Hearst Newspapers says that an announcement on its Seattle Post-Intelligencer will come next week. The company announced that it was putting the 146 year-old newspaper up for sale on January 9th. The company said at the time that after 60 days if no buyer was found the newspaper would either close completely or would continue online only.
That 60 day deadline has now passed with no buyer, and it is expected that Hearst will announce next week that the paper will close. It is also expected that the announcement will address whether the website will continue. The company has already identified at least some of the staff members who would be retained if the website remains, but it was made clear that no decision on whether that will happen had been made. Either way, many of the paper's approximately 170 employees would be let go.
The Seattle P-I has been losing money since 2000, and lost about $14 million last year. It is the oldest newspaper in the state of Washington, and is one of two papers in Seattle. The P-I is the latest victim in the struggling newspaper industry, and is further proof that soon many of America's major cities will be reduced to one daily newspaper. It was only a few weeks ago that the Rocky Mountain News, the oldest newspaper in Colorado, closed in Denver after 150 years in print. As loses in the industry continue, this story will be repeated in cities across the county.
Below is video from January 9th of management announcing that the Seattle P-I was being put up for sale:
I love the mix of excitement and gloom on this blog. Its real drama. There's the jumping, and london-ing, the crepes, and the magic of the UK, while at the same time the DOOM of print journalism peppered throughout. Highly engrossing, inevitably addicting. That should be another tagline.
ReplyDeleteNow I'll do my homework.