Seattle P-I To Print Last Issue Today
Seattle P-I Home Page
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer announced that it will print it’s last issue today 3/17/09. This is a sad thing for Seattle for sure, though they will still have a daily paper with The Seattle Times. There is something very different about reading a newspaper compared to a computer screen of even a eReader. Unfortunally daily printed newspapers don’t fit into how people are getting news today, or even into the news cycle as a whole.
While I am far from your typical news follower, but a good example of this is how I found out that tomorrow was the last day the PI was publishing. While listening one of my daily podcasts, Buzz Out Loud, someone in their chat room they monitor while taping mentioned it to the hosts. They hadn’t planned on talking about this story and may or may not have known that they were even announcing their last printing that day, but they took it and ran with it.
The little that I know about newspapers tells me they are not nearly that nimble, yes, someone could run into the printing room and shout ‘stop the presses’ ( not just movie lore it can be done ) but the financial impact of that would be enormous. Plus, once the paper is printed and out the door it can’t be changed, the only way to amend it before the next edition would be to print an ‘Extra Edition’, again at a large financial impact. These are problems easily addressed with digital distribution. I have a feeling that we saw our last wide scale ‘Extra Edition’ printing in the US on 9/11/01.
Like I said there is something about ink on newsprint that is nice, but in order to survive I feel papers need to also have a digital supplement to their printed editions, much like CNN did with their cable channel. I don’t know any stats off hand but I’m sure even the 24hr cable news stations are being hurt with this push to online news delivery. CNN realised this and is one of the most popular sources for ‘reptuible’ news online.
All that being said when the Seattle P-I came out and said that they would be going to online only distribution the BOL podcast I mentioned before brought up it may be a prefect testbed for the ‘Hearst Reader’. Hearst owns the Seattle P-I and has come out saying that it would like to release its own eReader to compete with the Amazon Kindle, specifically in the newspaper and magazine markets. (InformationWeek) Seattle would be a logical market for Hearst to test out this technology due to its high number of people in the tech industry.
If Hearst can find a way to effectively sell advertising on such a platform to heavily subsidise the cost of the reader it could really work. I think this will happen before we see the prices come down due to cheaper materials or manufacturing processes.