It's Official: Seattle Post-Intelligencer Will No Longer Print

Newspaper to go online-only

After a lengthy competition with the Seattle Times and an extended period of looking for a buyer, the print version of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is calling it quits.

The newspaper will print its final edition on Tuesday, St. Patrick’s Day, and from then on it will publish online. The shift makes the P.I. the largest U.S. newspaper to convert to an entirely digital format.

How it came to this

A similar pattern is emerging as cities that have two major newspapers become one-paper towns. The Heart Corp., which own the Seattle P.I., put the newspaper up for sale in December. The paper ran into the same budget woes that are plaguing newspapers across the country. As it lost advertising revenue and printing costs continued to go up, Hearst could no longer afford to keep it going. It didn’t make sense to take out short-term loans to support the paper, because it didn’t appear that the newspaper would return to profitability, even if the recession eased up.

A good, long run

The Seattle P.I. has been around for 146 years. It currently has a circulation of 117,600 on weekdays. The P.I. has been around even longer than Seattle’s surviving newspaper, The Seattle Times. The Times and the P.I. had an interesting relationship. Though owned by different companies, they entered into a “Joint Operating Agreement” in 1983. The papers competed for sales and subscriptions. But they also collaborated. They put out joint Sunday editions.

Papers could go down together

Because of their joint operating agreement, the fall of the P.I. could potentially hurt the Times rather than helping it, as you would expect. It’s looking more and more like some large cities might end up with no major local newspapers. The Rocky Mountain News shut down after a lengthy battle with the Denver Post. The San Francisco Chronicle, the city’s only newspaper, is saying it faces the threat of shutting down. ... click here to read the rest of the article titled "It's Official: Seattle Post-Intelligencer Will No Longer Print"