quick hit: up from the ashes?

Interesting news out of Seattle, proving that once again, the reports of journalism's death in general, and newspapers in particular, may have been greatly exaggerated.

The New York Times reports that, since the demise of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Seattle's remaining daily newspaper has begun to turn a profit. When the PI went out of business, many of the subscribers just re-upped with the Times.

Meanwhile, several of the online news site that have sprung up since the PI closed up shop, are doing well.

From the story:

... But The Times has improved its prospects by picking up most P-I subscribers and managing to keep them so far. It says its daily circulation rose more than 30 percent, to more than 260,000 in June, from about 200,000.

Oddly enough, what remains of The P-I is also faring better than expected. The Hearst Corporation kept the paper’s Web site alive as a news operation with a small staff, heavily reliant on more than 200 unpaid bloggers who write on things as diverse as their neighborhoods, cooking and marathon running.

Industry analysts called it a long-shot experiment, but SeattlePI.com has kept most of the reader traffic it had as a newspaper site. Hearst will not say whether it makes money, but it says that audience and revenue are ahead of projection.

And:

SeattlePI’s news staff of 20 people, down from The P-I’s 165, covers only a few subjects closely, like crime, the aerospace industry and transportation, while offering links to news on other sites. Michelle Nicolosi, the executive producer, said the site, rather than resembling a traditional news organization, “is trying to be Seattle’s home page.”

Other news sites populated by former P-I staff members have also cropped up, expanding Seattle’s already-vibrant range of alternative news choices, and turning the city into something of an online news laboratory.

print: the online driver?

Editor and Publisher offers the new list of the top 30 online newspaper sites as of March 2009. Not surprisingly, the New York Times took the top spot.

What may be a surprise, however, are these indicators that online-onlies may not provide enough cash to save daily journalism, at least not yet: The article cites Scarborough Research, which found that the number of adults who read newspapers only on the web was a meager 4 percent.

What's even more of a surprise was the fact that the traffic to the website for the Seattle Post Intelligencer -- which recently killed its print edition -- fell off the list completely, down 23 percent over the past year.

Could it be, posits Jennifer Saba, the article's author, that it takes print to drive people online? Scary thought, especially as newspapers continue to shut down -- or threaten to do so.

Or could it be that when we go looking for for online-onlies, we're looking for sites such as HuffPo and Talking Points Memo that provide a whole new model?

No answers -- but you have to think that, maybe, that London study got it right. bk

quick linx for a sultry monday night

Quick hits:

Ana Marie Cox in the WaPo on the Washington Press briefing room as the place "where news goes to die."

Jack Shafer on Slate re Steve Brill's plan to charge for news content -- and why it won't work.

Something interesting in Seattle: Just as the Seattle PI went all-digital (at 12 percent capacity) several of the former staffers came online with the Seattle PostGlobe, with many of the former PI staffers volunteering their time and expertise in collaboration with both a local TV station and an alt-weekly . What I find cool is not only the entrepreneurial spirit, but also the drive to keep news from the riverbanks alive and well.

Here's a note from one of the writers. I'd post the link, but damn. I can' find it anymore.

By Kery Murakami PostGlobe The last you saw of us, we had the stunned look of many people in this economy -- suddenly jobless, our futures and our careers uncertain. Many of us were in tears. We became the subject of news ourselves, on TV, in the papers, in the blogosphere, as the pages of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer died. It's been almost a month. But we haven't left. Today, we -- former P-I journalists -- are embarking on a new stage in our careers, hoping to fulfill our life's mission in a different way. We want to keep letting you know what's really going on in this city. At first, we're doing this as volunteers. But what you'll find on this Web site is a story much larger than ours. As in Denver, where the journalists of the now-defunct Rocky Mountain News also are starting their own news site, we're forging on because we believe newspaper-quality journalism needs to continue even as newspapers close. We're relying on you -- the community -- to keep us going. The possibilities are exciting, because we're resurfacing with new friends: KCTS public television and the Seattle Weekly. We'll begin by bringing the work of former P-I journalists to our site. We're planning next to work with public television, and possibly public radio journalists, on stories and special projects, combining the best of our approaches. Ultimately, we're exploring creating a combined news organization based on the idea that distributing information should be not just for profit. Our venture with the Weekly means we'll be able to bring to you the longer-form journalism and daily posts from its site. From a business standpoint, the Weekly's national ad staff will be selling advertising for this site. And of course, we'll offer some of the best journalists of the old P-I you miss. Kathy Mulady will be going back to patrolling the corridors of City Hall. Mike Lewis will return to the city's streets to tell you the stories only he can. Art Thiel will write for this site as well as others. Joe Copeland, who wrote for the P-I editorial board, and Larry Johnson, a veteran P-I foreign correspondent, will bring you commentary on Seattle and the world. And our site will have the professional photojournalism of former P-I photographers Grant Haller, Mike Kane and others. Please bear with us because this is just the beginning. Coming soon will be a way to comment on our stories. Hopefully, as our colleagues pick themselves up, more of them will be back with us doing their jobs. Yes, the P-I we knew is gone. But we're still here with our notebooks and computers. Now it's up to you. We'd especially like to thank KCTS President and CEO Moss Bresnahan for his support, and Rennie Sawade, of WashTech, and former P-I designer Elana Winsberg for putting in countless hours to develop our Web site. Kery Murakami can be reached at kerymurakami@gmail.com This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . To support his work and allow stories like these to continue, please go to our donation page

Gone.

Another heartbreak: The last edition of Seattle's Post-Intelligencer.

The paper is not exactly gone for good. It will start publishing online only, with a staff of twenty, down from one hundred seventy (violation of AP Style rules for emphasis) whose reporting will be supplemented with blogs, features from Hearst magazines and, more than likely, "citizen journalists" attempting to cover what the reporters will no longer have time or be paid to do. No doubt there will be plenty of multi-media to bedazzle the readers along with regular dispatches from Susie from Wedgewood. Whether or not these will be enough to not only attract readers -- but distract them from what they've lost -- only time will tell.

Hear all about it, via NPR, here. For more, type Seattle Post-Intelligencer into the search box, above. bk

quick link, on seattle

j.linx is rapidly morphing into a newspaper deathwatch. hideous.

This, on the possibility of Seattle, one of the most literate cities in the U.S., becoming a no-newspaper town, if the Seattle Times folds on the heels of the Post-Intelligencer.

I can't imagine it will happen -- all may be part of the Times' owner's tax rant. But still. Scary stuff. bk

hesitation cuts

Aggregation or aggrevation:

Re the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Reuters reports that Hearst will make a decision next week whether to "name a buyer for the daily newspaper, close its print edition or shut it down entirely."

Re the SF Chronicle: WaPo and others have reported that the union has agreed to concessions that "will allow the Chronicle to lay off union employees without considering seniority, which means it can more easily cut higher-paid employees." The union ratification is set for today.

Re MediaNews and Gannett: The same site reports that "unions at Gannett and MediaNews may eventually have to decide on whether to accept unpaid furloughs next quarter."

Re McClatchy: HuffPo reports that "about 175 employees at the Miami Herald will lose their jobs, and most of the remaining full-time staff will see their salaries reduced as the newspaper tries to cut costs amid plunging advertising revenue."

Molly Ivins had it so right. bk

22 is a lonely number

Really, it's all about the money.

As word comes down that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer may be the first major American daily to go online only, Ken Doctor of Content Bridges does the math, confirming what we all suspected, that based on revenues, digital news sites can only support very small news staffs.

Where will the reporting (pardon: content) come from? Bloggers? Citizen J's? Some TBD hybrid? And how much time will all the digital extras (video, sound slides, tweets, fast-break updates) suck from out-of-the-building reporting by that skeleton crew?

From Doctor's blog:

Now 22 is an interesting number. Let's do the math. The PI starts with 170 newsroom staffers. Online-only, it moves to 22, which would be 12.9% of its print staff. That's a number worth remembering.

As the Christian Science Monitor, the Capital Times, the East Valley Times and the Detroit papers, among others, all engaging in one form or another of flipping the switch (going from print to digital) or dayscrapping (reducing the days of print publication or delivery), I've often gotten this question from the press: "Why don't papers just go online-only?" We talk about the economics of print vs. online vs. hybrid, and I've guesstimated that if metro dailies indeed flipped the switch, they'd be able to "afford" about 15% of their newsroom staffs. So that 12.9% number confirms my guess. With metros taking in 10%-plus of their revenues from digital advertising now, that's about all the current business will support.

It's a sobering number.

RIP Seattle Post-Intelligencer (1863-2009)

From a long-time Seattle resident:

RIP Seattle Post-Intelligencer (1863-2009)
by Anonymous

Despite the years of circulation losses, the Joint Operating Agreement with the Seattle Times, the successive rounds of layoffs and all the hand-wringing an over-involved community could muster, it was a shock to the city to hear that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is about to be put to sleep. The Hearst Corporation, which owns it, announced yesterday that they were putting the paper up for sale for sixty days. Hearst does not expect to sell it, but is merely undertaking a formality which the JOA process requires before they can pull the plug. The last number published will probably be around April.

It is very sad for a literate community like Seattle to see a daily newspaper a quarter-century older than the state fold. This is true despite the fact that the P-I has for many years been a thin, miserable excuse for a newspaper. By far the brightest light left on the huge, iconic P-I globe is Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist David Horsey. Most of the other journalists remaining are those who could not find other jobs or refused to relocate to other cities.

Hearst, which bought the P-I in 1921, used its voice about as irresponsibly as it has its other regional dialects. In 1936 the P-I battered the Newspaper Guild into submission, using its own pages to tar its employees. In 1942 it beat a jingoistic tattoo to march the large and loyal Japanese-American community off to internment camps. In the '60's and '70's it became a wholly owned subsidiary of Dan Evans' and Slade Gorton's Republican state machine; its support for the GOP candidates was crucial to their success because on local issues and national elections the P-I was considered more liberal than the cross-town rival Seattle Times.

So now Seattle, in which more books are bought per capita than all but a handful of American cities, will have only one newspaper. Maybe none- the Times has been so badly managed over the past thirty years that its financial position is now tenuous. Any debate over the P-I's future in recent years would soon hear a counterpoint of speculation that the Times might fall first. Now having the JOA off its back and the P-I gone may not be enough to save the Times, which has lost 20% of its circulation in one of the fastest-growing areas in the country. Microsoft, Adobe, RealNetworks and the other high-tech empires in the Seattle area are teeming with young, affluent employees who get their news online.

Hearst, at the end, once more demonstrated the class that has made it what it is today. Instead of coming to Seattle and giving its longtime employees the news in person, Hearst management sent them an email.