Goodbye to an Old Friend

The morning newspaper has been a daily part of my life since 1995, when I'd pick up The Daily Evergreen to keep up with the latest goings-on at WSU.

When I moved to the Seattle area, I lived with my parents and read their copy of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer every morning, which I've always felt was a pretty good paper (though I didn't have a strong basis for comparison), and when I moved into my own apartment with Becky, I started my own subscription. It was my companion every morning with breakfast (I'm very loyal to my rituals).

Over the past few years, I've regularly had internal debates as to whether I should keep my subscription active. I kept hearing how newspapers were struggling to compete with the Internet and that Craig's List had killed their most reliable stream of revenue. I'm a technology geek, so I felt like I should migrate to online news, not to mention the guilt I felt for all of those dead trees (I always recycle, but still).

Of course I did embrace online news a long time ago, but it just felt awkward to have a laptop next to my cereal bowl instead of a traditional newspaper. Having my kids with me at breakfast only increased my concern for my laptop's safety. However over the last several months I've grown quite comfortable reading news on my iPhone via the New York Times' and AP's custom applications, the latter of which draws local news via the P-I and The Seattle Times.

The last straw was when the P-I had to go from five sections to three, hiding the local and business sections within the others. I respect their need to cut costs in this market, but I was irritated nevertheless and vowed that my iPhone would become my new breakfast companion.

Before I had the satisfaction of canceling (actually just not renewing), the P-I announced that they were basically closing up shop (their chances of finding a buyer that will keep printing it is zilch). For the most part this saddens me because I still intended to read it online, and any job losses are bad for the overall economy.

Some of these out of work journalists will find success in new media, but most of them probably won't. I'm curious to see what the landscape for news will look like after this revolution has played itself out. Let's hope that blogs and rumor sites, which are great for what they are, don't supplant hard news sites with high editorial standards.