Monday, March 16, 2009

AFTER AFTER A PERSON OR THING ENGAGED IN THE ACT OF INTELLIGENCING: The Seattle Post-Intelligencer will cease its tactile operations and begin a new life as an all-Internet edition beginning Wednesday. That leaves the Seattle Times as the city's only daily news-on-paper newspaper (and the region's only real newspaper; no offense to the Tacoma News Tribune or any other subregional daily). I was a Times guy growing up (and as a result, I think of any newspaper equal to or greater than the 1980s Times as a good paper and any paper worse than it as a bad one; this actually has turned out to be a surprisingly useful yardstick). At some point in the Internet era I divided my allegiances between the Times and the P-I depending upon the subject matter. The P-I had decent coverage of local issues, usually seemed less an establishment mouthpiece than the Times, and did a decent job covering baseball and high school sports. Now, who knows? (ETA: I do. Reporters' blogs say that sports will be a minimal part of the online venture, so Art Thiel, the definitive chronicler of the salvation of baseball in Seattle, and other members of the sports department are history.)

In any event, the Times now owns a local monopoly on the kind of news that blackens your fingers daily, and the P-I becomes the nation's largest former mainstream newspaper now reimagined as an Internet-only venture, a fact that will seem significant only until the totally unreadable but still famous San Francisco Chronicle folds (which some people seem to expect will happen this year).

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