Industrial perspective 
Jan. 6: Troubled magazine publisher Ziff-Davis sells video game-news Web site 1up.com to Hearst Communications-owned UGO.com, in the process declaring venerable game (print) magazine EGM will cease publishing.
Jan. 9: Hearst declares the Seattle Post-Intelligencer up for sale. If they can’t sell it in 60 days, they might gut the print staff and go digital-only.
I’m just happy to have a job, over here.
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It’s frustrating that “digital-only” is basically death for a newspaper because online ad revenues are 5% those of print. I would much prefer my newspaper to be digital only — I read the Seattle P-I every day, but only in my web browser. The important part of journalism is the reporting-the-news part, not the part about mucking with ink and driving stacks of paper all over the city.
Comment by Elan — January 10, 2009 #
If it was digital, would you pay for it directly? Would you even register and make yourself log into the site to read it?
Most people would not, have not, in the past 10 years of newspaper operations shoveling their work out for free onto the Internet and putting it in print. Newspapers are a product that necessarily costs a set amount of money based on how much of it they want to produce, NOT how much of it people want to consume, and costs the consumer money if they don’t want to just pick up a copy someone else used.
And it’s grown steadily easier to sell ads on the Web. Most newspaper ads are from department store chains and auto dealers anyway. With the economic downturn, the first thing to go is a local advertising budget, which for many local businesses is treated as a tithe to support having a local newspaper, the 1×2 ad long past the point of having a tangible benefit to the business.
Say goodbye to the P-I.
Comment by J. — January 11, 2009 #