One needn’t listen to the news much to know that newspapers and other so-called “dead tree” media have fallen on hard times, the victim of changing technology, evolving readership habits and a sour economy. Today we have another example, this time a little closer to home: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer (simply called “The P-I” in Seattlese) announced today that it is being put up for sale, and that if after 60 days it has not been 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,” one executive said.
Two thoughts come to mind. The first is: WWP is mighty glad he left print journalism some years ago. And the second: What will happen to all those newspaper carriers?
If you’re wondering why WWP is concerned about the carriers, here’s the explanation. WWP’s first-ever job was as a newspaper carrier, for the P-I, in 1968, back when it was the only morning newspaper in town struggling against the more dominant then-afternoon newspaper, The Seattle Times. If memory serves, in the neighborhood where WWP delivered the Hearst paper served by one paper route there were four routes for the competitor. Of course, labor laws have since all but eliminated paper delivery as a young person’s chance at earning extra cash; the job has since fallen exclusively to adults with cars, in Seattle and elsewhere.
Still, we cannot help but mourn the jobs that will be lost, to say nothing of the vanishing memories of a boy, a bicycle and a paper route.
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[The ghoulish joke now circulating Seattle posits that the P-I has exactly three assets: one popular long-time columnist, a Pulitzer-prize winning cartoonist and an 18.5-ton paperweight. Read more about the last here, and about the P-I’s long history here.]
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