000 to 260,000, having kept most of the P-I subscriptions it had inherited in March.
However, that’s still a drop from the former combined circulation of the SeaTimes-dominated Joint Operating Agreement, which had been approximately 311,000 at the print P-I’s demise.
Still, the SeaTimes’ current readership is close to its ’90s, pre-Internet peak.
Just don’t expect the paper to restore its newsroom staff size to ’90s levels. Not with the ad market still so shaky.
…and best wishes to top local music producer Conrad Uno (Young Fresh Fellows, PUSA, and more). He and his lovely bride Emily Bishton renewed their wedding vows at Safeco Field on Sunday. The here-linked Seattle Times article mentions almost nothing about Uno’s musical career.
Today’s Sunday paper is down to 76 pages (plus ad flyers, supplements, and comics). Weekday papers this past month have had as few as 26 pages. (That’s not the “news hole;” that’s the whole paper, ads and all.)
I’m not calling this feature a “death watch,” because the Times still has a lot further down it could go.
As yet, no major US city has lost all its daily papers. None probably will.
But the papers that remain could become unrecognizable. They could become tiny journals of record, like slightly more mass-market versions of the Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce. They could become glorified pundit-newsletters promoting the local business community’s agenda of the day. They could become, to borrow from the old National Lampoon Sunday Newspaper Parody, “newscasts in print,” lurid sheets emphasizing crimes, fires, and mayhem.
…for the Seattle Times, that local bastion of patrician conservatism, to reprint an essay from The Nation, that national bastion of defiant liberalism?
It takes a long screed in favor of government assistance to newspapers, direct or indirect.
Its co-author, Robert McChesney, is a scholar of media history and a longtime advocate against corporate consolidation in news and entertainment. What nobody except me seems to remember is he was a co-founder of The Rocket, the local rag that proclaimed the hotness of Seattle rock bands back when Seattle Weekly still ignored anyone born after 1950. It can be hard for younger or more recently-arrived folks to imagine a Seattle where the leading “alternative” paper was more culturally conservative than the local dailies. The rise of Seattle rock in the late 1980s was as much about DIY media as it was about DIY music.
After McChesney went off to Wisconsin for his Ph.D, he expanded his beliefs in indie media into a scholarly history, in books and essays, of U.S. corporate media and its discontents.
So it’s strange to see his words interpreted, by their placement in the Seattle Times, as a plea to bail out organizations like the Seattle Times.
Anyone familiar with McChesney’s larger body of work knows that’s not his real goal.
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.)
Rick Anderson reports the post-print seattlepi.com will include unpaid contributions by ex-Mayor Rice and Congressman McDermott, among others. Brian Miller, meanwhile, snarkily suggests a surefire substitute for professional reporting—more cute kitten pictures.
Meanwhile, here’s how the NY Times, Bloomberg.com, and the Puget Sound Business Journal reported the grim news.
Slog keeps adding additional views on the disaster. Included: P-I art critic Regina Hackett (who’s moving on to ArtsJournal.com) taking one last potshot at “the we-precious-few tone of the Times, which rubs itself against the legs of the comfortably middle-class like a cat looking for a handout,” and a commenter who scoffs at the Times’ continuing plight: “The only problem with newspapers is that they are run by newspapermen. You’re the poster child. You guys pretty much fucked-up a monopoly by trying to defend it, instead of trying to leverage it.”
P-I business columnist “the 40 year old” Bill Virgin blames his bosses for not being nice enough to conservatives and for ignoring a lot of suburban issues. (The latter point may be valid; the P-I traditionally had more out-of-town readers than the Times, but lost that advantage in the past decade.)
The Times has confirmed that it’s keeping all of both papers’ subscribers. (Expect a lot of cancellation calls.) It’s also adding five P-I comic strips, including Pearls Before Swine and 9 Chickweed Lane; but it’s not adding any P-I writers, at least not yet.
It’s here. The announcement we’ve been dreading but expecting these past nine weeks was made shortly after 10 this morning. The last print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer will appear Tuesday. That’s one day sooner than the earliest closing date offered during Hearst’s Jan. 9 announcement.
Other than the date of the final edition, the winding down of Washington state’s oldest business enterprise has gone according to rumor.
Yes, Hearst’s keeping the P-I brand, and the globe.
Yes, there’s be a Web site, run by a tiny subset of the existing P-I staff (20 editorial staffers compared to 150 previously). Only a few of these surviving staffers have been announced; cartoonist David Horsey’s one of them.
Yes, nobody came forward with a solid offer to buy the paper and keep it in print. (What, nobody wanted the chance to lose $1 million a month as the junior partner in a JOA with the also-failing Seattle Times?)
Yes, the final announcement came when P-I columnist Joel Connelly was out of town, and local news-biz analyst Chuck Taylor had just gotten back into town.
The Stranger’s Eli Sanders was in town, and he noted that the P-I site went to a text-only “disaster” mode around 10:30 Sunday nite. When the full site reappeared an hour and a half later, its non-ad pages were bereft of the “nwsource.com” domain name. That’s the domain run by the Times under the 1999-revised terms of the JOA. As of this morning, seattlepi.com is its own freestanding thang. (Ads now appearing on the site were sold by the Times, but an in-house sales staff is being assembled.)
Newspaper people, everywhere, are fond of romanticizing their own. They’ll note that the Obama inauguration was the last big national story in P-I print; the December snowstorm and Washington Mutual’s collapse were its last big local stories.
Ken Griffey’s return to the Mariners, the launch of Seattle Sounders FC, the Husky men’s basketball team’s NCAA tournament run—not to be commemorated in a printed P-I. The opening of Sound Transit light rail, the final fate of the Alaskan Way Viaduct, this year’s mayoral race—all things we’ll have to read about elsewhere.
The P-I staff had already been preparing a big goodbye special section. That’ll show up Tuesday. Expect a huge wrap party/wake tonight at Buckley’s on lower Queen Anne.
This past Thursday, I spent a couple hours in the central library looking at microfilmed P-I issues from significant dates in my life—my birth date, the day the Sonics won the NBA title, the day Mt. St. Helens blew, etc.
The first thing I noticed: Monochrome microfilm just isn’t paper; novelist Nicholson Baker was right when he pleaded for libraries to hold on to printed newspapers.
The second thing I noticed: Papers sure had a lot more ads back then. Ten pages of classifieds at the minimum. Multiple ads for supermarket and department-store chains within the paper, not as separate inserts.
The third thing I noticed: The words describing major events can evoke memories just as strong as, or stronger than, the audio-visual memories of the events themselves.
But that’s what newspaper people do. They create what an old cliche calls “the first draft of history.”
And now, the Post-Intelligencer, as a tangible product and as a fully-staffed newsroom, is history.
Meanwhile, the various assorted attempts to jump-start a competitive post-P-I news site continue.
As will the pontificatin’, here and elsewhere, about what online news should be and how it could be funded.
