{"id":657,"date":"2018-09-02T23:03:32","date_gmt":"2018-09-03T06:03:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/?page_id=657"},"modified":"2025-07-21T01:08:42","modified_gmt":"2025-07-21T08:08:42","slug":"death-of-the-p-i-2009","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/death-of-the-p-i-2009\/","title":{"rendered":"Death of the P-I (2009)"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Like the conservatives, many libertarians hate newspapers for their liberal-progressive bias. Newspapermen often deny this bias, which seems to be detectable only from outside the club. I never had any trouble perceiving it, but I didn\u2019t buy the idea that political bias was the cause of newspapers\u2019 decline. Nor did I accept the \u201cgood riddance\u201d from conservatives and libertarians when newspapers started to drop dead. Especially when the one I\u2019d worked at for 16 years \u2014 the Seattle Post-Intelligencer \u2014 dropped dead.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I wrote this shortly after the Post-Intelligencer died as a printed publication. It was published in Liberty, June 2009. (And as a printed publication, Liberty died a year and a half later.)<\/span><\/i><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0I sense little grief from libertarians at the possible extinction of newspapers. It\u2019s the market \u2014 and anyway, except for the\u00a0Orange County\u00a0<\/i>Register<\/i>, newspapers have not been notably libertarian. A thought arises: \u201cThen to hell with newspapers.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I\u2019m a newspaperman, and I don\u2019t feel that way. The daily paper where I worked for 16 years, Hearst\u2019s\u00a0Seattle Post-Intelligencer<\/i>, has stopped printing. It was not a great paper; it didn\u2019t have enough people, and only some of them were really good at what they did. I knew many of them. Now, apart from a handful still at the\u00a0P-I\u2019s<\/i>web page, they are gone, and the city is the poorer for it.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Since 1983 the\u00a0Post-Intelligencer\u00a0<\/i>had shared printing plants, delivery trucks, advertising, and revenues with the larger\u00a0Seattle Times\u00a0<\/i>and split the pot under a \u201cjoint operating agreement.\u201d In the 80s this had been a way to save the\u00a0P-I\u00a0<\/i>and make money for both owners. It changed after 2000, when the\u00a0Times\u00a0<\/i>switched from afternoon delivery to mornings in order to avoid daytime traffic congestion. The result of the two papers\u2019 sharing the same time slot, and of all the other things going on, was a slide in\u00a0P-I\u00a0<\/i>daily circulation from 195,000 to 114,000. Revenue sharing spread the pain to both of them, and in the past year it has threatened to sink them both.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Struggling to stay alive, the\u00a0Seattle Times\u00a0<\/i>had two rounds of buyouts and layoffs in 2008. Until January 2009 there had been no cutbacks at the\u00a0P-I<\/i>. In January a Hearst executive flew out from New York and announced that the paper had lost $14 million in 2008 (which works out to $80,000 per employee) and that unless a buyer stepped forward, the paper would stop printing in March. On March 18 the\u00a0P-I\u2019s\u00a0<\/i>red coin boxes stood empty.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Of the five publications I\u2019ve worked for in my career, three have stopped printing, one is for sale, and the fifth, where I work now, has shrunk its staff in an effort to survive.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The major cause of all this is not the\u00a0<\/span>b\u00eate noire\u00a0<\/span><\/i>of libertarian and conservative critics, liberal bias. That malady does exist. But what is one to say when libertarian economics prof Bill Anderson bellows (LewRockwell.com, Dec. 31, 2008) that \u201cthere is no entity in this country that is more statist than the typical newspaper,\u201d or when libertarian economics prof Walter Block proclaims (LRC, Oct. 6, 2005) that the typical newspaper business page says \u201cthat taxes and welfare payments must always and ever be increased.\u201d I\u2019ve worked on newspapers for 30 years \u2014 and I had to be a hell of a lot more careful with what I said than these guys are.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Steven Greenhut of the\u00a0Orange County Register\u00a0<\/i>is more accurate when he says (LRC, Jan. 23, 2006) the typical chain newspaper is imbued with a \u201cbland left-of-centerism\u201d \u2014 with the emphasis on \u201cbland.\u201d The\u00a0Seattle P-I\u00a0<\/i>was like that. Its editorial columns were left-liberal but not stridently so, and left-liberal assumptions might be found in some of its feature stories and columns. But the\u00a0P-I\u2019s\u00a0<\/i>core market, the city of Seattle, is at least as lefty as it was; the city voted more than 80 percent for Barack Obama and elects\u00a0the left-wing\u00a0<\/span>Jim McDermott to Congress. The\u00a0P-I\u2019s\u00a0<\/i>reputation as a liberal paper did hurt it with part of its market, but that was the smaller part.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0There are stronger reasons than bias for the decline of newspapers. One is the decline of reading; video has lowered Americans\u2019 attention spans. Another is the rise of a new kind of reading, on screens. In the 1990s newspaper management decided to provide content on the internet for free. The salaries of reporters and editors were already covered by the newspaper\u2019s advertisers. The internet paper required no pressmen or truck drivers, and though there was some fixed cost, the incremental cost of a new reader was nearly zero. \u201cFree\u201d fitted the internet ethos, and it was good marketing.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0But that was a fateful decision. Newspapers\u2019 internet sites have inexorably gained readers, while their dead-tree product has lost them. Yet the dead-tree product paid for the reporters and editors. Now the printed newspaper weakens, and it can carry fewer employees. News executives thought that by now the internet would carry the weight, but it hasn\u2019t.\u00a0Google has taken the great share of internet advertising because it tailors ads to match search requests, and newspaper sites can\u2019t. Google brings users to newspaper sites, but \u2014 from the newspapers\u2019 viewpoint \u2014 it collects too much of the ad revenue.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0An even more important result of the internet has been the newspapers\u2019 loss of classified ads. The metro daily I work for used to have pages and pages of ads for jobs, houses, cars, and garage-sale goods. We charged a steep price for these ads, and they accounted for 40 percent of our ad revenue. In today\u2019s paper, as I write, the classifieds have shrunk to one page, plus four columns of public notices. The classifieds have shrunk to the same space as the paid death notices.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Much of the classified business has gone to craigslist. I met the famous Craig at a dinner once. His business card did not identify him as a corporate CEO but simply as \u201cCraig Newmark, customer service rep. & founder.\u201d He is a short, soft-spoken man who writes his company name and job title in lowercase letters. He denied to me in a tone of innocence that he is the carnivore eating my industry\u2019s lunch, but he was trying to be nice. He\u2019s killing us by offering a classified-ad service that works better than ours and that costs most of his customers nothing.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Better product, price of zero: What are you to do?<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Maybe you do something else.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Maybe you go out of business. The printed\u00a0Seattle P-I\u00a0<\/i>folded in March 2009. Denver\u2019s no. 2 paper, the\u00a0Rocky Mountain News<\/i>, closed on Feb. 27. In Michigan, the\u00a0Ann Arbor News\u00a0<\/i>said that it will go internet-only in July.\u00a0Time\u00a0<\/i>printed a list of the ten other U.S. newspapers most likely to implode, and the list\u2019s major failing was that it left out too many names.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Every year newspapers shrink \u2014 in the width of pages, the number of pages, and what\u2019s in them. The sports section stops covering high-school games. The business section drops the stock tables and second-tier public companies. Book reviews are discontinued. The rock \u2019n\u2019 roll critic retires. The consumer-complaint columnist dies and is not replaced. The political cartoonist is laid off. The letters editor goes on medical leave. The travel editor takes a buyout.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

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\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0This is the world I live in.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Well, so what?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Think of what a good newspaper is: a group of people paid to write about the world around them. Government especially. A good paper will have at least one person at the state legislature, and a really good paper will have several there and one in Washington, D.C.\u00a0\u00a0It will have a reporter at the county government and another at city hall.\u00a0\u00a0It will staff cops and courts. There are also regional governments, suburban governments, special-purpose governments, and school boards.\u00a0\u00a0As libertarians know, all these agencies have power, and they need to be watched.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I worked\u00a0at the\u00a0P-I\u00a0<\/i><\/span>in the business section. We covered mergers, strikes, proxy fights, and initial public stock offerings. Those were the big things. The grunt work was the stockholder meetings and the earnings of every local public company, with comments on the company\u2019s stock and on its business plans. All these are important.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0A\u00a0good\u00a0<\/span>paper also covers cultural things: art, music, plays, dance, movies, novels, restaurants. Without newspapers, some of these things would be covered anyway. Seattle has the subscription-only\u00a0Puget Sound Business Journal<\/i>, and for entertain-ment, the ad-supported\u00a0Seattle Weekly\u00a0<\/i>and\u00a0The Stranger<\/i>. But they are weeklies. They can\u2019t cover breaking news.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Some will say, \u201cBreaking news? Forget newspapers. I get my news from the internet.\u201d And where does the internet get it? From newspapers. That\u2019s where radio gets its stories \u2014 from newspapers and from the wire, and the wire gets them from newspapers. TV also gets stories from newspapers.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0There are internet sites such as RealClearPolitics, which carry lists of newspaper stories; these are\u00a0<\/span>aggregators<\/span><\/i>. They are like Google: they provide a shelf for other people\u2019s work. That\u2019s fine, but someone has to create the stuff\u00a0<\/span>on\u00a0<\/span><\/i>the shelf.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0What, then? At Reason.com, March 19, Jesse Walker suggests that local people will spontaneously fill the vacuums left by departed news reporters. What sort of people?\u00a0\u00a0One is the gadfly, the \u201ccharacter who sits through those council meetings, or the school board meetings,\u201d because that\u2019s the most interesting thing in the world to him. Another is the activist, who follows public policy for a cause. Another is the insider, who works for an institution and wants to get a story out.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0These people do exist. But, being unpaid, they are subject to only such reliability as they impose on themselves. Sometimes they don\u2019t show up. They are often partisans with narrow interests. A big-city school board may attract activists for one ethnic group only, gifted students only, or one neighborhood only.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0And most of these folks don\u2019t write. They\u00a0<\/span>talk<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Without newspapers, there would still be information \u2014 mountains of it. Already government puts bills, laws, budgets, and court rulings on line. Public companies put quarterly earnings, annual reports, and Securities and Exchange Commission filings on line. But these things are boring, and most people won\u2019t read them. For years, my job was to read them and tell the stories in them,\u00a0for a daily newspaper<\/span>.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Without newspapers, organized business, labor, and political groups would cover the things their members cared about, such as the state legislature. Some do this now, and offer their work on the internet for free. But they care about only some things, and they take a partisan view about them.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Real internet newspapers \u2014 that is, sites that report their own news \u2014 may arise if someone can figure out how to make them pay. Hearst is trying it with seattlepi.com, but the site is a shadow of the old\u00a0Post-Intelligencer.\u00a0<\/i>As I write, two groups of former\u00a0P-I\u00a0<\/i>journalists are said to be organizing their own web papers as non-profit ventures, which is an admission that they expect to be subsidized. In Seattle the private wealth exists to do that; the question is whether Bill Gates, Paul Allen, or any of the other rich folks around here would want to shrink his hoard for such a purpose. I am not optimistic. A report in the\u00a0Seattle Times\u00a0<\/i>said that one ex-P-I\u00a0<\/i>group had raised $4,000 and that some journalists wanted to get to work right away. God bless them, it sounds like people I know. I wish them luck, but I fear that web curmudgeon Fred Reed was right when he said, \u201cThe crucial fact about web journalism is that there is no money in it.\u201d<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>It boils down to this: newspaper reporters are the largest group of people\u00a0<\/span>paid to gather information\u00a0<\/span><\/i>for the public<\/span><\/i>. They are trained in reporting and writing; they are not intellectually trained about\u00a0<\/span>the institutions they cover, and they get the story wrong sometimes. Some of what they write is fluff. Much of it is handed to them by people who are paid to influence information, and sometimes they are influenced. Some of them become shills for the people they cover. Some have a political bias. Admit all this. Still, if newspapers go away, big, powerful institutions will be left largely to cover themselves.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Do you want that? I don\u2019t.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 You may s<\/span>ay, \u201cIf there\u2019s a market for news, someone will provide it.\u201d If there is a paying market, yes. If the market expects it for free, maybe not.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0News has typically not been sold. It has been sponsored. One of two classes of the newspapers\u2019 sponsors \u2014 classified ads \u2014 is gone. The other is display ads, and they are still there, which is why newspapers are still there. If display ads go, newspapers go.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Walker ends his piece for Reason.com with the anarchistic thought that if newspapers disappear, the thing to do \u201cis to tap the information already flowing from citizen to citizen without any journalist’s intervention.\u201d For some things that idea may be the best there is, but think of what it consists of: trained, managed, and paid workers are to be replaced by untrained and unmanaged volunteers, volunteers of undependable knowledge, undependable literacy, and all too dependable partisanship<\/span>.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0To me, that is not progress \u2014 but then, I am a newspaperman.<\/span><\/p>

\u00a9 2009 Bruce Ramsey<\/span><\/em><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Like the conservatives, many libertarians hate newspapers for their liberal-progressive bias. Newspapermen often deny this bias, which seems to be detectable only from outside the club. I never had any trouble perceiving it, but I didn\u2019t buy the idea that political bias was the cause of newspapers\u2019 decline. Nor did I accept […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-657","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/657","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=657"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/657\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1618,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/657\/revisions\/1618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=657"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}