I know it’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything to this blog. It’s just that the news is so depressing.
Saying goodbye at the end of a long relationship can be strained and awkward.
But it didn’t feel that way at all at a quickly organized tribute outside The Seattle Post-Intelligencer last Monday, the day its staff was writing their newspaper’s obituary. P-I reporter Carol Smith has written a lovely obituary that catalogs the newspaper’s origins, achievements, and mournful end. The P-I was the oldest newspaper in Washington state, even predating statehood (1889). After more than 145 years, the newspaper – owned by New York-based Hearst Corp. – bowed to overwhelming economic pressures that are shoving newspapers across the land into history’s dustbin.
There were several tributes and memorials to the newspaper. The editors of Columbia Journalism Review invited P-I staff to submit their reflections. The Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild, which owes its existence to P-I workers, lamented its passing. The alternative weekly, The Stranger, chronicled the last day at the P-I. Two minority journalism groups (one of which I am co-president of) issued a joint statement. Even the P-I’s cross-town rival, The Seattle Times Co., issued a statement.
And in a confessional video, some P-I staffers shared their own reflections with their readers.
As P-I Publisher Roger Oglesby told the staff, “the bloodline will live on,” referring to Hearst’s re-launch of seattlepi.com as an online-only publication. But the website will have a staff of about 20, a fraction of the printed P-I’s workforce, which numbered close to 170.
But you can’t keep a newsroom full of journalists down. Former P-I staff plan to get together and drink later this week, and some are talking about raising money to launch their own online-only website, taking a page from the former staff of the Denver Rocky Mountain News, which published its final edition (and a tear-jerking documentary-style video obituary). Some of the Rocky’s staff have launched InDenverTimes.com.
There are hard times for all media, but especially traditional media. Today, the family-owned Ann Arbor News announced it will stop publishing a printed edition later this year. We need creative minds to test new business models and philanthropists to offer their support to journalists willing to try something radically new. We also need to support the surviving newspapers in our cities, so they have the chance to make the transition to this new world we are hurtling towards.
If democracy is an engine, journalism is its lubricant. Without journalists to verify information and assertions, will our civic sphere descend into partisan screed? Without trained professionals to investigate waste, corruption and abuse in business and government, what happens to the balance of power?
President Thomas Jefferson, who was often the subject of savage criticism in the press, had this to say: “If I had to choose between government without newspapers, and newspapers without government, I wouldn’t hesitate to choose the latter.”
My fingers are crossed for all of us.
