SEATTLE — Patrick Sheldon has been a loyal reader of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer since 1965, when his dad started buying it because he preferred its sports coverage to that of rival Seattle Times. Will he continue being a loyal reader, now that the P-I exists only as a website? Like many of the paper’s customers, he says it depends on who writes and what they cover.
“If it’s just bloggers, I probably won’t,” he said, sitting on a ferry from Bainbridge Island to Seattle.
After 146 years, the P-I’s final edition rolled off the presses Tuesday, but a skeleton crew remained in the cavernous newsroom to take part in a journalistic experiment: whether a major newspaper can make money, and consistently produce good stories, as an Internet-only operation. It’s the first major U.S. daily paper to switch from print to digital, a step that P-I owner Hearst Corp. took after it failed to find a buyer for the newspaper.
“It’s a sad day, but I guess that’s the way things go,” said radio talk show host Ron Reagan, son of the late president.
on Tuesday featured many of the same articles that appeared in the final edition, including somber remembrances of days gone by. But it also offered a glimpse of what the site will look like once the content produced by the full staff vanishes, including breaking news updates from crime and political reporters, columns by Seattle luminaries such as U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott and about 150 blogs by readers. The Associated Press
