P-I likely to shut down in a matter of months
KING 5 is reporting that the Seattle P-I will be put up for sale and likely shut down within a matter of months.
Source: Seattle P-I to be sold, or closed
There can be only one.
Source: Seattle P-I to be sold, or closed
It would be sad if we lose Aubrey Cohen. His reporting has been solid lately. If this comes to pass, thanks to the departure of the ever-amusing Elizabeth Rhodes from the Times, I'd be left as the closest thing this town has to a real estate news reporter.Now, a source close to the deal tells KING 5 that the paper's owner, Hearst Corporation, will announce as soon as tomorrow that it's putting the P-I up for sale. Under the joint operating agreement between the P-I and The Seattle Times, the P-I must be offered for sale for at least 30 days before it can cease operation.
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We're told Hearst does not expect another buyer to step forward and that Seattle will likely become a one newspaper town within the next few months.
There can be only one.
Comments
Tim MacLeod?
You and I talked about this a couple of weeks ago Tim, but one of the biggest reasons for the demise of print paper isn't where people get their news so much as it is Craigslist. No one uses newspaper classifieds anymore to sell anything. I know that as a RE agent that print advertising gets you no response on anything anymore.
If you look in the Sunday paper nowadays, in the classifieds almost all you'll see is just pages of windermere, John L Scott and ReMax ads, and car dealerships. The interesting thing about the RE ads is that those aren't there to actually sell the houses. They're there as a marketing tool in order to get new listings.
Just don't behead each other, okay.
Plus, although the Hearst family is not one you may want to cuddle with, the Belthens who own the Times are downright creepy.
I heart TBTL.
Maybe Aubrey would want to blog at SB.
If this turns out to be true, would it be tacky to post a link to a photo of a crying baby over there?
I think it would be more interesting to see how they handle it....and if they decide to form a group blog elsewhere. The only people who post on a regular basis are just a small handful of the total number of bloggers over there.
From the P-I front page: Times story: P-I up for sale
A quote from the Times piece: Awesome editorial skills, guys. And yet the P-I is the one that's going under.
[Update: The Times has since updated their online story to fix the bizarro paragraph quoted above.]
LOL
Maybe the cranky old guys/gals are correct. The English language is being destroyed by...technology?
Let's just hope they don't come here.
For the record, this was a snarky reference to a post that Larry made a while back referring to those who believe in a real estate bubble as crybabies. I would never actually stoop to that level, as I'm not a professional.
That pretty much sums up the SREP blog. Mack wants to talk about professionals versus the anons, and then he posts crap like the "rap" about bubble bloggers...
It boggles the mind.
They of course talked about the decline of newspapers and what not, and he said something interesting and I've heard the same about the New York Times. He said that even though print purchasing and actual subscriptions are down, readership via the web is up. I believe he said there were over 20 million unique visitors to the Washington post website last year.
Now the Christian Science Monitor has also declined greatly over the years and is the first major daily to stop doing a daily print and go web-only for their daily news and switch to a weekly format.
I'm thinking that most major newspapers will not very likely collapse completely, but I think some will. I do think that very soon we may see the elimination of actual physical daily print of newspaper. I can't imagine that for most news organizations that the daily printing of newspaper is even a break even proposition for news organizations.
So if you eliminate the actual printing of the news, then you eliminate the costs of printing. Granted, you're putting alot of people out of work by doing that, but would a newspaper be able to function normally without an actual physical print? Would they have to still lay off alot of writers, or would they get enough ad revenue to keep up with the same kind of reporting?
It amazes me that some of the small town papers are able to stay afloat.
But then, my small town newspaper experiences were many years ago.
My old hometown (city of about 60,000 with several larger cities fairly close by) has a newspaper that has figured out the internet. Their online site is quite good, and they have some pretty good interactivity (photo sharing, personal stories) during major local events like the summer floods.
Of course, now that I just checked that, I see that the online site is run by a company that does about 20 online editions for different cities. Consolidation of online content - not surprising.
One risk is that your Sunday edition now becomes more expensive to print. If you only run the presses once a week, that's a lot of jobs that go from full time to one day a week, which is more difficult for all involved than just eliminating the jobs completely.
I think the true death of most print media happens once e-paper or something like it (Kindle...ugh) is in the vast majority of homes. Until the online edition is portable, it's not a full replacement. In the meantime, perhaps some papers will begin doing abbreviated prints. I.E. the daily has 1/3rd the content of the online version, but it gives you the stories you most want to see. Also, home delivery will go away while the "pay 75 cents kiosks" will last longer (cheaper distribution costs).
From my own experience, I was thinking a bit smaller. The area I grew up in had one paper that covered three neighboring towns, with a combined population of < 10,000. I've been trying to think of how a paper like that could survive. They didn't have any real competition, being in the middle of nowhere, so maybe that's the key. They focused mainly on local news that the nearby "big cities" (50+ miles away) didn't cover -- high school football, school board, city council, etc. I'm assuming the Internet has caught on even there by now, and I wouldn't be surprised if they outsourced a website just like they outsourced printing.
Mack's rap really bugged me too.... Mack's arrogance and his comments about comparing the size of his wallet with yours, will not be missed. They say that corrections do away with the excess. Thankfully, in this case it is true.