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This morning brings another skinny 26-page SeaTimes, with only eight major staff-written news stories. Nevertheless, a laudatory NY Times piece relays that the SeaTimes is now claims to be “operating in the black,” though the Blethens are quiet about the financial metrics they’re using to make this claim.
The NYT story also notes the SeaTimes circulation has risen from 200,000 to 260,000, having kept most of the P-I subscriptions it had inherited in March.
However, that’s still a drop from the former combined circulation of the SeaTimes-dominated Joint Operating Agreement, which had been approximately 311,000 at the print P-I‘s demise.
Still, the SeaTimes’ current readership is close to its ’90s, pre-Internet peak.
Just don’t expect the paper to restore its newsroom staff size to ’90s levels. Not with the ad market still so shaky.
…and best wishes to top local music producer Conrad Uno (Young Fresh Fellows, PUSA, and more). He and his lovely bride Emily Bishton renewed their wedding vows at Safeco Field on Sunday. The here-linked Seattle Times article mentions almost nothing about Uno’s musical career.
Today’s Sunday paper is down to 76 pages (plus ad flyers, supplements, and comics). Weekday papers this past month have had as few as 26 pages. (That’s not the “news hole;” that’s the whole paper, ads and all.)
I’m not calling this feature a “death watch,” because the Times still has a lot further down it could go.
As yet, no major US city has lost all its daily papers. None probably will.
But the papers that remain could become unrecognizable. They could become tiny journals of record, like slightly more mass-market versions of the Seattle Daily Journal of Commerce. They could become glorified pundit-newsletters promoting the local business community’s agenda of the day. They could become, to borrow from the old National Lampoon Sunday Newspaper Parody, “newscasts in print,” lurid sheets emphasizing crimes, fires, and mayhem.
…for the Seattle Times, that local bastion of patrician conservatism, to reprint an essay from The Nation, that national bastion of defiant liberalism?
It takes a long screed in favor of government assistance to newspapers, direct or indirect.
Its co-author, Robert McChesney, is a scholar of media history and a longtime advocate against corporate consolidation in news and entertainment. What nobody except me seems to remember is he was a co-founder of The Rocket, the local rag that proclaimed the hotness of Seattle rock bands back when Seattle Weekly still ignored anyone born after 1950. It can be hard for younger or more recently-arrived folks to imagine a Seattle where the leading “alternative” paper was more culturally conservative than the local dailies. The rise of Seattle rock in the late 1980s was as much about DIY media as it was about DIY music.
After McChesney went off to Wisconsin for his Ph.D, he expanded his beliefs in indie media into a scholarly history, in books and essays, of U.S. corporate media and its discontents.
So it’s strange to see his words interpreted, by their placement in the Seattle Times, as a plea to bail out organizations like the Seattle Times.
Anyone familiar with McChesney’s larger body of work knows that’s not his real goal.
Today is the day many of us have dreaded these past nine and a half weeks.
Found a newspaper plopped down outside my door upon awakening. But it was the wrong one.
When this happened in the past, I could call a voice-mail tree system to get the paper I actually wanted.
But I can’t do that anymore.
I can only accept the large-print, smugly conservative rag aimed at the suburban white elderly market.
Or I can quit it.
As I’d expected, the new Seattlepi.com is no substitute for the P-I paper and website that were. Its “front page” photo today is a cute puppy. The long list of local headlines on its still-cluttered home page links mostly to wire copy, short police-beat briefs, and stories on other sites.
But that’s what Hearst apparently wanted all along during this tragedy—to keep the P-I brand alive as cheaply as possible, while breaking both the Joint Operating Agreement and the Newspaper Guild.
The new Seattlepi (and we might as well call it that, instead of the beloved two-initial nickname of its already mourned predecessor) has nowhere to go but up.
How much better can it become, and how quickly?
Specifically, can it get its online-only act together before one of the proposed indie post-P-I sites gets going? (If any of them do get going, that is.)
Rick Anderson reports the post-print seattlepi.com will include unpaid contributions by ex-Mayor Rice and Congressman McDermott, among others. Brian Miller, meanwhile, snarkily suggests a surefire substitute for professional reporting—more cute kitten pictures.
Meanwhile, here’s how the NY Times, Bloomberg.com, and the Puget Sound Business Journal reported the grim news.
Slog keeps adding additional views on the disaster. Included: P-I art critic Regina Hackett (who’s moving on to ArtsJournal.com) taking one last potshot at “the we-precious-few tone of the Times, which rubs itself against the legs of the comfortably middle-class like a cat looking for a handout,” and a commenter who scoffs at the Times’ continuing plight: “The only problem with newspapers is that they are run by newspapermen. You’re the poster child. You guys pretty much fucked-up a monopoly by trying to defend it, instead of trying to leverage it.”
P-I business columnist “the 40 year old” Bill Virgin blames his bosses for not being nice enough to conservatives and for ignoring a lot of suburban issues. (The latter point may be valid; the P-I traditionally had more out-of-town readers than the Times, but lost that advantage in the past decade.)
The Times has confirmed that it’s keeping all of both papers’ subscribers. (Expect a lot of cancellation calls.) It’s also adding five P-I comic strips, including Pearls Before Swine and 9 Chickweed Lane; but it’s not adding any P-I writers, at least not yet.
It’s here. The announcement we’ve been dreading but expecting these past nine weeks was made shortly after 10 this morning. The last print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer will appear Tuesday. That’s one day sooner than the earliest closing date offered during Hearst’s Jan. 9 announcement.
Other than the date of the final edition, the winding down of Washington state’s oldest business enterprise has gone according to rumor.
Yes, Hearst’s keeping the P-I brand, and the globe.
Yes, there’s be a Web site, run by a tiny subset of the existing P-I staff (20 editorial staffers compared to 150 previously). Only a few of these surviving staffers have been announced; cartoonist David Horsey’s one of them.
Yes, nobody came forward with a solid offer to buy the paper and keep it in print. (What, nobody wanted the chance to lose $1 million a month as the junior partner in a JOA with the also-failing Seattle Times?)
Yes, the final announcement came when P-I columnist Joel Connelly was out of town, and local news-biz analyst Chuck Taylor had just gotten back into town.
The Stranger’s Eli Sanders was in town, and he noted that the P-I site went to a text-only “disaster” mode around 10:30 Sunday nite. When the full site reappeared an hour and a half later, its non-ad pages were bereft of the “nwsource.com” domain name. That’s the domain run by the Times under the 1999-revised terms of the JOA. As of this morning, seattlepi.com is its own freestanding thang. (Ads now appearing on the site were sold by the Times, but an in-house sales staff is being assembled.)
Newspaper people, everywhere, are fond of romanticizing their own. They’ll note that the Obama inauguration was the last big national story in P-I print; the December snowstorm and Washington Mutual’s collapse were its last big local stories.
Ken Griffey’s return to the Mariners, the launch of Seattle Sounders FC, the Husky men’s basketball team’s NCAA tournament run—not to be commemorated in a printed P-I. The opening of Sound Transit light rail, the final fate of the Alaskan Way Viaduct, this year’s mayoral race—all things we’ll have to read about elsewhere.
The P-I staff had already been preparing a big goodbye special section. That’ll show up Tuesday. Expect a huge wrap party/wake tonight at Buckley’s on lower Queen Anne.
This past Thursday, I spent a couple hours in the central library looking at microfilmed P-I issues from significant dates in my life—my birth date, the day the Sonics won the NBA title, the day Mt. St. Helens blew, etc.
The first thing I noticed: Monochrome microfilm just isn’t paper; novelist Nicholson Baker was right when he pleaded for libraries to hold on to printed newspapers.
The second thing I noticed: Papers sure had a lot more ads back then. Ten pages of classifieds at the minimum. Multiple ads for supermarket and department-store chains within the paper, not as separate inserts.
The third thing I noticed: The words describing major events can evoke memories just as strong as, or stronger than, the audio-visual memories of the events themselves.
But that’s what newspaper people do. They create what an old cliche calls “the first draft of history.”
And now, the Post-Intelligencer, as a tangible product and as a fully-staffed newsroom, is history.
Meanwhile, the various assorted attempts to jump-start a competitive post-P-I news site continue.
As will the pontificatin’, here and elsewhere, about what online news should be and how it could be funded.
…to succinctly explain what I meant a few posts back as “microbrew journalism.”
Essentially, it’s the idea that, like the beer biz, the news biz needs to decentralize.
It needs to move from a few big makers toward many smaller organizations.
And it needs to expand from bland, singular, everything-to-everybody products toward more compelling tastes that consumers will actively seek out and loyally support.
This means more than just shoveling newsprint-style text online.
And it means more than just adding blogs and comment threads and RSS feeds and tweets.
It means involving your readers in the daily churn of your reporting beats. Not just the big stories (big crimes, big elections, big layoff announcements) but the eternal ebb and flow of events, the “inside baseball,” the amassing of little events and little facts that add up to an ongoing sense of community.
It’s easy to see this approach taken to sports, business, lifestyles, and arts coverage. Those content genres already have built-in hardcore audiences. There are already people out there who really care about the Mariners, the tech biz, the music scene, and the cost of food.
It takes an extra leap of imagination to see how it could apply to what the Seattle Times used to call “General News.”
But it can be done.
It takes great research, great storytelling, and great networking. All these are skills journalists are already supposed to know about.
But instead of working all week to prepare a couple placid little he-said-she-said analysis pieces or brazen ambulance-chasing gorefests, use the Web’s unlimited space to add both depth and breadth. Let stories breathe with the details that add personality and narrative. Spread out beyond the headlines to show the daily drama ofthe courts, the city council, the schools, etc.
You can do this and still be fair to the various sides of a political debate or a court case. Indeed, with more room online, you can fully explore an issue from all angles.
And you can have background stories about particular issues, stories that stay up on the site, updated when needed.
The online transition can mean both more and better local news coverage. Coverage that can draw in readers at a higher level of involvement.
That’s the sort of audience that can command higher online ad rates.
And it’s the sort of audience that could be sold premium-tier content—stats, alerts, and detailed reports for people who need to know what local and state governments are up to on a professional-wonk level.
Hearst is leaking a few hints about a potential online-only P-I. As many of us had feared, it’s shaping up as a barer-than-bare-bones operation, with few of the original-reporting positions that we in the save-the-news crowd are trying to save.
The SeaTimes notes two limited experiments in print newspapers going online-only, and finds them both relatively low-budget efforts relying on subsidies from larger organizations.
The NYT remembers that nonprofit journalistic endeavors have been around since before the Web. One of these, Mother Jones, is hanging in there fiscally, but is not immune to the larger economy’s ebbs and flows.
Chuck Taylor concludes his own “Life in a Zero-Newspaper Town” series with his own answer to funding the new news: There is no one answer. Instead, news Web sites will need what the motivational coaching industry calls “multiple streams of income.”
Nathan Richardson offers some simple things the big Web portals could do to help news sites. One suggestion: Google, etc. could vow to link directly to original-reporting sites, rather than to all those slice-n’-dice aggregation sites. (How would that affect a site like this, which offers both original prose and linkage?)
Alan Mutter believes news sites can indeed charge for online content. The trick: Have some content people will want enough to pay for. That’s not rewritten press releases, human-interest homilies, or ambulance chasing. It’s comprehensive news-you-can-use coverage of consumer, business/financial, and governmental topics.
That’s another ingredient in what I’m calling microbrew news—stuff people really care about reading, stuff people will go out of their way to get.
Earlier this week, I complained about the Seattle Post-Intelligencer dropping the Zippy comic strip. Now, according to unconfirmed rumor, there might not much longer be a P-I to carry or not carry the strip.
KING-TV claimed Thursday night that the Hearst Corp. will put the Post-Intelligencer up for sale, as a formality under the Joint Operating Agreement with the Times toward shutting down the P-I within months. P-I and Times bosses all claimed they haven’t heard yet of any such move. However, it would seem a plausible possibility. The owners of Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, also the junior partner in a JOA, have made just such a move. And both the Times and P-I severely cut their page counts following pathetic holiday-season ad sales.
We, and the papers’ staffs, will learn the degree of truth of this telecast rumor sometime Friday. (There likely won’t be an official announcement in the papers themselves until at least Saturday.)
Needless to say, I’ve not wanted this to happen. I’ve supported the efforts of the Committee for a Two-Newspaper Town, which put public pressure on the Times to keep the JOA alive. I’ve long preferred the P-I, which long ago shed its last vestiges of William Randolph Hearst Jr.’s right-wing squareness to become the region’s dominant center-left editorial voice.
Yet few people, especially within the newspaper biz, quite expected industry-wide ad revenues to plummet so far so fast. Recent Times and P-I issues have had fewer than four pages of display ads and fewer than two pages of classifieds.
And you can’t expect the papers’ owners to just eat these declines. The Times’ majority owners, the Blethens, have tried to sell some of their other properties with no takers. The Times’ minority owners, the McClatchy chain, allegedly wants to sell its most prestigious possession, the Miami Herald, also with no apparent takers.
And the P-I owning, family-held Hearst Corp. is notoriously private in its business dealings; but it’s clear that its major income-earning properties (Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Esquire) also carry far fewer ad pages these days.
I’ll talk more about this when I know more, which will be after anyone else in the business here knows more.
…and the whole greed/corruption/warmongerin’ Bush era dept.: Saturday’s Sunday-preview Seattle Times will have its editors’ choices for the top local news stories of the year. Here’s mine:
1. Washington Mutual goes pffft.
2. The Sonics go blort.
3. Safeco goes doink.
4. General economic and real-estate kerplunk-ness.
5. Obamamania a huge hit locally; Democrats win just about everything except the 8th Congressional District.
6. December’s Snowtopia brings beauty, wonder, photogenic bus wipeouts, and the sudden discovery that not everyone loves the Nickels administration.
7. Seattle music rules again (Fleet Foxes, Grand Archives, Saturday Knights, the Dutchess and the Duke, Team Gina, Mono in VCF).
8. The incredible shrinking newspapers.
9. We learn just how corrupt the Port of Seattle’s been.
10. Northwest Afternoon goes twok.
Some runner-up stories, in no particular order: Whooped-up nonsense over an atheist billboard at the state capitol; all major local sports teams have pathetic seasons at once; the local news media discover gang violence when it strikes in white neighborhoods; Twilight mania; Amazon Kindle a hit; Alaskan Way Viaduct and SR 520 replacement choices drag on; another round of school-closure threats.
We’ll miss ’em: Edward “Tuba Man” McMichael; politicians Ruby Chow, Jeanette Williams, and Ellen Craswell; sculptor/video artist Doris Chase; sports promoter Dick Vertlieb; Ellensburg installation artist Richard Elliott; DJ/jazz promoter Norm Bobrow; Blue Moon Tavern co-owner Bob Morrison.
And Su Job. The fiber artist, arts promoter-advocate, and 619 Western studio landlady passed peacefully at 7 p.m. Christmas night.
Sometimes the Mariners win. Sometimes that perfect song comes on the radio just as you’re about to make your move. Sometimes the bus comes right on time, right when you’ve stepped out for it.
And sometimes the Seattle Times editorial board endorses the better candidate.
…to my longtime pals Garth Brandenburg and Tor Mitskog. They’re in a big Seattle Times color pic. It’s due to their participation in a house rock band at the Perkins Coie law firm, which goes off to a “Battle of the Corporate Bands” contest in L.A. this weekend. Knock ’em dead!
There was once a time when the Seattle Times wouldn’t run ads such as the following, at least not in a quarter-page size in the middle of the A Section. (OK, sure, they ran those scary “bed wetting” therapy ads back in the day, and those all-text ads for “The Lazy Man’s Way to Riches.” But not this.)
…another 7 daze since I last posted. Excuses: Got none. (Except that a startup entrepreneurial venture I’d been involved with this past year seems to have gone “on hold.”)
In the nooze recently:
