These sort of posts almost inevitably get misconstrued as me wanting The Seattle Times to go away. I don’t. More voices are better. More journalism is better. But I think that given The Seattle Times’ turning away from the web, their continuous pissing away their credibility, and the general state of newspapers, it’s not very out there to assume that their day will come. So this post is looking at some of the things that might happen if they went away.
The first, and I think scariest option, is nothing. It’s possible that given the state of the newspaper industry that nobody would want to put out a daily in Seattle. The money making pieces of the newspaper have already been made less so with craigslist and with sports blogs. So perhaps we would just lose the reporting that we get now.
But I think it’s more likely that something would replace them. There is already a lot of solid local reporting on the ground in Seattle. From West Seattle Blog to Capitol Hill Seattle to the blogs of the weekly papers, you can get decent, current, reporting today outside of a daily. It’s no substitute, but I suspect those things would step up, and other online voices would fill any gap left behind.
However, I’m also not convinced that in the absence of The Seattle Times would mean the end of a daily in Seattle. I think it makes a certain amount of sense that one of our local millionaires or billionaires would take it on as an act of good will. They could either buy The Seattle Times outright or they could start their own paper if it went under. This paper might manage to be even more pro-corporate friendly than The Seattle Times currently, if that’s possible.
Another couple of possibilities I’ve been thinking about are a bit more out there. I could envision either The Stranger expanding to a daily if there was no daily or the newspaper guild starting a paper like they did during the strike. I don’t know if there would be any will to make these things happen, but I don’t think they’re outside the realm of the possible.
I hope that we have The Seattle Times for a good long while, and I’m rooting for it to get better as a paper. But it seems reasonable to think about what happens if they go under.
The Seattle Times Corporation could probably survive for a while without publishing The Seattle Times. That’s because the local editions of several other papers including the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and New York Times are already part of what’s keeping the Bothell printing plant and carrier network busy. Whether the company would agree to print and distribute someone else’s local daily would depend on how much of a stupid, bitter sore loser Frank Blethen insists on being, and how much his kids would be willing to let him squander what’s left of the family fortune. And yeah…I’m one of those who think that no matter how important the Web is, any Internet-only daily paper is almost certain to fail. Even with e-readers, it’s still easier and more comfortable read a print paper while taking a dump.
Awwww, whatsa matter? Times not facist enough for you? Journalism??? Hey, if liberals are bleating that the Times is losing credibility it just means that the Times is not publishing lies and bullshit fast enough to suit liberals. Well, maybe you should suggest that the Times hire someone like Jeff Burnside. That ought to boost Times credibility with liberals tremendously.
Driveby@2: The Times is tanking.
Bitch about liberals all you want if it makes you feel good. But we are voting with our wallets and cancelling our subscriptions.
There isn’t any money in printing and distributing newspapers on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday (except Thanksgiving, and those ads could be delivered on Wednesday), Saturday.
There isn’t a daily paper anymore, they are just going through the motions.
ST will likely go to a three times a week paper. If they don’t, someone else will.
The thing that newspapers online and plenty of web-only newsy sites don’t do very well is be a fact aggregator. Rather than write a summary of a city council meeting a site should link through to agendas and schedules, maybe get a little reader feedback on what they want more information on an event they see on a calendar, and send Reporters (they are like journalists, only they use more facts) to those events.
There is a lot of free data out there, and I know that the vast majority of people are unlike me, they are not about to look at agendas and watch the video feed. But knowing that something is going to be discussed or decided is pretty useful information.
The ST cornered the market on columnists, but opinions are like assholes. Another dumb investment.
Going and getting actual news has actual value. Deliver it when it is profitable.
Welcome to the future.
I should have also mentioned the TV stations and especially their websites stepping up. Local TV news isn’t what I hear it once was, but it’s still something, and some of their websites are pretty good.
The problem with the Internet as a source of reliable information is that everything is ephemeral. Anyone can jump on a blog site (well, like this one, f’rinstnce) or rent a little space on a hosting service and put up whatever they want…and make it go away in an instant if they think the heat’s on. People in general don’t bother to vet the stuff they read online-witness the countless postings on Facebook repeating over and over again the same urban myths that bored housewives were trading on AOL and Juno 25 years ago.
The other problem with the Net is that the powers that be can not only monitor everything that’s on it and who looks at it…they can pull the plug any time they want as well. They’ve done this many times with individual sources that aren’t distributed in the “cloud” and the only reason they haven’t done that with the likes of Wikileaks is that to do so they’d have to break so many connections (at least for a while) that it’d interfere with the flow of packets that represent all the “wealth” being siphoned out of your and my pockets into the coffers of the oligarchs.
Although the Times does very little investigative journalism, it does some. The Times has also been a major force in preserving the Public Records Act and opposing sealed court files. Blogs don’t have the resources to litigate issues like these. We need newspapers, even the Seattle Times.
We don’t just need newspapers, we need journalists. Folks like us just posting random thoughts for a few of our friends to read certainly don’t fill that bill, to say nothing of the likes of Scott St. Clair or Alex Jones.
@5 TV news will never replace print journalism because you can’t scan a broadcast like you can a broadsheet. You may be interested in only one news story but you have to wait through 1/2 hour or 1 hour of other news to get the information you want. TV news also lacks depth; it’s rare for a story to get more than a few seconds of air time. TV never really competed for the audience that reads papers. The problem newspaper publishers face is that you can get instant news from the internet and the newspaper is day-old news by the time you get the newspaper. I don’t know what the solution for that is. The need for journalism hasn’t gone away; it’s the news delivery platform and business model that is changing. The need for the gatekeeper and editor functions of professional newsies hasn’t gone away, either; historically, newspapers were a trusted source, whereas most of what’s posted on the internet is nothing more than some yahoo’s rant. People still want reliable information from sources they can trust, so the fact anyone can broadcast his opinions to the whole world via the internet hasn’t eliminated the need for journalists and editors.
Has HA been down? I haven’t been able to access HA from my home computer for a couple of days, and I’m wondering if it’s the site, my computer, or my access was blocked for some reason.