Seattlepi.com’s Ghost Town

March 18, 2009 By 3 Comments

200px-the-omega-man-posterThose 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.

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Journalism on the Brink (Part II)

March 3, 2009 By 6 Comments

It bears repeating that it is not journalism that’s necessarily on the brink. It’s the newspaper business model that isn’t just on the brink, but hurtling back through time to the penny press days.

Yes, the Web makes it way cheaper to present content. And, yes, there are fewer barriers to entry to both content providers and technology. But one plus the other does not equal profits, or even sustaining revenue.

A lot of the discussion at “Journalism on the Brink” at the University of Washington last week (see Part One) focused on how the Web was changing journalism. Seattle’s two daily newspapers, the Times and the soon-to-be-gone Post-Intelligencer, both were represented by non-traditional content providers who reflected the kind of wrong thinking that has doomed the U.S. newspaper industry into a certain shakedown, if not extinction. That is, that news on the Internet should be free, that newspapers need to be everything to everyone, and that aggregation and what I call “celebrity presentation” (folks such as the P-I’s Monica Guzman not reporting on anything, but snarking and Tweeting about what already exists on the Web).
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Journalism on the Brink (Part I)

February 27, 2009 By 2 Comments

The nightmare, worst-case scenario for U.S. journalism finally began to unfold in earnest today, as the Rocky Mountain News became the first of the expected congo line of major daily city newspapers to publish its final edition and cease operations. The tabloid format Rocky was the plucky counter-voice to the somewhat stodgier Post. At least Denver has a voice left, but how long before it, too, is silenced?

Final Edition from Matthew Roberts on Vimeo.

This of course is the question being posed in every city, even nationally and internationally, and the discourse over which recently has gone into overdrive. In Seattle, which is facing a similar scenario with the Post-Intelligencer within the next three weeks, the Communication Department at the University of Washington and Online News Association (ONA) hosted on Wednesday a panel discussion, “Journalism on the Brink,” that provided ample illumination, but scant little positive news for the newspaper industry.

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Newspapers, murder-suicides and the Kindle 2

February 12, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Few, if anything, in life is more irrational than a murder-suicide. I always think, “It was his problem; why didn’t he (it’s usually a “he,” isn’t it?) just do himself and spare everyone else?” I mean, if you are going off the deep end, go alone.

I think the same thing about the massively unenlightened newspaper executives around the country. They have, after all, lined up time, technology and new ideas, and shot them in the head. Now, one by one, they are swallowing the poison — gutting their staffs and their products — that makes the death of newspapers almost a fait accompli.

Yes, I am saying the death of newspapers is a murder-suicide. I’ve thought a lot about this subject, of course. It not only involves my former professional life, but is really in our faces in Seattle these days with the imminent passing of the Post-Intelligencer and the slower, but just-as-ugly and almost just-as-certain demise of my old newspaper, The Times.

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