Seattle Post-Intelligencer is Latest Newspaper Casualty

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is the latest casualty in what seems like a never-ending stream of newspaper failures. Today is its final issue.Unlike the Rocky Mountain News, it will continue as an online publication.

What's next -- the San Francisco Chronicle or the Miami Herald? Both have been struggling and it seems like newspaper closings are but a sign of the times. [More...]


I wonder if 20 years from now, trying to describe a printed newspaper to our grandchildren will be met with a blank and quizzical look --- like trying to explain to someone under 40 today how we typed with colored carbon paper before the invention of the xerox machine. How we couldn't make mistakes or else had to start all over, how there was no cut and paste (it was pre-word processor or computer.) Can anyone who wasn't there can even imagine such dinosaur days?

Maybe the end of newspapers will be met with the same reaction. Those born after the end of the daily paper may scratch their heads in bemusement and bewilderment when told the daily paper used to be delivered to every home before sunrise and people got the news twice a day: from the morning paper and TV's nightly news -- with no updates in between.

Yet, how strange it will seem to the rest of us to walk into an airport, a doctor's waiting room, a bank, a subway station or a breakfast diner and not see the newspaper either for sale or lying around discarded on a chair. Surely, not everyone who reads the paper in these places will have a Kindle on them. Not to mention that reading a paper on a cell phone can be slow and frustrating.

I imagine all these establishments will soon have monitors like the one in the elevator at my office building that flashes the headlines with a two sentence lead and photo caption throughout the day. In other words, once leaving home in the morning, without the benefit of the morning paper, millions of Americans will be stuck only with the equivalent of CNN Headline News.

The times, they are a changing. But maybe not for the better.

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