Good-Bye Seattle Post Intelligencer


A few months ago Hearst Corp. announced that the P.I had until March to find a buyer or the print edition of the paper would be shut down.

It's March and there were no buyers.

Tomorrow is the last print that the Seattle Post Intelligencer will send out. This marks the largest daily newspaper to go out in America thus far.

I was lucky enough to be able to visit the P.I. several times to meet with one of the editors, John Gardner, my first glimpse into a real newsroom. One of my first profile features for my Journalism Writing I class was on a P.I. sports reporter, Dan Raley, the only reporter I contacted that was nice enough to help me out (everyone from the Times told me they were busy). He even drove into the office even though he usually works from home.

The stories that are coming out from the rich history of P.I. in the city of Seattle reiterate my feelings and romantic ideals of working for a print media. I understand that the industry didn't make a quick enough shift to handle the internet but it still really breaks my heart.

What's really sad is that it was largely due to my generation and their lack of interest. I guess that's something I don't quite share with my peers.

I just read an amazing article that will be featured in tomorrow's paper by Carol Smith. I couldn't have expressed the closing or this new shift away from newspapers any better.

I've included an exerpt below, but really you should read the entire article. It's great.

"Print is what we posted on refrigerator doors, and hung on walls -- tangible documents of our rites and passages, of what entertains, informs or outrages us. Clippings of births and deaths -- and the deeds and misdeeds in between -- fill thousands of family scrapbooks.

Now, like Polaroids and slide projectors, Kodachrome and coin phones, we slip into that foggy part of memory reserved for things whose absence we haven't really registered yet.

The print newspaper is going away and with it, its varied afterlife. You can't sop up your basement with your computer, or wrap a fish. And what is the paper mache -- that miracle sculpting media that must have launched a million budding elementary school artists -- without newspaper?

Beyond the actual, physical newspaper, however is the newspaper as an institution, or more precisely, as the people who put it out. This newspaper was still the place many people contacted when they didn't know where else to call -- to right a wrong, to find a phone number, to get someone to listen to their stories.

We know because we picked up the phone.

And when our lives changed overnight -- when President Kennedy was slain, or the Twin Towers fell, or President Obama was elected -- it was the next day's newspaper that people thought of saving."

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