Comments on: R.I.P., Seattle P-I newsPAPER—and hello to the Web-only seattlepi.com!

By: Garson O'Toole

Garson O'Toole — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 15:00:37 +0000

Blue Tyson wonders about the type of reporters that are being kept. Apparently a sharply limited number of staffers of any type are being kept. An article at Publishing 2.0 says “the entire news industry will be watching to see what an editorial staff of 20 can accomplish compared to a staff of 165.” Here are some quotes from the Michelle Nicolosi, the Executive Producer, of SeatlePI.com about the news coverage of the website:

We'll spend our staff time where we know we have something unique and civically important to offer. A lot of our staff efforts will be on coverage of government, spending, crime, and harder news in general. … We'll also be joined by couple of well-loved sports columnists—Jim Moore and Art Thiel—who will each write for us twice a week and our two-time Pulitzer winning cartoonist who will continue to create his brilliant cartoons and blog for us at DavidHorsey.com. … We don't have reporters, editors or producers—everyone will do and be everything. Everyone will write, edit, take photos and shoot video, produce multimedia and curate the home page. That'll be a training challenge for everyone, but we're all up for the challenge and totally ready to pick up all these skills.

By: Blue Tyson

Blue Tyson — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 14:37:37 +0000

So which reporters are they keeping, the investigative and news types (which is the important part) or the fluff, pop-culture and entertainment – or a mixture?

By: Garson O'Toole

Garson O'Toole — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 12:22:53 +0000

David Rothman identifies the crux of the problem facing newspapers when they attempt to move from print to the web: “It’s all those advertising dollars”. The funding obtained through advertising shrinks dramatically online.

What you find, with some modest rounding, is that print circulation is about 10% of total audience reach, while online advertising revenue is 10% of total ad revenue — the economics are nearly the perfect inverse of what they should be.

The problem was labeled the “10 percent” problem back in 2007 when a scribe analyzed revenue and circulation figures from the New York Times. Hearst will continue to publish a version of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer online, but the number of employees will be much smaller. Maybe online advertising will be enough to support the contracted news operation.

By: Blue Tyson

Blue Tyson — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 00:33:46 +0000

There’s one thing you can do with a newspaper the web can’t do :-

Wrap broken glass, spread around when you clean the oven to catch the gunk, that sort of thing.

That might be missed!

By: David Rothman

David Rothman — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 20:21:55 +0000

Hey, Paul, it isn’t the pulped-wood I feel the nostalgia for. It’s all those advertising dollars that used to pay my salary on a daily newspaper. Someday people will get their biz models down right for the Web, but that day isn’t here yet in most cases, and should the industry just kiss off the existing revenue from the paper editions? Well, up to a point. Looks as if you got your wish in Seattle.

At the personal level? Yes, I canceled my pulped-wood subscription to the Washington Post for the same reason you canceled your subscriptions. But so far, hundreds of thousands of others here in the D.C. area want to keep theirs.

Thanks,
David

By: Paul Biba

Paul Biba — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 20:13:33 +0000

I must admit that I don’t understand this great nostalgia for newspapers. To me they are just a pain in the neck – something that requires bundling, tying and dragging out to the curb for recycling. As a matter of fact, recycling is what decided me to kill all my newspaper subscriptions.

A newspaper is out of date the moment it is printed. A web publication can be updated in real time and can provide truly current news. Newspapers are obsolete technology, but it is interesting that so many people are emotionally bound to them. Even ebook fanatics somehow think there is a place for them, even though they would deny that place to pbooks – saying the pbook is obsolete. Fuzzy thinking.

Most of the kids I know (those in their late 20s) consider newspapers to be an anachronism, even those I know who went to journalism school. They feel that the future is the web and have no qualms about the death of an obsolete medium.

Unlike books, I can’t think of anything a newspaper does that can’t be done just as well on the web.