Text by Sarah Phelan
Unable to find a buyer for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which it put up for sale in January, Hearst is kiling P-I’s print version. Starting tomorrow.
Hearst’s chief honchos, Frank A. Bennack, Jr., vice chairman and chief executive officer, Hearst Corporation, and Steven R. Swartz, president of Hearst Newspapers, tried to give the announcement a positive spin, stating that the P-I “will become the nation’s largest daily newspaper to shift to an entirely digital news product.”
(But for those of us who love and appreciate everything about newsprint, this is like saying, it’s too expensive to grow flowers anymore, but hey, you will be able to see cyber flowers online.)
“The P-I has a rich 146-year history of service to the people of the Northwest, which makes the decision to stop publishing the newspaper an extraordinarily difficult one,” Bennack said. “We extend our profound gratitude and admiration to our P-I colleagues who have done such an exemplary job under extremely difficult circumstances over the past several years. Our goal now is to turn seattlepi.com into the leading news and information portal in the region.”
“Seattlepi.com isn’t a newspaper online—it’s an effort to craft a new type of digital business with a robust, community news and information Web site at its core,” said Swartz.
“On the business side, we are assembling a staff to form a local digital agency that will sell local businesses advertising on seattlepi.com as well as the digital advertising products of our partners: Yahoo! for display advertising, Kaango for general marketplaces and Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask.com for search engine marketing,” Swartz said.
Hearst also noted that in January, Nielsen ranked seattlepi.com among the top 30 newspaper Web sites with 1.8 million unique users. The site has an average of 4 million monthly visitors, according to internal Hearst tracking.
You can read Hearst’s full statement about the Seattle P-1 here.
The annoucement came two days after workers at the San Francisco Chronicle voted 10-1 to accept Hearst’s proposal to cut 150 jobs and end seniority, moves Hearst Corp. stated were necessary to avert the immediate closure and/or sale of the city’s major daily newspaper. But even Guild workers were clear that voting to accept Hearst’s proposal was no guarantee that the Chronicle would thrive, unless a new business model can be found.
Carl Hall, the Guild’s lead negotiator for workers at the Chroncile, said that no amount of concessions can prop up a failed business model for long.
“This is the start of the real battle,” Hall said. “We have to find a solution, a real solution, to save what we really care about here – quality journalism and quality jobs.”
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