NEW YORK: It was another casualty in the US print-media industry as The Seattle Post-Intelligence produced its last printed edition yesterday (Tuesday) and shifted operations entirely to the Internet. The 146-year-old newspaper’s editor and publisher, Roger Oglesby, made the announcement yesterday, a year after the newspaper posted a $14 million loss.
“Tonight we’ll be putting the paper to bed for the last time,” Oglesby told a silent newsroom in Seattle, Washington. The P-I, as it is called, is also letting the majority of its 165 news staff go and will now run its online operations with approximately 20 news staff.
The P-I’s departure from print-media, marks the largest US newspaper’s shift to the web and leaves residents of the populous city with only one daily newspaper — The Seattle Times.
In an industry plagued with declining readership and revenues, insiders will be closely watching the P-I’s transition to the web. The Hearst Corp., which has published the P-I since 1921 and owns several other newspapers, is seeking to move away from an economic model which relies on the print-media for over 90% of its revenues. Hearst recently instructed its newspapers to suggest ways profits could be made from online content.
For its last edition, the P-I’s main story read “One era ends, another begins,” amd the same cautiously optimistic tone was echoed by top Hearst management. The president of Hearst Newspapers, Steven Swartz, said its new web operation was more than an online newspaper.
“Our goal is just to let the quality of the website speak for itself,” Swartz said in an interview on the P-I’s website. “We’re very excited that the people who are staying with us will continue to evolve and experiment and innovate. The newspaper industry needs more innovation, needs more experimentation, and I think the new seattlepi.com is an innovative experiment and I think that the eyes of the country and this industry are going to be on what we do in Seattle.”
Swartz’s statement marks a shift in the company’s tone; on Jan. 9, Hearst put the P-I up for sale after making losses for 8 straight years and warned that they would stop printing if a buyer were not found within 60 days. “With costs scaled back drastically, it seems Hearst is now using the P-I as a lab experiment to achieve a profitable business model that can be applied by all of its newspapers,” said a staff member.
The P-I’s closure is just one of many casualties in the US newspaper industry; Denver Colorado’s The Rocky Mountain News closed last month though Staffers plan to start an online news publication if they can get 50,000 paying subscribers by April 23. In Arizona, the Tucson Citizen is set to close on Saturday.
As advertisers migrate to the Internet, newspapers around the country are being threatened with closures and job cuts. The current economic recession has only exasperated the problem; four newspaper companies, including owners of the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and The Philadelphia Inquirer, have sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection while McClatchy Co., which owns The Miami Herald, announced last month plans to cut 15% of its workforce or 1,600 jobs.
Clay Shirky, an American writer and consultant on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies and adjunct professor at New York University, summed up the current problem facing the newspaper industry on his blog (http://www.shirky.com).
