On Monday, March 16, the Hearst Corp. abruptly announced that after 146 years, the following day would be the last for the print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It is both a huge loss for the region and the inevitable consequence of relying almost exclusively on capitalism to inform citizens in a democracy.
Sure, the P-I will continue to publish an online edition - at least for the time being. Industry speculation is that the massive, deep-pocketed Hearst will use Seattle as a money-losing laboratory to try to figure out some strategy - any strategy - for making money from an on-line newspaper.
So far, however, the country's brightest media executives have tried and - with the exception of a few niche publications -failed. And that's just the point.
I'm no Luddite on this score. I've happily written for print publications, on-line publications and blogs, and I've repurposed my reporting and opinions for electronic media, as well. It's all to the same end: entertaining and informing (hopefully) an audience.
While I definitely have some nostalgia for a newspaper I can hold in my hands, in general print (like the Internet or radio or TV) has some advantages and some disadvantages, but you can communicate many of the same things with any of them. So what's the big deal?
The big deal is this: The on-line P-I will inevitably have a staff a fraction of the size of the old print version. There's simply no way to pay all those reporters, editors, copy editors, account executives and so on.
Some of this can be blamed on newspapers and other legacy media themselves for initially selling on-line ads as very cheap throw-ins with print ads - a strategy that has, at least so far, guaranteed that on-line ads cost far less than print to reach the same number of people. Once audiences migrated to the new technology, legacy papers like the P-I and Seattle Times were left in economic free fall.
There are also other reasons for the newspaper industry's current struggles - some self-inflicted, some not. But the bottom line is that nobody has truly figured out how to monetize news reporting on the Web. There are very, very few stand-alone on-line publications (and none locally) that can afford to produce primarily originally reported general-interest material. Most aggregate from other sources (often newspapers), or comment on other reporting (mostly originating from newspapers).
The results is a media universe with an unprecedented number of voices (which is a good thing), but very few people who have the time and skill set necessary to do actual reporting, especially investigative journalism.
A few years ago, at least 25 reporters covered Olympia's legislative sessions full-time. Now, after years of newsroom budgetary cutbacks and with the P-I's demise, that number is closer to a half-dozen. When the companies that employ these folks decide an Olympia bureau is a luxury they can no longer afford, who will keep an eye on what our elected officials are doing?
The answer, of course, is that nobody will, at least as a full-time job, and we're the losers. Which brings me to my original comment about capitalism: I'm all for companies making a buck, but the role of enabling citizens to make informed decisions in a democracy should never have been left solely to the free market, and the loss of the P-I is but one symptom of the problem.
In most other Western democracies, the public helps pay for at least one news service (the BBC in England, CBC in Canada, NHK in Japan and so on) whose mission is not to turn a profit, but inform. In all of these cases, private companies are free to make money offering their own products and do so, which is all to the good.
But these societies have recognized that there needs to be at least one institution that will report news, even when it's more profitable to run sports commentary, tabloid photos or reruns of "Who Wants to Be So Wealthy It's Coming Out Your Ears?"
Our country has nothing like that. PBS (in television) and NPR (in radio) were originally meant to mimic that model, and both provide a valuable service. But both also long ago succumbed to market-driven programming and ads ("underwriting"), and both now superserve the lucrative demographic of educated, upper-middle-class white folks, to the exclusion of almost everyone else. They do so very well, but it's hardly the reflection of myriad voices that, say, CBC offers.
And for all the flaws of CBC and other state-run outlets, surveys consistently show that their country's citizens are better-informed about their country and the world than Americans are. Better quality news isn't the only factor, but it's a big one - and anyone who has ever listened to a BBC or CBC newscast and that of an American network knows the difference.
So where do we go from here? Some folks (locally, Crosscut.com is an example) are trying a nonprofit model for on-line news. Hearst will now run the on-line P-I as an elaborate experiment. But nobody really has an answer yet.
More and more people are getting their news on-line, which reduces the "serendipity" factor of seeing stories you didn't know you'd be interested in or viewpoints you don't already agree with. The print P-I offered those things. Whether you liked or disliked its content (or, most likely on any given day, both), with its loss, we're all the poorer.
Geov Parrish, founder of Eat the State!, can be reached at needitor@nwlink.com.[[In-content Ad]]
