Rosebud

Hearst Corporation has announced that it’s shutting down the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Today is the final print edition. From now on it’ll be Internet-only.

As you might imagine there’s been a lot of booing & hooing—mostly from the PI itself—about how this closing represents the End of Civilization as We Know It.

Well, I’m a print journalist & therefore biased towards news in a corporeal form. However I can’t get excited about this demise.

This rag is as provincial as they come—which wouldn’t be a bad thing except that its pretensions are megalithic. Most of the national & all the international stories come from feeds & the local reporting is, well, booster-ish.

Business reportage—pretty much all wire feeds—constitutes two to four pages at the back of a 16-page sports section. (All Huskies, all the time.)

Culture is presented as an exclusive purview of Seattle, & yet there’s more gardening, even in winter, than book reviews. So “culture” may refer more to nematodes than non-fiction.

&, BTW, reviews are heavily skewed towards “local” interest, whether that be authorship or subject matter—no matter how tenuous the connection. Evidently something’s only “real” if it’s “Seattle”.

Thinks I, the paper doeth protest too much.

Another quirk that got straight up my nose: that Turkish Airlines crash in Amsterdam last month? Most headlines were along the lines of, “Nine killed as Turkish plane crashes near Amsterdam airport”, or “Turkish plane crash in Amsterdam”.

The PI blared, “737-800 crashes in Dutch field; 9 killed”, with a sub-head: “Four Boeing employees aboard; their fates are unknown”.

Now, Boeing’s the home team (sorta—the manufacturing plant is still here although the company moved its corporate headquarters to Chicago a few years ago), but still. The "news" wasn't really the aircraft, it was the human event.

Plus, dunno who’s more at fault here—Boeing for giving out the names or the PI for hotfooting it to the Boeing staffers’ homes—but the paper butted into the lives of the families of the four to ask what they knew before it became apparent that three of the passengers were among the dead.

Okay, okay—it is a Hearst rag, but still.

So I won’t miss this paper, as much as I want to see the tradition of print journalism continue.

I just want to see it continue with some modicum of quality.