(Pssst.... It's "Sheehan" -- Cindy "Sheehan" -- unless I didn't get the joke).

Good post.

"Post-Intelligencer." What a perfect name for a post-literate readership.

You are right. Others have noted this as well. I've corrected.

For some unknown reason my frayed neural circuits conflate Cindy Sheehan, arch kook, with Cindy Sherman, photographic concept artist.

Burb... Feed me!

On one hand I hate to see a 146 year old Seattle institution die. I've lived my entire life in the shadow of Mt. Rainier, and the Seattle P.I. was always there as the record keeper.

Then again, I do take some grim pleasure in watching them reap the bitter harvest that they have so diligently sowed.

I guess the P.I. that I remember actually died a long time ago. In fact, the Seattle itself that I remember has also died.

All things pass into the night.

But what shall be used to wrap the fish in now?

Funny thing, I stopped reading the local rags (especially the P-I) not long after first reading "Atlas Shrugged".

Now, whenever I come across people selling subscriptions I tell them I get more straightforward news from Pravda.

Thanks for posting this Gerard. You've got to wonder - how hard would it be for media moguls to check out the numbers of listeners to talk radio and compare and contrast the right/left statistics. Even if you were inclined to regard the 50,000 (guess, for purposes of illustration) daily listeners to Rush Limbaugh as crazy right-wingers could you not extend a bit of intellectual tolerance to imagine that say, 10,000 of them might not be crazy? Would you then not deduce that those 10,000 might be persuaded to read your newspaper if you occasionally printed a center-right review/feature article/editorial/travel article/food article/opinion piece? Maybe not. Extreme leftism carries with it the poison of having to be exclusively right. In fact, holding the correct view - independent of reality - is an important condiment in the leftist smorgasboard. Look at Seattle in 2008 - a slaughterhouse of black teens in the south end but - no matter - Seattle held all the right views, wore the right sandals, voted in all the right people, shopped at all the right grocery stores, drank the right coffee and read all the right books...and now...147 year old institution sails off into the sunset with all the right headlines - all those beautiful O-so correct anti-Bush snears and snipes...Goodbye!

I came across some anagrams of "Seattle Post Intelligencer." They seem fairly appropriate and thus I submit them for your approval.
"talentless piglet erection," "gentle pc toilet seat liners," "repelling toilet seat scent," and "get letters in inept local sheet."
Needless to say, as a lifelong (so far) resident of Seattle, I am not sad about the end of the PI.
Greetings from Green Lake, Mr. van der Leun!

"World Ends Tomorrow -- Women, Minorities Hardest Hit" -- Imaginary typical NY Times, LA Times, Seattle P-I headlines.

so long, and thanks for all the fish wrap.

"Sleeping tolerant testicle." Honestly, who cares? I never could tell the difference between the PI and the Times anyway...

"But what shall be used to wrap the fish in now?"

Print out some pages from the on-line version.

Many times I'll feel the need to add when reading a commentator on the media but not here. Well put Vanderleun. I lived in Tacoma for over 20 years and suffered through it. Today is a good day.

"What we will never hear is that their editorial policies and news slanting were part and parcel of their demise. We will never hear about the willed insults, slights, and snubbing of fully half of their potential circulation pool. Journalists and editors write a lot about "taking personal responsibility" when it comes to others. You never hear them write that about themselves. There's no mea culpa among liberal newspaper journalists these days. There's only 'The Internet ate my newspaper.'"

Quite well said.

I fervently wish that the demise of the P-I was demonstrably the result of the viciously slanted bias in its 'news' pages. But the cause was most likely money, rather than bias - the lack of both Seattle Republicans would not make much of a difference in the P-I's income, and even their advertising purchases wouldn't tip the scales.

One curious item is that so many of the local lefty population are anything but poor. The whole Gates/Microsoft clan (and its hundreds of stock millionaires), the local 'foundations', the law offices, the majority of the software firms with their oh-so-smart executives, the teeming crowd of City and County and State employees, the teachers - by the standards of the average US citizen, are plenty well-off. Certainly enough to fork over the cost of a latte a day for the dear, iconic P-I, instead of its measly fifty cents.

But except for the political ads they take out at election time, they don't buy no steenkin' advertising in the paper, since they produce no goods nor services which must compete in the marketplace. So they will jointly and severally bleat about their 'sore loss' when the paper's gone, but if you though that they'd club together to buy the paper and run it themselves, well, no. They still have the NYT, which expresses all and more of the same safe opinions that the P-I did. All the NYT lacks is Joel Conelly's savage partisanship plastered over the non-editorial 'news' pages - but it makes up for that lack with far more pages of leftist propaganda.

Seemed like this is/was a good opportunity for some enterprising, entepreneurial conservatives to acquire the P-I brand and start up a local middle-of-the-road newspaper (not Left, not Right).

Have op-ed columns from a couple of folks on the Left, a couple of folks from the right, with the editorial leaning right to differentiate the New P-I from its former self and from the local competition. Get on the web with a Kindle edition, again like the Seattle Times. Push the paper to conservatives and moderates both local and nationally. Most important, scrupulously separate editorial from news by NOT automatically taking the AP/UPI/Reuters/etc. feeds and reprinting them, but by cleaning them up to ensure a lack of bias (have left- and right-leaning editors involved, the goal being lack of bias, not equal bias).

It certainly would be a good experiment... to see if media bias towards the left is killing the newspaper industry, and to see if a newspaper that really did report the news instead of insidiously trying to rewrite it can be viable.

Seemed like this is/was a good opportunity for some enterprising, entepreneurial conservatives to acquire the P-I brand and start up a local middle-of-the-road newspaper (not Left, not Right).

Have op-ed columns from a couple of folks on the Left, a couple of folks from the right, with the editorial leaning right to differentiate the New P-I from its former self and from the local competition. Get on the web with a Kindle edition, again like the Seattle Times. Push the paper to conservatives and moderates both local and nationally. Most important, scrupulously separate editorial from news by NOT automatically taking the AP/UPI/Reuters/etc. feeds and reprinting them, but by cleaning them up to ensure a lack of bias (have left- and right-leaning editors involved, the goal being lack of bias, not equal bias).

It certainly would be a good experiment... to see if media bias towards the left is killing the newspaper industry, and to see if a newspaper that really did report the news instead of insidiously trying to rewrite it can be viable.

I emailed PI columnist Joel Connolly, and I told him essentially the same thing. He accused me of not being a real American and being against the First Amendment.

"World Ends -- Women, Minorities Hardest Hit" -- Imaginary typical NY Times, LA Times, Seattle P-I headlines.
Posted by Stephen B at March 16, 2009 5:21 PM

Mort Sahl, believe it or not, used that line about the San Francisco Chronicle almost 50 years ago.

Mort Sahl.

As a former PI subscriber, I can testify that I canceled my subscription solely because of their editorial stance in both their news and editorial pages. I loved reading Joel Connelly's whine (for free online) "Who will speak truth to power?" last week, I really felt his pain, and enjoyed it.

As a life-long Seattleite I can only say, "good riddance." The Times isn't much better, but one liberal mouthpiece for our city is enough.

I won’t mourn the loss of the P-I. I never read it.

But, I do mourn the loss of the daily. Why? Well, because, I once worked, very hard, every day, to provide news to the reading public. Also, because information is good.

And, I do believe, very strongly, that newspapers did themselves in: Not only because of their liberal bias, but because of their own hubris.

It was so important to erect the Chinese wall between editorial and the other departments that the newsroom lost its connection to the readers – and advertisers.

Ultimately, newspapers were in the business to make money.

But leadership was so berated about the importance of leading the lambs, that ultimately all the newsroom did was end up lecturing readers every day about how wrong they are in their personal beliefs – or as acting as a Greek chorus to their co-harts. That is a losing business model.

And their executives never knew how to react to a changing media environment that was leaving them as nothing more than bird-cage filler.

Good-bye P-I. Many more will follow.

I moved to Seattle from Nevada in '95 and took the P-I. I didn't know how liberal a paper could get before that. I cancelled it for the slightly more balanced Seattle Times. That lasted until the internet was good enough that I didn't need it any more. Good riddance P-I.

I'll make no bones about it, I'm quite ecstatic to witness the demise of the pathetic P.I. and I also concur with the poster who stated that you get more balanced news from today's Pravda. How the tide has turned in Seattle...hell, where the Russians were knocking down statues of Lenin the idiots in Seattle (city of stupid) put one up. Good night and good riddance P.I. and may the idiot socialists in Seattle suffer for what they've perpetrated!

I'll make no bones about it, I'm quite ecstatic to witness the demise of the pathetic P.I. and I also concur with the poster who stated that you get more balanced news from today's Pravda. How the tide has turned in Seattle...hell, where the Russians were knocking down statues of Lenin the idiots in Seattle (city of stupid) put one up. Good night and good riddance P.I. and may the idiot socialists in Seattle suffer for what they've perpetrated!

The PI didn't die due to it's liberal tilt. Remember, Seattle is the town that re-elects McDermott each 2 years 80% to 20%. Times are changing, it just doesn't make economic sense to print up a couple hundred thousand newspapers each day, with the internet still growing. I'm suprised they've lasted 15 years after the internet hit in a big way. A friend at the Times gives them just another year.

"The Internet" only eats certain kinds of papers. If all they carry for world and national news are wire service copy, then yeah, because everyone interested in news already read all those stories 24 hours before the paper came out. Or you can ready ANY other paper and read exactly the same stories.

If "the internet" was the problem, then all mediums would be having the same problem and not just papers. Why does the highest ranked cable news show outside of Fox rank 7th? The Wall Street Journal appears to be doing well.

My guess is that the PI died from preaching to a small choir and alienating a good portion of their potential market. Rather than being a mirror of the world, they wanted to play artist and paint a picture of a world they would want to exist and not present an objective view of what does exist.

Playing up fringe actors as if they are mainstream opinion (as shown in the graphic above) is certainly one way to shed readers.

One down and two to go...?

It may comfort the mourners for the dead-tree newspapers to blame the Internet for their troubles but that's self delusion. FM did not kill AM, TV did not kill the movies, and the Internet did not kill newspapers. Newspapers committed suicide.

The US is fairly evenly divided between the Left and the Right - politically - even in Seattle. Sure, the Left may be louder and more articulate, but the rest of us are the ones who buy the groceries, shop for furniture and trade in our cars. And the people who produce newspapers set out deliberately to spit in our eye. Like a battered spouse, we may put up with abuse for a time, but give us an out and we'll take it. And enough people did that so that the economics of putting out a newspaper crossed the line from profitable to unprofitable.

In the comments I read on the Internet about the demise of newspapers. Most are not just the comments of people who have moved from “Brand A” to new and improved “Brand B,” but from people who feel that they have been abused and insulted by “Brand A” over an extended period of time. These are people who have found not just a fresher version of the news and have left the old version behind; these are people who have learned to loathe the old version and are happy about its demise.

The news media seems to be one of the few industries that does not believe that the customer is always right. Like Triumph the insult dog, it revelled in demeaning at least half of its customers. "Triumph" was a piece of comedy; the newspapers took their insults seriously. And their customers reacted appropriately.

There’s a lesson there for those who wish to learn. Apparently they would rather die.

Faster please.

The 'Atlanta Journal-Constitution' is headed down the same road, a few years in the future (along with a lot of other dailies). Yes, the internet has eaten away the advertising base they formerly depended on for most of their revenue. But they are unable to shift to a more reader-centric, info-oriented business model because they have, over decades, alienated the potential audience for a revamped AJC. The younger, inside-the-Perimeter demographic their editorial and news policy appeals to do not read newspapers. And large numbers of the older, suburban population despise the AJC with a visceral passion. Until the paper began its terminal slide, they used to send out kids to go door-to-door in the suburbs to gen up new subscriptions. I always figured that must be one of the most frustrating, thankless part-time jobs in the world.

It's emblematic that with the retirement of the old 'Atlanta Journal's' editorial page editor Jim Wooten, the AJC will be without a local conservative commentator on its editorial page. The AJC is such a political monoculture that they are unable to promote anyone internally to take Wooten's place as the 'house conservative'; instead, they have had to conduct tryouts to find an outsider to bring in. Typically, the AJC's editors and publishers do not see the irony.

Good riddance to bad rubbish. I wasn't boo-hoo blathering last week when the Rocky Mountain News died, and I don't give a tinkers damn about the P-I closing up.

These "journalists" are just now coming to understand that their "sacred trust" to be the watchdog comes at a price - they have to level their attacks at their friends when their friends screw up, and none of them have the integrity to do so. Attacking easy targets (President Bush, Israel, Wall Street) is a coward's way out. How much have they attacked their clueless Senator Murray? I thought so.

As for the Atlanta paper, all I ever needed to know about that vile arrogant piece of filth is that to this day they have never offered an apology for their insane attacks on Richard Jewell. So much for "integrity."

Screw them all.

Hey now! Nothing wrong with Utilikilts.

heres the brutal truth. I read newspapers and the internet all day, every day, And i hope my employer does not find out anytime soon.

After 10 years of reading newspapers in seattle, i have only looked at the print version of the PI once. and i have probaly been to thier website less than 10 times.

Nothing lost. At least nothing noticible....

Because of the liberal bias of the content, newspapers like the P-I end up with a smaller subscription base. As they depend more on advertising to make budget, a downturn in the economy restricts that source of income also, to the breaking point. That dynamic alone should convince publishers to cater to the widest possible readership, especially with the additional effect of the internet.

I remember reading, online, an editorial in the Piss-Ingester. It was a worshipful ode to the recently deceased terrorist-lover Rachel Corrie.

Good riddance indeed.

Its not only newspapers TV as well is going down the sink. Even liberaldoms escapades into talk radio failed remember. Look at the TV leaders to get a pic. of how low their numbers are.
Its the content no matter how many of them deny it. The bias is shameful if not pandering to those Mavens of the air against those they despise. Double standards for liberals & conservatives. An anti-Christian attitudes from Evangicals to Catholics, than glosses over anything Islam does out of fear. That with Journalism Schools trying to teach a talent as a trade. Propaganda mills is a more apt descriptor. Have embedded in their own ranks an agenda of absolute “Progressivism” (Socialism IMHP) at any cost. Its their religion now. Along with of course all the phony climate garbage most of us long ago found wanting.

Alienating half your readership is always a loser.
They will not speak out on the great subjects of the day like Islamism in Europe or at home. Indeed they hide it under euphemisms. The sluggish Journalists (Reporters are a different species) are using even poisoned sources plus false ones to slant the view. Its the narrative after all that counts, not reality that matters.

Anyway the internet has put paid too the methods used & the cover-ups for years camouflaged. I bet most here have used em all yourselves at one time or another? Most of the CEO's have not conned onto this fact or Photoshop with Bloggers on the spot. To point out with vast readership the lies. Three dimensional instant real time feedback of news with no filters.
Its why even in the Canada's the CBC (Canadian Bolshevik Communications) Government owed station is not getting money these days. I hope to see them die. Even wrote a ditty to that effect on SDA (Small Dead Animals. Not my Blog) in a fit of shared elation.
Thing is though, the MSM proved by its bias a lack of vigilance during the last election. Established by actions not taken or those that where By “Champagne Journalists”’ are not fit to protect the information of free citizens.
Good bye P.I. Never knew yeah, but than you all look the same to me.
JMO
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/010987.html#comments

Tell us how you really feel, Gerard.

It's actually getting to the point of humorous, how desperately people want to believe that this phenomenon is about anything BUT "the Internet ate my newspaper."

We're conservatives. We believe in the free market, the invisible hand. There was nothing sacrosanct about the newspaper industry as it existed circa, say, 1999. There was nothing predetermined about it. It wasn't locked into place, somehow resistent to the same market demands that sculpt every other product.

In other words, if "liberal bias" is strong enough to abruptly transform the newspaper industry in 2009, as you claim, then it was strong enough to transform newspapers in 1999, or 1989, or 1979, or any other point when liberal bias reigned. The market would have forced it. The invisible hand would have created the sort of press you claim the public clamored for.

For God's sake -- news isn't all politics. It isn't even mostly politics. "Liberal and conservative" isn't the framework for the entire world, and it was never the framework for the entire sphere of what we call journalism. That's just the framework YOU see the world through, and so it's natural for you to see newspapers' struggles primarily in that context. It's such a defining perspective for you, you're not even capable of seeing how myopic it is.

Newspapers are dying because of the Internet. That is the beginning of the story, and the end of it. Celebrate their demise if you wish, but stop making lousy arguments.

Frank, Frank,

You must be a committed centrist who couldn't care less about political bias as long as you get your news straight. Problem is they wouldn't print the news straight. Remember Abu Ghraib? Important news story? Yes. Did it deserve two straight weeks of front page coverage with every florid adjective the reporters could think of to describe how awful the U.S. Army and its C-in-C were. Maybe you agreed, I don't know, but I thought it was way over the top.

How about the assasssination of U.S. citizen Nick Berg by Al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq? Important news story? Yes, it's always newsworthy when a U.S. citizen is beheaded on film in order to create dread and fear in the U.S. population. That story ran one day, on page 15 and was a masterpiece of objective journalism. Told the who, what, why, where, how, when with no florid adjectives or invective. Coincidence? I don't think so.

The final straw for me was when I wrote a letter to the PI pointing out the errors they made when reporting about Anthropogenic Global Warming. I called the paper and asked why they had not printed my letter. The editor told me they considered the science settled and they were not printing anything that didn't agree with their point of view. That was six years ago and was the end of my reading the PI.

I haven't subscribed to a dead tree news source in years. My dad still subscribes to the Orlando Sentinel, which he complains has shrunk till it's the size of one of the weekly papers. I can see why, though. A few weeks ago I was over at his place and I glanced at the paper. In the top left corner there was a picture and article about an "undocumented immigrant", their words, in a church. With a slant like that I give them about a year.

The euro crisis is not something what is caused by some countries or people.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ty1HvJGhiJo

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