Denny's Free Grand Slam Breakfast Day Tuesday
Marina Yoga Studio Donates Old Mats for Haitian Relief
Prop 8 Trial Judge Is Gay; Should This Matter?
Muni Bus Nails a Fire Hydrant
One Dead in Fisherman's Wharf Nightclub Shooting
We'd typically leave news that one of Seattle's two daily newspapers, the Seattle P-I, has been put up for sale to our sister site to the north. But a segment in the P-I's own story on the announcement gave us much pause:
...the reason for offering the paper for sale is purely economic."Since 2000, the P-I has lost money each year, and the losses have escalated and continue to escalate in 2009," he said. "We have had to make a very tough decision. This is a business decision and it is no reflection on your work. The decision reflects our inability to see the losses turning around soon."
In a release circulated shortly after Swartz finished speaking, Hearst said the P-I lost about $14 million in 2008.
So, Hearst has a brand new head of newspapers trying to stick his finger in the leak of the damned newspaper industry. Bless his heart. And there's a paper that's lost $14M in the past year, so, sure, makes sense.
But what about our own Hearst owned paper, the beleaguered (way, way too many links to choose from, folks) Chronicle? We've all heard how the Chronicle was losing a million bucks a week, and we're dubious that much has turned around since then. So, OK, that's at least $52M for 2008, right?
So, what's keeping the little Dutch boy from shutting down our local dike? One possibility is the difficulty they might have in getting out of a 15 year contract the paper recently signed with a Canadian printing press company. 15 years! Won't we be getting news via a port in our brains by then?
While it's been suggested that the Chronicle could merge with the MediaNews owned papers in the Bay Area (that is, pretty much all the other print dailies around here) to save itself, MediaNews doesn't seem to be in a position to absorb SFist's student loan debt, let alone a paper as mortally wounded as the Chron.
So, will the Hearst owned Chronicle, surely the loss leader of their newspaper division, be the next on the block? We're pretty much trying to read the tea leaves here, but all we see is an expensive brown mess.
Image: Jeremiah Owyang
add to stumble upon
add to reddit
tweet this
post to facebook
the seattle times is one of the worst papers now...at least with a viable PI they had to at least try to do some reporting....if the PI becomes another Media News shell, it'll die off soon anyway since all medianews papers just have stuff you can find on yahoo news wire feeds anyway...
that's it - - - I'm heading up to Russian Hill to burn down a porta-potty in protest! Oh wait, new episode of House is coming on. Never mind...
The Chronicle is a terrible paper, and the sooner they go out of business the better. They we can turn that building into condos for rich people who just moved here from the suburbs.
Could they find a buyer? Would the Fangs take it off their hands if they paid her enough?
I'm not trying to deny that the newspaper industry is fucked (and, as a subscriber to both the Chronicle and the NY Times, I'm more upset about it than most), but... Seattle had two daily papers trying to compete. The P-I was far and away the shittier of the two. They had some crazy agreement whereby the Seattle Times and the P-I even put out a joint paper on Sunday.
The P-I is a better paper than the Examiner, but this is a relatively similar situation. Seattle is way too small to support two daily papers. This was a long time coming.
This sounds like what happened when the Ex was Hearst and the Chron was the Fangs'. Look to SF for a flash-forward of Seattle will look like soon enough(a one-paper town)