Seattle P-I’s fate sealed

Final Seattle P-I Will Roll Off Press On Tuesday

SEATTLE, WA (March 16, 2009) – The Tuesday edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer will the the last one to roll off the press for the 146-year-old newspaper.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer photographers and photo editors pose for a photo on top of their building and in front of the iconic globe Monday, March 9, 2009, in Seattle. Kneeling are Joshua Trujillo, left, and Mike Urban and standing from left are Duane Hamamura, Dan Delong, Gilbert Arias, John Dickson, Meryl Schenker, Scott Eklund, Rob Sumner, Andy Rogers, Paul Joseph Brown, Mike KaneEustacio Humphrey, Karen Ducey and Grant Haller. Brown holds a photo of deceased photographer Phil Weber, who died in 2006, just short of 50 years at the paper. Not pictured is James Johnson. (Photo by Cliff DesPeaux) courtesy Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Owner Hearst Corp. made the announcement this morning, although everyone at the paper, and Seattle, and in the bigger world of journalism knew for some time that this day was coming soon.

The P-I will continue to exist as a Web-only publication, with a handful of employees generating its content instead of the 170 P-I employees who had been producing the newspaper until today.

“Our goal now is to turn Seattlepi.com into the leading news and information portal in the region,” Hearst CEO Frank A. Bennack Jr. said in a company press release. P-I editor and publisher Roger Oglesby told a silent newsroom this morning, “Tonight we’ll be putting the paper to bed for the last time. But the bloodline will live on.”

The P-I was Seattle’s oldest business, much like The Rocky Mountain News which Scripps shut down on February 27 was Colorado’s oldest business (150 years).

“This is a hard day for all of us,” Oglesby said. “We were fortunate to be part of a great newspaper with a great tradition, and we’ve been blessed to be part of a wonderful group of talented people. We all hate to see that end. “But we knew it was coming. Hearst fought for years to keep this place going, but time and these rotten economic conditions finally caught up with us.”

The paper says about 20 people will make up the online P-I staff, about 10 creating content (including one photographer) and ten Web support people. Today’s story in the P-I also said there are 20 newly-hired advertising sales staff members.

from nppa.org

In her post about the changes to come, executive producer Michelle Nicolosi said, “We don’t have reporters, editors or producers—everyone will do and be everything. Everyone will write, edit, take photos and shoot video, produce multimedia and curate the home page. That’ll be a training challenge for everyone, but we’re all up for the challenge and totally ready to pick up all these skills. I’m personally looking forward to becoming a better photographer and videographer via personal coaching from our incredible photographer Josh Trujillo.”

Back in January the company said the P-I was for sale, and if no buyer stepped forward the paper might close or continue online only.

When no buyer came forward by the 60-day deadline last week, speculation started to swirl about how long Hearst would continue publishing the daily before pulling the plug. The P-I lost $14 million just last year.

Today’s closure announcement ends the Joint Operating Agreement with Seattle’s other large daily, The Seattle Times.

Employees had already been told their jobs could end very shortly, but they would continue to receive pay up through March 18 (due to federal laws that spell out how much notice employees must receive before a business shuts down or lays off workers).

Today’s P-I’s story of the paper’s closing says that workers will get severance packages worth about two weeks pay for each year they’ve worked.

A week ago today, employees were offered a “Last Visit To The Globe” on the newspaper’s roof, a giant spinning neon planet with “It’s In The P-I” written around the globe, where they took a series of group photographs.

Late last week P-I business reporter Dan Richman discovered that the company was having packing boxes and shredder bins delivered to the newsroom by the end of the week so that desks could be cleaned out and sensitive notes destroyed, so P-I employees gained an additional clue that the closure was approaching.

Seattle Times publisher Frank Blethen told Times employees in an eMail about their rival’s closure, saying that the Times “finds no joy in the loss of any journalistic voice.” But at the same time Blethen acknowledged that the Times being free from the burden of the Joint Operating Agreement “gives The Seattle Times the best opportunity to be viable long term.”

At one time, and as recently as January, some P-I watchers thought it would be Hearst who would buy The Seattle Times and make the city a one-newspaper town.

Now, only a few short weeks later, it’s the Times that’s left standing as the P-I turns off the presses.

On Wednesday, subscribers to the P-I will be automatically switched over to The Seattle Times.

A screengrab of the photo staff list from seattlepi.com March 16, 2009.