Seattle P-I ends print edition

SEATTLE -- The Everett Morning Tribune. The Everett News. ­Labor Journal. The Seattle Star.

This morning, add The Seattle Post-Intelligencer to the casualty roll of newspapers that once published in this region.

The giant spinning globe atop the P-I's waterfront headquarters will not disappear with today's final print edition, officials said. Instead, about 20 reporters and editors will help transform the brand into an online-only destination, and another 20 people will sell ads.

Still, nearly 160 people will lose their jobs.

A community is always hurt by the loss of a newspaper's voice, said Joann Byrd.

She was The Herald's executive editor in the 1980s, was an ombudsman at The Washington Post and became editorial page editor at the P-I from 1997 to 2003.

Byrd is interested to see the content of an online-only P-I.

"I'm hoping they'll put enough imagination and reporter power into that to make it viable," Byrd said. "It's an opportunity to experiment with online reporting in a way that has not been done here before. I'm very hopeful that their experiment will help the community stay informed and involved for many years to come."

Something important goes away when a newspaper closes, said David Dilgard, a historian at the Everett Public Library.

"If you don't have a healthy press, you don't have a healthy democracy," he said.

Daily newspapers also provide a glimpse of the past, Dilgard said.

The early days of Everett's founding were chronicled by three separate and fiercely competitive Everett-based papers, he said.

In Seattle, The Seattle Star, a tabloid, once was part of the fray along with the 146-year-old P-I and The Seattle Times.

Today, economic forces have shifted. Many people now gather news from the Internet, and the Seattle marketplace simply failed to support two hulking metro newspapers, experts said.

After years of speculation, officials with the Hearst Corp. announced Monday that today's print edition, a commemorative, will be the P-I's last.

Starting tomorrow, P-I subscribers automatically will receive The Seattle Times, a newspaper that many experts also say is struggling. The Times printed the P-I and ran its circulation and advertising departments under the papers' now-finished joint operating agreement.

Some newspapers, including The Herald, remain profitable despite the widening recession.

"We've always felt we could serve Snohomish County better from Snohomish County than either Seattle paper could from the outside," Herald Executive Editor Neal Pattison said. Prior to joining The Herald in fall 2007, Pattison worked for the P-I and was an assistant managing editor.

The laser focus on community could be part of what keeps newspapers such as The Herald operating, said Rick Edmonds, a media business analyst at the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit school for journalists in St. Petersburg, Fla.

"They can stay pretty healthy businesses for some time to come," he said.

Joe Copeland worked at The Herald for nearly 25 years before joining the editorial board of the P-I in 2002.

"What strikes me is how lucky I've been to work at two such wonderful newspapers," Copeland said. "I had wonderful support and was surrounded by people who are really dedicated to their communities and their professions in both places. I'll miss that."

Initiative activist Tim Eyman said the P-I's last print edition is one of the "biggest nonevents I've seen in a long time."

Something will rise in the P-I's place, he said.

"It is richly ironic that all the liberal policies they've advocated all these years have come home to roost and contributed to them going out of business," Eyman said.

Shifting economics, stiff competition, the complex joint operating agreement and the rise of the Internet all contributed to the P-I's demise, experts said.

The shape of the newspaper industry in the future remains uncertain, said Tim Gleason, dean of the School of Journalism and Communication at the University of Oregon.

"The fundamental fact remains, there's a thirst for information and a desperate need in a democracy for the kind of reporting and watchdog role that good journalism does," he said.

As readers and advertising dollars move online, newspapers will be forced to find ways to deliver content and remain viable to businesses trying to attract customers.

"It's not, can we find the solution? We have to find the solution," Gleason said.

Pattison said editors worried that the Internet would rob newspapers of readers. Instead, it stole advertisers, he said. Most newspapers generate about 80 percent of revenue from advertising.

Employment, real estate, automotive and other classified advertisements once thrived in the newspaper, said Alan Mutter. He's the author of the Reflections of a Newsosaur blog, an executive in the Silicon Valley and a former editor at the Chicago Sun-Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Now, the value proposition has changed. Consumers can find these types of listings offered free on Web sites such as Craigslist. Many advertisers can reach a targeted audience on the Internet for a fraction of the cost of paying for a newspaper ad, Mutter said.

Newspapers today typically make more money from advertisers in their print publications than online, he said. Newspapers must reinvent their business models to survive in the new economy, and so far "newspaper companies have been stupendously incompetent at doing so," Mutter said.

He said it's unlikely that the P-I's new Web site will attract enough advertisers to pay to rebuild the stable of well-paid investigative journalists who helped earn the Seattle paper a reputation for quality, scrappy coverage.

"I'm not surprised but I'm sad," said Scott Maier, an associate journalism professor at the University of Oregon and a former P-I investigative reporter. "The P-I's loss is representative of a larger threat to serious news coverage."

He said the P-I was a feisty newspaper that often had the local news first. While The Seattle Times produced quality news, the P-I was different.

"On a day-to-day based it was more fun and informative to read the P-I, and we no longer have that," Maier said.

Reporters Noah Haglund, Sharon Salyer, Julie Muhlstein and the Associated Press contributed to this report.