Bye-bye, Seattle P-I

Last week, some of us in the print media observed a moment of silence for the death of a relative. After 146 years in business, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer printed its last newspaper on March 17. Unable to make a profit, the Hearst Corporation, which owns the P-I, has turned the paper into an online-only edition.

You'd think that enough readers could be found among the area's three million residents, even with competition from the Seattle Times. Yet almost all U.S. newspapers have been in trouble for at least a generation. Since 1983, the P-I and the Times have had to do their advertising, production, marketing, circulation, and even their Sunday edition together.

By agreement, the P-I's print subscribers will now be getting the Times delivered to them. This can't be good for the P-I, nor can the fact that the Times already has a website, and a very professional one at that. Looking at it, you understand immediately that their business is news, and lots of it. Their own reporters write many of the stories, while things like video and blogs are pushed to the bottom right of the home page, in smaller type.

The P-I is taking a different approach. Its website, though amateurish in appearance, bravely attempts to offer the content modern readers might want. Everything is summarized on the home page, be it news, blogs, tweets, TV listings, an entertainment calendar, or man-on-the-street interviews. What's missing, though, are the things that are most important: advertisements. As I write this, a 600-by-300-pixel hole sits in the middle of the page.

Closing the newspaper altogether would be worse. The Denver Rocky Mountain News, started in 1859, printed its last issue on February 27. Its archives and website are now for sale.

Many are wondering whether The New York Times will be next. The paper that includes "All the News That's Fit to Print", and for which Times Square is named, is more than $1 billion in debt. Raising the price several times and selling off property hasn't helped. Making The New York Times online-only — if it happens — would, however, eliminate the high cost of printing and delivering paper copies to customers all over New England.

If the paper goes down that road, and is to be successful, it must choose between two models. The first is that of The Huffington Post, which was conceived as an online-only venture from its beginning in 2005. Like The New York Times, the Post lives from its reputation for good analysis and commentary — but its authors don't get paid.

The second model is that of the national Christian Science Monitor, which went online-only in October 2008 and continues its first-rate, in-depth and original reporting with a smaller circulation.

The availability of news on the internet may have started this whole problem, but free headlines are not the same as good journalism. We in the business can continue to hope that customers will choose products of quality and that advertisers will use our medium to try to find them.