Class final: How to kill an American newspaper (SEA P-I)

In a case study of how the Seattle Post-Intelligencer died, P-I columnist Bill Virgin discusses the state of American newspapers in context with not only how the P-I died, but how other newspapers may be going down the same slippery path as the P-I and the late Rocky Mountain News.

A sample:

What sorts of mistakes did the industry make? Its reaction to the Internet is a mother lode. Instead of using the Internet as a complement to its print product, the industry went chasing after the Web and offering its most valuable property -- the news it so carefully and expensively gathered -- for free, while chasing the chimera that online advertising would support the whole thing.

The trend was no service to either readers or advertisers -- people read far more in print, and see more ads, than in an online version. The bandwidth for delivering material may be nearly infinite online, but readers' ability to absorb it isn't, and it gets even narrower online.

In the process, what newspapers did was devalue their brands and the heritage and legacies built into them, their core products and the value proposition that brought them readers and advertisers in the first place.

The genius of the American newspaper was never that it was the only place you could get information. Given enough time, money and energy, even in the age of the telegraph you could assemble the same information

But the essential point was that you didn't have to.

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E.C. :)