Another One Bites the Dust. Or perhaps that is "Bytes the Dust."
We are watching history in the making. Unfortunately, it is a sad thing to see. Another major city newspaper will print its final edition. This time, it is the Seattle Post-Intelligencer which ends its long run in the print media. In its announcement, the newspaper stated:
Hearst Corp., which owns the 146-year-old P-I, said Monday that it failed to find a buyer for the newspaper, which it put up for a 60-day sale in January after years of losing money.”
The full announcement is available at http://www.seattlepi.com/business/1700ap_seattle_p_i.html.
The Post-Intelligencer is not the only major newspaper to go out of business or to move to the web. Several others have done the same thing in the past two or three years, including:
- The Rocky Mountain News, a Denver institution for 150 years
- The Baltimore Examiner
- The Cincinnati Post and The Kentucky Post (both owned by the same company)
- The Halifax (Nova Scotia) Daily News
- The Albuquerque Tribune
Even the New York Times has reduced its workforce and leased out a major part of its headquarters building in an effort to reduce expenses.
One web site has been set up simply to monitor the newspapers that are going out of business: Newspaper Death Watch at http://www.newspaperdeathwatch.com. Even Time Magazine has published a list of "The 10 Most Endangered Newspapers in America" at http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1883785,00.html.
Print media is becoming too expensive to justify its existence. Not only newspapers, but magazines are also fighting to remain solvent.
I suspect that within a decade both magazines and newspapers will disappear from print, perhaps to be replaced by electronic versions on the web. The one exception might be those wonderful examples of "journalistic integrity" that we see at supermarket check-out stands.
