Brains: Small Print Edition

[elfs]

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer Will Close Up Shop Tomorrow

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which has chronicled the news of the city since logs slid down its steep streets to the harbor and miners caroused in its bars before heading north to Alaska's gold fields, will print its final edition Tuesday.

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. Now the P-I will shift entirely to the Web.

Clay Shirky on why newspapers are doomed

If you want to know what happened to the P-I, and what will happen to the Seattle Times soon enough, Clay Shirky gives us an obituary.

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse. This shunting aside of the realists in favor of the fabulists has different effects on different industries at different times. One of the effects on the newspapers is that many of their most passionate defenders are unable, even now, to plan for a world in which the industry they knew is visibly going away.

It's long, but I recommend you read it all. Novelists are more threatened by the time pressures (and ADHD inducement) of other media than they are by the price of copying, and they don't suffer from the spatial amortization effect the Internet has on newspapers (why would so much local newsprint be dedicated to national and international news? We can get better sources on-line; what we need is local news, local sports, local weather), but it's still got a lot to think about for those of us who write.

Comments

[tagryn]

Exactly. For newspapers to survive, they need to start charging for what they're providing for free. Not sure what a reasonable fee would be - perhaps 1-5 cents to access a story? - but the costs of running a news service has to come from somewhere. Newspapers haven't figured out a way to make money from their online services, hence their decline. Online ads as a source of revenue haven't worked.

I personally still find a lot of value in reading something in print - hard to catch a wireless connection riding the bus to work, for example, while the paper is right there - and I happen to like technology fine, thank you very much.