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150-Year-Old Seattle P-I Newspaper Officially Going Online-Only

by Terrence O'Brien on March 17, 2009 at 01:06 PM

Seattle Post-Intelligencer Goes Online Only
...And the flood gates have opened. Print publications are now in full-on death march mod,e and it's only a matter of time before newspapers become like vinyl records -- odd relics that hipsters cling to out of a false sense of nostalgia.

Okay, so the chance that people will one day stack old, yellowing copies of the New York Times in milk crates around their studio apartment is pretty slim, but as more and more newspapers and magazines go online only --
or close up shop completely -- it's hard to imagine a future where print media is even half as ubiquitous as it is today.

Today, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (or the P-I as it's known) became the largest newspaper in the U.S. to close its print operation and move online only. Its owner, print conglomerate Hearst, has been looking for a buyer for the troubled P-I for some time, but yesterday its deadline expired and the nearly 150 year-old print version of the newspaper was put out to pasture. The publication will live on at its Web site SeattlePI.com, but its staff has been cut to about 20 people, a mere fraction of the former 165-person operation.


The new SeattlePI.com will feature some original reporting, columns, and blogs, but it will primarily serve as a news aggregator, linking to content on other sites in the same way the Huffington Post does. Many outlets will be watching the P-I closely to see if it can succeed with its new model -- a model that might just be a sign of things to come for other news outlets.

We do have one concern though -- if everyone simply becomes an aggregator of news, who will do the actual reporting? [From: New York Times]

Death of Print


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Tags: death of print, DeathOfPrint, internet, news, newspaper, newspapers, old media, OldMedia, online, print, recession, seattle post-intelligencer, SeattlePost-intelligencer

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