(AP Photo/Elaine Thompson)
It is all too common in this day and age to hear that the newspaper is a dying form of information conveyance in this modern world. The most recent casualty was obviously the hometown hero, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Many faithful subscribers scooped up the final issue of the P.I. printed newspaper on March 17, 2009, begrudging the loss of a Seattle institution that has been around since 1863.
However the P.I.’s transition to an online newspaper seems to be a forward-thinking step into the future. More people than ever are getting their news online. With iphones running rampant in Seattle, it almost makes more sense technologically and financially to begin experimenting with non-paper, internet-centric ways of delivering the news to the people.
Many think that the transition from paper to online-only is a death sentence for the P.I. and that the Hearst Corporation is only setting the website up for failure against the eventual transition of Seattle readership to the Seattle Times. It is most certainly a bold experiment, (one that is also being seen with the Christian Science Monitor and the Kentucky Post) but one that would be necessary to take at one time or another.
There are outstanding issues, concerning a transition to online-only, issues that are slowly beginning to surface within this first month of the newspaper’s transition. These issues include such things as attaining and keeping readership, competing with the printed Seattle Times, gaining sustainable income through advertising, and dealing with union concerns in the new virtual newspaper world. Journalism isn’t the only field dealing with such new and confusing issues with the growing dominance of the internet over the past two decades. There have been new legal debates over privacy, issues of copyright infringement, how to police crimes committed over the web. These are all questions that the world has had to face in the technology boom.
The P.I. experiment is risky, and the outcome is unpredictable, but for experiments in new uses of modern technology, there is no better place than Seattle, a city that has so readily embraced the difficulties and the challenges of the modern age. It is a little too early to claim that the P.I. is completely dead. Perhaps it would be more accurate to admit that it’s in critical care. Only time and constant renovation will show if an online-only newspaper can fulfill the needs of such a news hungry city as Seattle.
Comments
The Seattle P-I switched to online only on March 18, 2009 -- the day after it published its final print edition. The current site has an editorial staff of 20 (it was 150 in the print days). Another 20 people were hired to sell ads. Since the switch, readership of the online site has declined by 20 percent.
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