Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 1863-2009
“Can Seattle’s oldest newspaper be successfully transformed into a child of the information age?The Northwest is a land of big dreams. With the demise of the Soviet Union, one quipster noted that Puget Sound is now home to three empires still bent on global dominion: Microsoft, Amazon.com and Starbuck’s.
If the stars align properly and with a quality product, Seattle will show the way to a new model for journalism of the written word.”
Editorial Comment: Another death in the family.
MORE:
• Last day paper.
• Managing editor’s goodbye.
• P-I memories.
• Introducing the nation’s largest daily online newspaper: SeattlePI.com
• David Horsey, the P-I’s 2-Time Pulitzer Prize winner.
• Announcement, w/ video
• Reax: Peter Kafka Media Memo
David Horsey, Seattle P-I
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Ted,
ReplyDeleteThe only reason this makes me sad is for the people who’ve lost their jobs.
Otherwise, all the weeping over paper is sort of like holding an extended funeral for typewriters. Yes, they were charming. But computers are much better.
Hearst made a big mistake in paying the online reporters less. That hardly signals belief that online is the future. And yet who can deny this is true? There is a much bigger potential audience (circulation), which is traditionally where papers have made quite a bit of their money. You can measure the effectiveness of advertising better, enabling you to deliver better service to that segment of customers. You can provide more information than you could have if you were limited by column inches and static graphics.
There are really only two challenges: to find the audience, which is done through good distribution and appealing content; and to teach advertisers what a better deal they’re getting.
I am a big fan of the PI. Their Web site has always been better than that of the Times. There are so many more ways you can reach people with good reporting and smart opinion writing than through a printed newspaper. I just don’t weep for the environmental hazard that is printed news.
Radically yours,
Martha
Two thoughts:
ReplyDelete1) Reports of the PI's "death," like the false report of Mark Twain's in the New York Journal, would appear to be greatly exaggerated if, as you noted, the PI will continue online. It has changed clothes, if you will. Let's not bury the organization along with the old clothes it has discarded.
2) Why did you not report with equal prominence the fact that, according to a March 3 NNA article (http://www.nna.org/eweb/Dynamicpage.aspx?webcode=NewsTemplate&wps_key=46c416bf-925d-4a18-9112-99f76b9ef04f), the Suburban Newspaper Association (dailies and weeklies) report 26 percent of respondents have launched NEW PRODUCTS this past year? The report also says that, while ad revenues are down, they are not down anywhere near what the "usual suspects" are experiencing.
I don't disagree with you, Martha (which is nice circumlocution that I learned from a former provost, who used it to confuse). Computers ae better for a lot of things. But what's being lost as newspapers die out is the broader social conversation and--not to sound too grandiose--the essential role in the marketplace of ideas that an engaged and vibrant and robust press performs. Over the years (said the ancient professor), I've watched as students become less and less engaged with news and civic affairs. Now, even my self-professed journalism students refuse to read the news--on newspaper, online, on TiVo whatever!--and so routinely flunk their news quizzes. Newspapers couldn't and didn't halt that trend, but the Internet won't either. Without an engaged and informed citizenry, the participatory democracy is dead.
ReplyDeleteThus endeth the lecture.
Ted
oops. Missed Anne's comment.
ReplyDeleteTrue, the P-I isn't entirely dead, but replacing a daily newspaper with 20 (underpaid) online journalists isn't the same. Obviously, I hope that the PIonline experiment can be both financially and socially successful, because that's clearly the future.
That fervent hope is shared by all those smaller market outlets that are experimenting with new online products--everyone's scrambling to find new solutions to both the issue of cost AND the question of what people will attend to.
The irony of the information age is that although we have access to more information than anyone could need, what we attend to is different than when we could depend on the sensemaking role of the daily newspaper. Different isn't necessarily better or worse, but as we individually self-select the news we think we can use, there is a lot of stuff essential to self-governance that's lost in trivia.
We agree on the importance of an engaged and informed citizenry. The only thing I can say about journalism students who don’t crave news is this: Whu-huh? Honestly. Why are they there? That’s a failure of parenting, I think. If parents don’t insist their kids be engaged in something, and insist they bring something unique to the world, kids will glide through without getting that they owe the community their talents.
ReplyDeleteMartha
"Engaged," "informed," and "participatory democracy" are catch phrases with little measurable meaning. Just because today's students flunk your news quizzes -- based on your definition of news -- you assume they are uninformed about everything that "matters" (again a subjective term) and that they therefore are not "engaged" (to be married to what?) or are not "participating" (which apparently means "contributing their talents")in "democracy" (does anybody remember that we live in a democratic REPUBLIC?) -- by whose measuring stick and by what standards?
ReplyDeleteLook, I'm as frustrated as you two are. But I think the answer lies in challenging the news industry's assumptions and jargon. Until we come up with a fresh definition of news that incorporates more than just the "top tier" of government (says who??), with a fresh definition of journalism that encompasses more than the vision of a snarling watchdog ready to rip the throats of anyone who dares to aspire to public service of any kind, with fresh language that explains and reports events and occurrences rather than making snide, under-the-breath comments about them, and with a fresh understanding of and respect for the new communities forming, engaging, and participating on their own terms (not ours), we deserve being abandoned.
To put it in piscatorial terms, if the river has carved out a new bank causing the collapse of the old and if a news species of fish has moved in and both the old and the new species have discovered this new habitat, isn't it time to up anchor and figure out how to cast a fly or drop a worm in this new spot? Or maybe these new fish prefer something as exotic as kiwi chunks trolled on the bottom while strains of Amy Whats-her-name are played underwater. We can either lament the loss of one fishing spot or we can go figure out how to fish another.
OK -- I promise to shut up. For today. :-)
For many of us over the age of 40 (and I can’t even see that in my rearview mirror anymore), it’s not just a medium that is vanishing, it’s part of our culture. Of course, I am sure that many in their teens, 20s and 30s would say that reading news on computers is part of THEIR culture.
ReplyDeleteJS
New Study:
ReplyDeleteNewspapers do matter, Princeton study finds
The shutdown of a newspaper has an immediate and measurable impact on local political engagement, according to a new study by economists at Princeton University.
“If voter turnout, a broad choice of candidates and accountability for incumbents are important to democracy, we side with those who lament” the decline of newspapers, said economists Sam Schulhofer-Wohl and Miguel Garrido, who conducted the study.
http://newsosaur.blogspot.com/2009/03/newspapers-do-matter-princeton-study.html
What interests me is that everyone has made such a big deal out of the PI's supposed death, technically it is still living on, what about all of the newspapers that go out of business each day and are no longer printed?
ReplyDelete