Seattle Post-Intelligencer staffers are describing what this city will have lost when, after tomorrow, the newspaper’s print edition ceases to exist. Here’s P-I columnist Joel Connelly, who is currently down in Arizona watching the Mariners’ spring training and will be filing his first dispatch for the new, online-only P-I sometime this afternoon:
The last few months have been a gas: Sounding off on Nickels’ awful snow removal response; delving into 11th hour Bush administration moves to eviscerate environmental laws; pissing off Stranger news editor with column defending pharmacists’ rights of conscience.
Still . . .
A day after Steve Schwarz put Sam Simeon North up for sale, I took family’s elderly standard poodle and headed for bluff at Ebey’s Landing on Whidbey Island.
From the bluff, you can see four wilderness areas created with support from the P-I; a corner of North Cascades National Park, which we backed; plus a national recreation area and a national wildlife refuge, both of which were P-I causes.
The bluff sits in the middle of Ebey’s Landing National Historical Reserve—on a stretch of land once earmarked for summer homes—and looks down on a tidal lake once marked for draining.
The view looks out on the Strait of Juan de Fuca, site of other P-I causes, from keeping supertankers off the Sound to revealing that Victoria dumps millions of gallons of raw sewage into an international waterway each and every day.
The message?
I’ve been positioned to help protect and preserve the gorgeous corner of the world where I grew up. I’ve been able to give back. The P-I has been a consistent, eloquent voice to protect God’s—yes, Dan—great out-of-doors.
Illustration by Andrew Saeger.
Online only cannot work with that old lumbering dinosaur over there.
post more! there’s only a dozen posts today by you….
i wish there was a meta “what’s been lost” thread.
i may be what is to be gained is far greater.
Steven Berlin Johnson has a very provocative take on the death of newspapers.
http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/2009/…
Excerpt:
In fact, I think in the long run, we’re going to look back at many facets of old media and realize that we were living in a desert disguised as a rain forest. Local news may be the best example of this. When people talk about the civic damage that a community suffers by losing its newspaper, one of the key things that people point to is the loss of local news coverage. But I suspect in ten years, when we look back at traditional local coverage, it will look much more like MacWorld circa 1987. I adore the City section of the New York Times, but every Sunday when I pick it up, there are only three or four stories in the whole section that I find interesting or relevant to my life – out of probably twenty stories total. And yet every week in my neighborhood there are easily twenty stories that I would be interested in reading: a mugging three blocks from my house; a new deli opening; a house sale; the baseball team at my kid’s school winning a big game. The New York Times can’t cover those things in a print paper not because of some journalistic failing on their part, but rather because the economics are all wrong: there are only a few thousand people potentially interested in those news events, in a city of 8 million people. There are metro area stories that matter to everyone in a city: mayoral races, school cuts, big snowstorms. But most of what we care about in our local experience lives in the long tail. We’ve never thought of it as a failing of the newspaper that its metro section didn’t report on a deli closing, because it wasn’t even conceivable that a big centralized paper could cover an event with such a small radius of interest.
Not everything at the P-I is worth saving.
God, I hate the phrases, “it’s a gas!” “what a gas!” “he’s a real gas!”- any of that shit. Especially when used by journalists. How fucking old is Joel Connelly? 140?
Hearst Corporation pull plug on Seattle P-I print edition, Seattle P-I publish final print edition, freak out, online-only out, SEATTLE P-I BECOME ONLINE-ONLY NEWSPAPER!
ONLINE-ONLY SEATTLE P-I WILL SMASH ONLINE-ONLY SEATTLE TIMES!
And no, I don’t feel like letting it go.
Joel’s faith has to be pretty shaky if my atheism annoys him so much that it crowds his mind at a time like this.
Arizon?
Wow. Joel really put it to Dan by stating that he believes God owns the outdoors, in spite of the fact that Dan doesn’t believe that.
Great first sentence from Seattle’s ultimate gasbag!
One thing I’ll miss about the PI: top-notch reporting on the polluted Puget Sound and the totally inadequate government response.
Wow. A P-I reporter writes an article about a national park and becomes the paper becomes the LEADER of the environmental cause.
I think he’s actually doing some work on global warming, actually …
Good point, Trevor. The Times dropped the ball on that.
Jesus, Connelly makes me wish I’d cancelled the P-I years ago as well. Is there a new trendy word we can use for him besides douche-nozzle and asshat? He would totally be that.
Thank god the NYT is still home delivered. I won’t be reading this old fart on the “new P-I” site, ‘cuz I won’t be reading the new site at all.
terry@14: I like “jizzmopper,” but some seem to think it has homophobic overtones. To me it’s just the guy who cleans up all the jizz off the floor of the adult establishment, the least talented guy with the worst job ever. You know, like Joel Connelly. But w’ev.
Say what you will about the Conelly/Barnett feud, but ol’ Joel’s smart enough to not get caught stealing an $8 bottle of wine from QFC.
Advantage: Conelly.
@5
146 to be precise.
but didn’t Connelly register his car on whidby to evade and escape the motor vehicle tax in seattle?
also he registered folks who didn’t even live there, in his whidby house, saying they could be registered there because they helped build the stairs down to the beach.