Seattle Paper Shifts Entirely to the Web [New York Times]
It's a sign of the times. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Seattle's second largest newspaper, has announced that starting tomorrow, it is suspending the production of a printed edition of the newspaper. Rather, it will reduce the number of newsroom staff and publish the news online through the paper's current web site.
This is the largest American newspaper thus far to announce the end of a print edition. Last year, the Seattle P-I had a print circulation of 118,000 readers each weekday. However, it also has an online readership of 1.8 million visits each month. The Hearst Corporation, which owns the paper, plans to shift resources toward the digital focus, with the business model focused on generating online advertising revenue.
The current recession, coupled with the lack of newspapers to create a profitable online business model, have created a perfect storm that threatens to force many other papers to follow the Seattle P-I's lead. Just last month, Denver's Rocky Mountain News announced that it was closing down, faced with these conditions. And while both the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer both operated in markets with a second newspaper, this scenario is likely to play itself out several more times in the coming months. Even major cities with a monopoly on daily newspapers are at risk.
The presence of a free press is critical to our democracy and the survival of newspapers is fundamental to its longevity. In these uncertain times, the Internet just may be the way many newspapers are saved from simply vanishing.
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