Via Jay Rosen on Twitter, comes an unintentionally revealing news item about the new, all-digital Seattle P-I:
Hearst said it will maintain seattlepi.com, making it the nation’s largest daily paper to shift to an entirely digital news product. “Tonight we’ll be putting the paper to bed for the last time,” editor and publisher Roger Oglesby told a silent newsroom Monday morning.
Television news quit sleeping with the launch of CNN almost 30 years ago. Print journalism never figured out how to respond effectively to that. And failed even more miserably when it gained the same kind of technological insomnia when the web became both practical and widespread.
Anyone still thinking of “putting the paper to bed” in 2009 is at least ten years late to the party — in an age where business mistakes get punished almost immediately.
Wake up, fellas.
The Seattle Times is next. Good riddance.
I like being able to read the comics and sports with breakfast, and don’t want to have to do it sitting at a computer, I do that enough at work. And I wouldn’t mind reading a good news story in print, but those are sadly lacking.
How far along are they with those plastic sheets as computer displays? Seems to me that if you could get the newspaper beamed to such a device overnight, those of us who want to hold a paper in the morning would have that tactile sensation filled, but with the savings of no printing and delivering.
Sounds like a Kindle. Or are you wedded to thin flexible coarse media that can deposit ink on your fingers and cuffs?