It’s a bad week for newspapers as two more titles totalling 284 years of continuous publication have been slated to close.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer will publish its last issue tomorrow, ending 146 years of print publishing. The Hearst-owned daily will maintain its website, seattlepi.com, thus becoming the largest daily newspaper to shift to an entirely digital format. The decision was expected. Hearst had put the paper up for sale in early January, promising to close it if a buyer wasn’t found. The demise of the P-I, which is Seattle’s oldest business, idles most of its 170-person workforce and leaves the city with one daily newspaper, the Seattle Times, and its financial footing is shaky.
The P-I is choosing to focus on the future. Even as the paper announced its closure today, its assistant managing editor posted an upbeat letter to readers about the continuation of the Web presence. “I hope you’ll pardon our dust for the next few weeks as we launch our new digital news and information Web site,” writes Michelle Nicolosi. That dust will be covering a lot of empty desks for a while.
The Tucson Citizen will also close this Friday if a buyer doesn’t step forward. The Gannett daily was put up for sale in January with a stated deadline of this week to find a buyer. No buyer has been found and Gannett has now taken to talking about the Citizen in the past tense.
The Citizen‘s circulation has been sliding for years and now numbers just 17,000, compared to rival Arizona Daily Star‘s 117,000. The two papers share some resources under a joint operating agreement. The Citizen, which publishes six days a week, has 65 full-time and three part-time employees. There’s no word yet on whether the paper’s website will continue after print operations are shut down.
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This entry was posted on Monday, March 16th, 2009 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Facebook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
Nothing left to stay except a sad, sad day. I can’t imagine what the staff in Seattle is thinking tonight. Good luck to them.
I am a Boston Globe reader, another paper in trouble. I can’t believe the carnage.
[…] Newspaper Death Watch is reporting that the Tuscon Citizen’s last day may be Friday. No Comments so far Leave a comment […]
How long will the online P-I last? Vote in my poll.
Looks like many of those ultra liberal news papers are digging their own graves to bad but maybe the NEW YORK SLIMES,WASHINGTON COMPOST and ATLANTA URINAL CONSTIPATION should go the way of the dodo as well
Oh, behave, Flu-Bird!
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