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Posts tagged as “Seattle Post-intelligencer”

It’s in the Times

April 21, 2009
blue house

In the window, in the Blue House/Stapilus

What you see here is the Blue House, a former residential building located a block or so from the Washington statehouse. It is where what remains of the statehouse press corps has its offices, a non-extravagant but functional place for the reporters. (And, from time to time, Bob the Cat.)

Directing your attention to the windows to the right of the doorway, you'll be looking at the Olympia office of the Seattle Times. Now look to the center window, and you'll see a patch of red. That is an old newspaper dispenser formerly used - and still painted for - the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which has quit printing its paper editions. The P-I's slogan long was, "It's in the P-I."

Can't be helped: Now, it appears, the P-I is in the Times.

More time for poetry?

March 16, 2009

Mark Trahant, who has been (as of this writing, presumably, still is) editorial page editor at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, has been on Twitter for a little while and doing something unusual with it: Composing four-line poems on subjects of the day. Today's topics include the AIG bailout and the shutdown of the print P-I.

This would be a good day to check it out.

Seattle P-I: Print ends Tuesday, web goes on

March 16, 2009

A sad day we knew was coming soon: Tomorrow marks the end of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer as a print publication. After tomorrow, it becomes web-only. One intriguing point: It will be "outside the JOA" - outside the agreement with the Seattle Times, with which its current website is linked. So this will be something new.

What will the web version be like? How will it differ from, say, Crosscut or Publicola? The early indications were not at all clear. The paper itself said "The so-called 'community platform' will feature breaking news, columns from prominent Seattle residents, community databases, photo galleries, 150 citizen bloggers and links to other journalistic outlets." That might have been one thing with a newsroom the size of the print P-I's; what it will be with 20 or so will emerge in the days ahead.

The transition goes on.

One day at a time

March 10, 2009

How sad is this headline from KIRO-TV on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: "Staff at the newspaper have been told that Wednesday's paper won't be the last one."

We're now past 60 days from the point on January 9 when Hearst, owner of the P-I, said it would keep the paper printing for 60 more days pending either a sale of the paper (which never looked likely) or conversion to online-only.

There will be a Wednesday print edition. Will Thursday print? Hearst isn't saying. So it's a day to day matter now.

So, apparently, is the digital conversion. The new Publicola site, which seems to have the best reportage on the situation, is suggesting that Hearst wants to try the digital approach and has been approaching 20 or so staffers to gauge interest. However, the pay and benefits package apparently has been mediocre, and evidently few of the paper's people have agreed to sign on. And that drama goes on.

After the next day or two, that drama may in fact be what keeps the P-I in print, for however much longer that may be.

Your ideas, anyway

February 17, 2009

You'll recall that when the Hearst Corporation owners of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer said about a month ago that they will be ending their publication of the P-I print edition (which end date is about a month from now), there was some indication of maybe continuing in some way as an electronic publication.

That possibility is still sort of out there, but it seems to be fading. A blogger at the Stranger's Slog, bringing some of this up to date, throws in a fascinating quote from an e-mail from a P-I staffer:

Can I also go off on a tangent and say how bizarre it is for Hearst to ask us for our groundbreaking, lean, out of the box ideas for a profitable online venture? (1) If they were going to ask, shouldn't they have asked before they let us know via KING 5 that we were probably all about to be laid off? (2) Do they seriously not have a plan already in place? That seems like terrible business planning, (3) Why are they asking us these questions instead of paying someone who might actually know something about how to make money on the Internet? Aren't reporters notoriously bad when it comes to issues like this, because we have always prided ourselves on having nothing to do with how ads are sold? But, (4) Didn't the two reporters who did know something about how to make money on the Internet, John Cook and Todd Bishop, come to them with a groundbreaking, lean, out of the box idea not so long ago and get rejected?