The day the globe stood still

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-23-2003
The day the globe stood still
13
Sun, 01-11-2009 - 3:29pm

I grew up with the P-I.  That was the paper my mom subscribed to.  I've always felt that it's been a paper where they try to tell both sides of the story.  Where they are still trying to 'report' the news...not just 'scoop' it or slant it one way or the other.




And while having news online is great...it can't compare with sitting down with a cup of coffee on my back patio & reading the paper, doing the puzzles, etc.  But times change & we must adapt.  If the P-I becomes an 'online newspaper', then I'll follow them there.  But what worries me most?  So many people, especially in the current economic climate, don't have computers, let alone internet access.  The main news stories can be found on TV but it's the 'little stories' that you'd find that truly educate one about the world around them.  Many times those stories are the one's to bring about changes.


David Horsey's Drawing Power


The day the globe stood still


Friday, January 9th, was the day I didn't believe would ever come.


I joined the staff of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 1979. I was a long-haired twenty-something not long out of the University of Washington. The P-I was already 116 years old.


The newspaper office was then on 6th and Wall Street. There were rumbling presses downstairs and type was still being set in hot lead. Photographs were still touched up with paint because the printing process was so crude. The paper looked awful, compared with today. Pages weren't designed, they were simply jammed full of print by tough old copy editors with pencils tucked behind their ears and cigarettes drooping from their mouths. The P-I newsroom of 1979 was closer to the wisecracking, scoop-chasing, "hold the presses" journalism portrayed in black-and-white, mid-century movies than to the P-I of today where the clatter of teletype machines long ago gave way to the soft click of fingers on computer keyboards.


But I have no particular nostalgia for the old days. Having worked with what seems like several generations of P-I colleagues, the current staff may be my favorite of them all. There has never been a better time at the P-I. My compatriots are a largely-young, talented crew with a passion for the job and a camaraderie that has made it seem we'd always be able to beat the odds.


And those odds have never been in our favor. Almost from the day I began working beneath the big blue globe three decades ago, the word was out that the P-I wouldn't last. We were always losing money. The Seattle Times was always ahead in circulation. Hearst was always rumored to be ready to shut us down. Scares came and then went away. When, two years ago, Hearst prevailed against the Times Company's attempt to end the Joint Operating Agreement and kill the P-I, many of us were convinced that the tables had finally been turned. Hearst executives had demonstrated their commitment to staying in the Seattle market and Times publisher Frank Blethen, despite his unwavering and admirable vow to keep the Times under his family's control, was facing a growing mountain of debt.


At a New Year's Eve dinner just 12 days ago, I predicted 2009 would finally bring the big change: Hearst would buy the Seattle Times. The entire newspaper industry was imploding and it was hard to see how the Times Company could avoid being brought down in the maelstrom. Hearst was one of the few communications companies still on a sound financial footing. Surely, just as had happened in San Francisco, the patient money of Hearst would win out over the local family that owned the rival newspaper. It didn't seem like a far-fetched prognostication, and yet it proved to be nonsense. I had no idea how the real situation had quietly and dramatically altered.


In San Francisco, Hearst got what they had sought for decades. They owned the one big newspaper in the town where William Randolph Hearst had founded his enterprise a century earlier. But owning the whole market had not produced profits. On the contrary, losses were in the tens of millions and mounting. It didn't matter how big and sophisticated the city was, the long-standing business model of newspapers was as obsolete as a blacksmith's shop. Advertisers had fled to the internet and were not coming back. Owning a newspaper -- once almost a license for printing money -- was, quite suddenly, a sucker's bet. And so, after years of waiting for the chance to buy the Seattle Times, Hearst had a change of mind.


It seemed unthinkable that such a shift could come, so none of us at the P-I imagined it. Yet it was the essential fact that drove a cold calculation: If it no longer made sense for Hearst to purchase another debt-ridden property like the Times, there was also no longer any reason to keep losing money by keeping the P-I afloat. On Friday, this all became terribly clear when the P-I was put up for sale with the expectation there would be no buyers. Barring some utterly unlikely turn of events, the Post-Intelligencer will cease publication in 60 days. I hope the Times will survive. But, given the state of the newspaper business, it is entirely possible there will soon be several cities without daily newspapers and Seattle could be one of them.


Newspapers on newsprint, that is. There may be a silver lining at the edge of this dark cloud. Though the P-I made up of ink and wood fiber will be gone, technology may allow a transformed P-I to live on. Can a newspaper survive as an entity on the internet? Is that the future of newsgathering? Those questions have been asked for several years now as the business has undergone radical change. No metro daily has given it a try. The first real experiment may occur right here with seattlepi.com. I'll be writing more about this possible metamorphosis of the veneralbe P-I brand. For now, though, I want to simply mark this moment.


On Friday, as many of us stood around in the P-I newsroom, just wanting to be together as we absorbed the bad news, several of my colleagues echoed the sentiment I was feeling: The last few years have been a grand era in the history of the Post-Intelligencer. A close-knit band of journalists has done work that has honored the newspaper's 146-year tradition and we've had an exciting time doing it. Given the economic realities, we understand the why of what has happened, but understanding won't erase the pain of seeing this time and this newspaper come to an end.


Now and then I've thought of the men who pulled the first copy of Seattle's newest newspaper off a hand-cranked press back in 1863, of the resilient newsmen who published an edition of the P-I amid the smoke of the Great Seattle Fire in 1889 and of all the generations of P-I reporters who followed them. They all felt the P-I was their very own for a time, but all those journalists moved on. The newspaper always remained.


This time, it's different. In 60 days, we will still be here. But the newspaper will be gone.


Posted by David Horsey at January 11, 2009 1:30 a.m.

 







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iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Sun, 01-11-2009 - 5:02pm

 


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iVillage Member
Registered: 02-19-2008
Sun, 01-11-2009 - 8:43pm

From the left, liberal bias always looks "fair".

Another take on this is here - http://newsbusters.org/blogs/mark-finkelstein/2009/01/10/prof-decries-profit-motive-killing-seattle-p-i

Lefty Journo Prof Decries Profit Motive In 'Killing' of Seattle P-I

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer could be going out of business. And the culprit is . . . capitalism. That's Pilgrim's Complaint. Tim Pilgrim, that is. The professor of journalism at Western Washington University was quoted today in the P-I's article about its own pending demise. The P-I's parent company, the Hearst Corp., has put the paper up for sale, and prospects aren't good for finding a buyer.

But not to fear. Prof. Pilgrim has a solution:

suggested that the P-I staff buy the paper and run it at a lesser profit than Hearst requires -- perhaps assisted by a wealthy patron such as Bill Gates or Paul Allen.

A "lesser" profit? What profit? According to the same article, the paper has lost money every year since 2000, racking up $14 million in red ink in 2008.

Continued Pilgrim :

If this kind of profit-driven killing of legitimate news sources keeps happening, the online 'news' outlets that repackage P-I and other newspaper content will be out of news and only have opinion (blogging, etc.) to post.

Pilgrim's personal page is a virtual parody of a left-wing professor. The self-described "poet and teacher" offers resource links on three topics:
America's rich get richer
Government Lies & Propaganda , and
Alternative media list

The latter leads to links constituting a roll call of the left, including Al Jazeera, Democracy Now, The Nation, and, my favorite: "Adbusters -- working against advertising." Looks like the P-I succeeded only too well in that quest!

Given his screaming lack of objectivity, the spectacle of Pilgrim decrying the death of "legitimate" news sources in favor of opinion bloggers is a bad joke. Has the professor considered that "journalism" professors such as himself share responsibility for the very death of print journalism he decries? It's in part because the MSM is filled with "journalists" taught by the Professor Pilgrims of the academic world that Americans increasingly turn elsewhere for their news.

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iVillage Member
Registered: 08-25-2008
Sun, 01-11-2009 - 9:41pm
people were upset when buggy whip manufacturers went bankrupt too
iVillage Member
Registered: 02-19-2008
Sun, 01-11-2009 - 11:07pm

In my state (Connecticut) papers are already seeking bail outs. I've read that some papers are asking for an ISP tax, so internet users can have the privilege of paying for a paper and not get anything delivered. It is a great deal if the government gives it to them.

Lets hope papers without readers die, and are replaced by other venues for information which readers will pay for.

With internet, my only use for our local papers is to take care of our bird cage. I always look for the largest size newspaper at the lowest cost.

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iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Mon, 01-12-2009 - 8:49am

"In my state (Connecticut)"


Don't say we're neighbours!?!? ;) I live in Tolland.


The only time I read a printed paper is when I get my hair 'done'. I do subscibe to Time mag. & Connecticut magazine.

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iVillage Member
Registered: 03-23-2003
Mon, 01-12-2009 - 12:22pm

Whatever.


iVillage Member
Registered: 08-25-2008
Mon, 01-12-2009 - 1:51pm

sing all together...


"It's a small world afterall..."


go north a couple exits to MA and drive east on Rt 20 for a bit, and I join the party too...

iVillage Member
Registered: 08-25-2008
Mon, 01-12-2009 - 2:00pm

Profit has taken the place of providing news.


LOL.

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-23-2003
Mon, 01-12-2009 - 2:41pm

I know the history of the newspaper industry.


iVillage Member
Registered: 03-18-2000
Mon, 01-12-2009 - 3:16pm
It's more than the closing of the printed papers but the journalists without work. Few writers can survive free-lancing.

Web based news has tried to charge fees for certain articles. NY Times did this for awhile obviously it didn't turn a profit because now there's access to all their materiel. Papers whether printed or web based have to sell advertising.

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