Tuesday March 17, 2009 saw the last print edition of the venerable Seattle Post-Intelligencer, long the second Seattle paper, keeping The Seattle Times honest.
And then there was only one.
Seattle has now joined the cities that in recent times have retired one of their two major papers. Denver's Rocky Mountain News closed its doors last month, as did Albuquerque's Tribune.
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is set to survive, however, in its digital incarnation as seattlepi.com.
According to reports, the digital paper will retain 20 of the paper's 150 strong staff, while also adding 20 sales reps to the online ads department.
Interestingly, any current Seattle P-I paper subscribers will automatically be switched to The Seattle Times, unless they make a fuss about it.
According to the seattlepi.com execs, the digital version is having a re-birth as of today, Wednesday. And an interesting one it is. All eyes probably will not be on seattlepi.com and their future financials and balance sheets, but they should be. For here is a paper that--albeit not by choice--has closed its analog doors and opened, widely, its digital ones.
Can it survive? Will it survive?
I believe it can (and without wasting trees). Whether it will survive, I believe comes down to--you've heard it before--content. If its content is good, and original enough to keep its current, and garner additional, readership, I believe it will survive. Perhaps on advertising revenue alone.
And if not; I, for one, would pay a subscription fee for an original, aggressive, insightful, well-written and relevant local paper. To me, $10 a month would be well worth it. Taking its current readership (those on the right side of the digital divide) of 146,000 that's close to $1,5 Million in monthly subscription fees. Any digital paper can boom on such revenue flow.
Then the question does become, how good do you have to be as a paper to command those $10 a month? Well, that's the question, isn't it?
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