Seattle P.I. In Jeopardy

This news doesn’t make me happy at all:

The Seattle P-I is being put up for sale, and if after 60 days it has not sold, it will either be turned into a Web-only publication with a greatly reduced staff or discontinued entirely.

“One thing is clear: at the end of the sale process, we do not see ourselves publishing in print,” said Steven Swartz, president of the Hearst Corp.’s newspaper division.

[snip]

Hearst isn’t likely to find a buyer for the paper, said one expert.

“The odds of finding someone to buy a newspaper in this time are very, very low,” said Stephen Lacy, a professor of communications and journalism at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Mich.

He said the current deep recession, coupled with the technological transition to the Internet, “prevent a comparison to any other time in history in terms of how hard life is for newspapers.”

In addition, he said, there is only room for one newspaper in Seattle — probably the one with the bigger circulation, because that’s the one advertisers can use more effectively.

And that paper is… the Seattle Times, which is, of course, the one I dislike intensely. Hopefully, the P.I. will retain its awesome investigative staff and go fully functional online. If not, I hope the best of the P.I.’s intrepid reporters end up over at the Stranger, thus expanding its awesomeness exponentially.

Well, it does say it’s “Seattle’s Only Newspaper.” Compared to the Times, and in the absence of the P.I., that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

Seattle P.I. In Jeopardy
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