Seattlepi.com’s Ghost Town
Those eager for Hearst’s splashy debut of its great online experiment, seattlepi.com, are in for a big letdown. It’s Wednesday, March 18, the first day of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s digital age, and the Web site looks, well, like everyone who wasn’t staying packed up and left, and the few who were coming back are still hung over from the Monday-Tuesday wake. The content model appears to be: We’re making this up as we go along.
I was going to lean on my nearly three decades of experience as a sportswriter, columnist and editor, both print and online, to offer some insights on how seattlepi.com was going to approach sports. Clicking on the “Sports” section from the main navigation bar is like being transformed into Robert Neville, the Charlton Heston character in “The Omega Man” (or Will Smith in “I Am Legend,” for you more contemporary fans of post-apocalyptic movie fare). The place is a ghost town and you know there are digital mutants lurking about, but they have yet to reveal themselves.
The lead and only story on the Sports page is a remnant from the day before, ”Can the ‘Zags Go All the Way?”. Thank goodness, there are TV/radio listings, but, oops, they are from Monday, March 16, and Tuesday, March 17, as if sports on the airwaves died along with the P-I print edition.
