The experience of news as we knew it: a personal perspective

[scarlettina]

People who don't live in Seattle may only just now be hearing about the demise of one of the city's two local daily newspapers, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It's the lede in the New York Times' coverage of the decline of newspapers in general. I've been following the news partly because my brother is in the business (he does event marketing for Newsday). He tells me that he still has a job--for now. But I digress. The direction in which news is going in Seattle is a little alarming. Just ask varina8, the professional journalist, and she'll give you an earful.

I remember reading Newsday every single day, growing up on Long Island. As a kid, I didn't read much hard news, but all of the stuff in Part II--a combination of Living, Style, and Entertainment--was must-read stuff for me. (I didn't go a day, growing up, without Peanuts, B.C., Ziggy, and Ann Landers.) I came to hard news later, living in NYC and reading The New York Times every day with some Newsday on the side.

When I moved to Seattle, I was astonished to find that the local papers didn't really cover national news much. It seemed a little Mickey Mouse to me. And the locals I met early on disparaged both the Seattle Times (a shill for conservatives) and the P-I (referred to by some as the Seattle Public Insult). All of this lead me to continue using the NYT as my primary news source, with smatterings of news from The Stranger (one of our two local weeklies--the reporting is occasionally excellent but, with a few notable exceptions, often unreliable due to bias). It's only been the last five years that I've really started paying attention to the Times and the P-I. True, the Times is more conservative than the P-I, but each offers value and together they make a pretty good source for local news.

And now we're losing the P-I. The idea that the city will have only one local news source in print--and that, we're told, will rely mostly on AP reports and news from other aggregators as well--is just bizarre to me. It's alien in the way that being in a foreign country and stumbling onto some completely new and ferociously unappealing custom is alien. It flies in the face of everything I've ever learned or thought about monopoly and competition in the marketplace, the value of multiple viewpoints, the value of local news and more. And if the Times does rely on aggregators, then our only mainstream source of local news will be broadcast, The Stranger, and the Seattle Weekly, which I stopped reading quite some time ago--which should make things, um, interesting. I think it's a bad idea.

Now, I totally admit that I haven't done much of anything to support my local papers. I only read the paper versions occasionally. I've become much more dependent on the Web for getting my news. My bad. But there's the part of me that grew up on newspapers, commuted to work with newspapers and then had to wash my hands when I got to the office because they were so dusted and darkened with ink, that just rebels against the idea of losing newspapers altogether. For me, a lot of this--I admit--is as much about losing the experience of reading a newspaper as it is about the value of multiple news sources, the importance of local reporting and so on. It was a piece of growing up that I'm sorry to see diminish and that I fear disappearing. But times, they are a-changin', it's been coming for a while, and I've adapted to new media with nary a thought to what it's replacing.

Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?

Comments

[scarlettina.livejournal.com]

Regarding your very last sentence, that's often the way it looks to me, too. And I just don't get it.

[katatomic.livejournal.com]

In the case of the P-I that's exactly what was happening. Hearst gutted it once subscription numbers swayed in the 1980s. They never gave equal advertising money to the P-I as they had claimed they would and they never supported the paper after the JOA, but rather put the Times into direct competition with the P-I by making a morning edition of the Times. What was done to the SF papers under their JOA is the same thing that was done to the P-I/Times by the same corporation. Hearst hates competition, even when they own it.

The thing that really makes me sad is that the P-I predates the Seattle Times by 40 years; it's our original paper and seeing it go down with such a sad little whimper hurts the history-buff in me as well as the former journalist.

Here's the real irony of the death of the P-I, though: Hearst has owned both papers since 1921, but it bought the P-I first. The Times was the progressive paper originally. Once Hearst bought out the Times, it became the conservative paper and the P-I became the progressive paper. The JOA of the 1970s was actually the beginning of the end for the P-I, not its salvation as hoped. A rash of high-profile prizes saved the P-I from going down a long time ago.

[e-bourne.livejournal.com]

Hearst does not own the Seattle Times. The Seattle Times is privately owned by the Blethen Family, which owns a small chain of newspapers, many of them on the east coast. The Blethen family did their share by using profits from the Times to support their east coast papers, particularly the purchase of a small paper in Maine, where the family is originally from.

I am truly and deeply sad that the P-I is going down. I fought to keep it going, and to keep the JOA viable. It makes me sad to see it go under.

[steve98052.livejournal.com]

As e_bourne wrote, the Blethen family owns the Seattle Times. Some years ago, they spent a few hundred million dollars buying a chain of small newspapers; they're now probably worth about $30M, and the debt service is bleeding them. As a result, the Times is probably doomed too, even though its operating losses are pretty small. With the subscriptions they'll pick up when the P-I stops printing, they might have a chance to operate at a profit. But there's no chance that their operating profits will ad up to an overall profit; loan payments are going to kill them.

Source: I'm paraphrasing an NPR story from memory. Their journalism is probably better than my memory.

[willowgreen.livejournal.com]

Did you ever see this "Reduction In Force" photo essay on Flickr, by a San Jose Mercury News photographer?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hellvetica/sets/72157604470612285/

It's kind of chilling.