Print Media Deathwatch: Seattle Post-Intelligencer Trades Newsprint For The Web
Mar 16th, 2009 | By James Lewin | Category: Commentary, General 
Print Media Deathwatch: Looks like Hearst is coming to grips with the idea that the traditional local newspaper is dead.
They’ve laid off hundreds and shut down the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, pinning their hopes for the news organization on a “new type of digital business,” creating a business focusing on community news and local business advertising.
“The P-I has a rich 146-year history of service to the people of the Northwest, which makes the decision to stop publishing the newspaper an extraordinarily difficult one,” Frank Bennack, chief executive of the Hearst Corp, said.
“Our goal now is to turn seattlepi.com into the leading news and information portal in the region.”
The paper’s final print edition runs Tuesday.
Most traditional newspapers face extinction unless they can radically reinvent themselves, very quickly.
In addition to the horrible economy, papers face unavoidable technology trends:
- People are getting their news via computers and mobile devices;
- People are just not that into newspapers anymore; and
- The barriers to competition for news have been largely eliminated, which means that our traditional idea of local news is dead.
Hearst is cutting and running, killing off the Seattle P-I to focus their efforts on the Internet. This may not be a great strategy, but it’s a pragmatic one.
This is really no big surprise as they strongly “hinted” that they were going to be doing this back in January. Any talk from corporate ownership of “we’re trying to find a buyer within the next 90 days” is BS because it would take much longer than that to sell a large property and for the buyer to do it’s due diligence even in good economic times. But when the woes of your business and the industry are so well known it nearly takes the “we’re looking for a sucker, I mean a buyer” option off the table.