Seattle P-I to publish last edition Tuesday
…and word is the Seattle Times is not far behind. The failure of the Times print edition would leave Seattle without a major daily paper.
What is interesting is how many resources the P-I can put into their Web site. Eliminating delivery and paper and ink frees up an immense portion of the paper’s…ahem, news organization’s budget. What they could do is enlist a ton of bloggers to comment on neighborhoods. Retain their reporters and editors to coordinate Web content spend more time doing investigative journalism and pursuing leads. They might also use their new format to hire some flash animators and a few filmmakers to perhaps garner some more advertising dollars with short, ten-second commercials.
The collapse of their print edition is indeed an unfortunate thing but they may also be in a unique position to show how well a major paper can make the paperless transition. And Seattle seems like a great city to try it out.
I think San Francisco is in bigger merde than Seattle, newspaper-wise…the P-I was always the #2 paper, and the Seattle Times will be picking up some of their eyeballs and their advertisers.
But the SF Chronicle is that city’s #1 paper and it’s hemorrhaging money. I think San Francisco stands a sad chance of being the country’s first major city without a daily paper.
At least both those cities are wired which certainly contributed to the demise of their daily prints. Now, let’s see how long the Laramie Boomerang or the Plain Dealer survive.
I got both the ST and PI delivered to me when I lived there and they were pretty crappy. Besides, most people in Seattle are glued to their laptops/smartphones anyway so it makes sense they would not need a print edition. Not sad. Things change!
Surely not everyone in Seattle or San Fran is, “wired” in such a way that assures us the information needs of the population will be served just as well by an exclusively electronic news service as it is by print.
What good is quality news and information if is available only to a narrow and isolated social caste?