From Stop the presses: Seattle Post-Intelligencer to publish on web only
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a newspaper that dates back to the city's frontier days, will issue its final print edition Tuesday and move entirely to publishing online, owner Hearst Corp. announced Monday.The online version of the 146-year-old Post-Intelligencer will be "an effort to craft a new type of digital business with a robust, community news and information website at its core," said Steven R. Swartz, president of Hearst Newspapers.
And the ground will shake and four horsemen will ride out into battle...
I have a personal fondness for the Seattle PI. They published one of my photos in the entertainment section a few years ago. It didn't look as good in black and white as I'd hoped, but they did pay me for my picture.
Web-only newspapers will be the way of the future. And books, but that will take longer.
Newspapers going digital makes sense right now. Fewer advertising dollars means fewer pages (you didn't think pages were determined by content, did you?). And cutting down trees for few people will ever keep doesn't make sense.
The technology to put a newspaper online is pretty easy, really. And putting text online means allowing searching and textual analysis.
But, what about libraries and archives? Of course, the Seattle PI will have archives. But will libraries and archives and researchers have access to those archives? Will they be free and open access? One can only hope.