In a recent post on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer‘s “Big Blog,” P-I managing editor David McCumber had this to say about the P-I‘s
seemingly imminent demise:
“I think that nationally and locally, we’ve been slow to respond to
changes in the market, in readers’ needs, and in technology. I think
larger papers, like the P-I, gradually ossified by demanding years of
experience for any opening and paid too little attention to
diversifying, in terms of age, ethnicity, and gender, to better reflect
the communities they serve. I think we haven’t done a good job of
marketing ourselves, of making sure people understand that what we do
actually is valuable. I think we got trapped between serving the
readers we wanted to attract and the readers we actually had. And we
haven’t done a very thorough job of continuing to research our
readership and our potential readership.”
As I see it, that assessment was only partly right. The P-I didn’t
diversify too little, it diversified too much—and in the wrong
directions. In a desperate effort to make a dent online—an arena
where its competitor, the Seattle Times, has faltered—the paper
wasted acres of real estate in areas where the market is already
saturated. Instead of creating a splashy webpage full of celebrity
gossip and fashion photos, the P-I should have chosen one thing to
really focus on (local politics, perhaps?) and owned it. Instead, it
tried to be everything to everyone—and ended up being
indispensable to no one.
If the P-I is going to continue as an online-only publication, it
should capitalize on its strengths—local reporting, breaking
news, insightful political commentary—and stop “diversifying”
into areas where it will never measure up to the competition. A few
examples:
• Too many blogs. On the P-I‘s main blog page, there are
currently 26 blogs by P-I staff. Many overlap (are seven separate
sports blogs really necessary? Should fly-fishing have made the cut?);
many have names that tell me next to nothing about what the blog is
about. (Would you guess that “Secret Ingredients” was about public
health? Or “Royal Brougham’s Baby” about baseball?) A few are called
out on the main page (the Big Blog, SPI, and Strange Bedfellows), but
it’s not clear why—does the P-I consider these its best blogs,
the most important, the most read? Or are they chosen more or less at
random?
I’m not saying the Slog model (one or two blogs that cover a wide
range of subjects with a wide range of voices) is the only one that
works, but you do want to strike a balance between allowing readers to
choose what they want to read about and overwhelming them with more
options than they can possibly explore. The P-I would have been wise to
limit itself to fewer general topics—say, sports, news, opinion,
entertainment, and food—instead of giving every subset of every
subject a little fiefdom of its own. That’s what Blogspot and
LiveJournal were made for.
• Too much democracy. If the staff blogs are an overcrowded
marketplace of ideas, the reader blogs are a Super Wal-Mart, with
something for every micro-interest. There’s a blog on cakes and a blog
on “fashion for moms,” one on charitable giving and one on pet health.
There are blogs for aviation geeks, people who are interested in “haute
happenings on the Eastside,” and those who want to “age gracefully.”
Many haven’t been updated for months. They’re an uncurated mishmash of
smart commentary and useless drivel, with no way to tell between the
two without clicking 100 links. If newspapers are going to let their
readers blog (rather than relegating them to the comments), some
hurdles (an audition, perhaps?) would improve the overall quality.
Meanwhile, blogs that go dark for more than a few weeks should be shut
down.
• Too much frivolity. The P-I‘s front page is stuffed with
stuff. There’s a roundup of photos from movie premieres; galleries for
Fashion Week in Hong Kong AND the Fashion Rio show; a page of “First
Lady Fashion”; a page full of “amazing animals”; a guide to TV
listings; a gallery of readers’ photos of their pets and another, below
it, for photos of their kids; and so on. Unless the P-I‘s market
research reveals something dramatically counter to my own experience,
people aren’t getting their news about Naomi Campbell’s latest outburst
or SamRo’s latest breakup from daily-newspaper websites. And I can find
cute animals and fashion on cute-animal and fashion websites. I don’t
need a 163-year-old daily paper to tell me about Michelle Obama’s
inauguration gown.
• Too much participation. At the P-I‘s website, after you’ve
blogged about playgroups or the Ravenna bar scene or bulb gardening,
you can go submit an essay about “What the Inauguration Means to Me,”
upload your photos to MySeattlePix, take part in a forum about being a
Seattle mom, become Facebook friends (and go to meetups) with various
P-I reporters, and “Sound Off” in the comments to any story. Combined
with P-I bloggers insistence on starting “conversations” with their
readers—e.g., “What do YOU think of the P-I‘s future?”—it
all starts to look a little desperate. Instead of providing three-dozen
different points of contact, the P-I should limit it to a few. I’m
willing to bet more people would be interested in giving feedback if
they didn’t have to choose between commenting, joining a forum,
“sounding off,” and contributing an essay.
• “Irreverence” can’t be forced. The P-I‘s “youth-oriented”
blog, SPI, is produced by a horde of unpaid interns—as if handing
the reins over to college-age “aspiring writers” automatically results
in a product that’s “younger,” “hipper,” and more “raw.” If the daily
papers learned anything from their disastrous experiments with back
pages produced by and for young adults (remember the Seattle Times‘
awful back page, NEXT?), it’s that “young” doesn’t automatically mean
“readable”—and that putting headlines in graffiti font doesn’t
fool kids into thinking daily newspapers are cool.
All of this isn’t to slag on the things the P-I does well. As I
wrote in last week’s In the Hall column, I’ll miss the paper’s local
news reporting, the attention it pays to low-profile events, the fact
that, true to its name, it has been a paper about the city, not the
suburbs. But if the paper does have a future online—and that’s a
big if—it will have to adapt to survive. Maybe that will mean
that instead of being everything to everyone, the P-I will have to
learn to do a few things well. 
Not surprising that “Seattle’s Only Newspaper” would have the temerity to render advice to a staff that has been publishing longer than The Stranger has had a business plan, by several orders. Ever notice how much farther and wider an audience seattlepi.com gets than thestranger.com? I mean, they get Canadians even…
What’s with the time of this posting? I read it previously with 1/15 on it (can still get a hit with that date from the search function), and here it is again with 1/20. Is this an “Updated”?
bwah ha ha, this is the most arrogant thing I’ve read in ages. some writer at the free weekly rag lecturing the actual big city newspaper about what they did wrong. sorry but what you guys do is nowhere near the same league as what the pi did, and you need to stop treating it that way. you work for a free weekly that litters the streets every week with a bunch of ads, classified ads, escort ads, a sex column and i, anonymous. get over yourselves.
I don’t think enough attention is being paid to discussion of “why the PI failed and the Times did not (or has yet to)”.
Obviously something there is something the Times is doing that the PI failed to and it certainly isn’t the website. The Times’ is not very clean or user friendly.
As already pointed out this is somewhat of a ludicrous exercise. The organization of the PI’s blogs is less of an issue than craigslist gutting their classified ad revenue.
Print media is taking a major hit with a massive drop in advertising and a growing number of PEOPLE who have NEVER had to PURCHASE either MAGAZINES or NEWSPAPERS. What is the secret of the Stranger, being a freebee? Is free info the best?
The Seattle P-I and other mainstream newspapers should have adapted to the web years ago, when it became clear that’s where things were heading. After all, what business are they in? The railroads certainly weren’t in the railroad business, were they?
From the December 22nd issue of the New Yorker, James Surowiecki writes:
“Had the bosses realized that they were in the transportation business, rather than the railroad business, they could have moved into trucking and air transport, rather than letting other companies dominate. By extension, many argue that if newspapers had understood they were in the information business, rather than the print business, they would have adapted more quickly and more successfully to the Net.”
Who cares the PI is a “Dead man walking”. And this pipe dream about going online only, please not going to happen. Thats just Hearst saving face with the union
Yes, a fly fishing blog should have made the cut and any idiot with even a whiff of Seattle sports history would know that Royal B is all about the mariners…
@Aaron
thestranger.com gets Canadians too – me, for instance.
Oh, there you are. I was wondering when you’d show up, Nick.
The point is that thestranger.com and seattlepi.com attract vastly different audiences. Erica imparting her wizened perspective comes across more as back door schadenfreude rather than a sincere desire to see a competing media outlet (even one with a great deal of valuable experience and a different audience) succeed and thrive. Erica’s writing past and present hardly exudes professional respect, this included.
The truth is it has nothing to do with the website or the reporters. It’s about money and the business model. Plenty of people do and will read both the paper and the website, but the advertisers have left. And the cost of producing and delivering information can’t be supported by people who want everything for free.
This article is fail personified.
i actually like the layout of the times website. i read it daily. i tried liking the p-i website, but it’s a jumbled mess. i think the times website is clearly laid out, section by section down the page. if the p-i wants to survive online, it should take some cues from the times.
This gives you a clue how clued in Erica is. Of all the problems daily newspapers have, online traffic is way down on the list. Check the traffic numbers for the Times and P-I compared to the Stranger. Check the numbers for the NY Times.
It’s not about readership: Hundreds of thousands of people pay to read the Times and P-I. Many more read their content online.
As everyone knows, it’s about getting revenue to pay for all that content. Online ads don’t come close yet — and it’s questionable whether they ever will. And in an era when everyone expects all content to be free, it’s unlikely the revenue will come from readers.
Erica’s obviously clueless about the whole business side of newspapering. Not that that would ever keep her from spewing an opinion.
Whoever is laughing at the “free weekly” pointing out the failures of the city daily completely missed the point: The Stranger knows its audience, and seeks to give them what they want.
Ask yourself: What do you need from the PI that you can’t get elsewhere? Surely it’s not the nationally-syndicated Carolyn Hax column that always seems to get high display on the PI website.
I hope Jim Moore and Art Thiel will still be around if a web edition comes to fruition.
I think that Erica’s commentary is right on. The newspaper industry as a whole lost its chance to change course years ago. As far back as the late 80s it was clear to many that the old revenue model was not going to last. Even without the internets, readership was in decline and papers were struggling.
What was the response? Make the paper incrementally less and less desirable to readers: fewer, shrunken pages, larger type, more ads, more useless pictures and graphics, more non-local syndicated columns, less text devoted to what people would pay to read.
“Craigslist killed teh newspapers” is a straw man argument. I and others stopped subscribing to newspapers years before craigslist and feel no sorrow for the loss of these dinosaurs. I do feel bad for the journalists, photographers, etc who will have to find a new way to make a living. Those folks are the true value generators and ironically are usually the first to be tossed overboard when a paper begins to flounder.
Now I think I’ll go enjoy the rest of my Stranger, which I’ve been reading since the first edition, and then check out Google News.
Saying that content or editorial positions is why print media is failing is like saying your car won’t start because it has a bad paint job.
Thanks for playing.
Maybe they could put a bunch of prostitute ads all over and they could get more advertising revenue. That would be real high class of them.
If the PI’s demise means I am never again confronted with another shallow, ignorant, single faceted article by Claudia Rowe then it’s a good thing. Her 2006 reporting in regard to Rivas was superficial and one-dimensional to the extent I remember it to this day – and we in Washington still pay the price. Ari Kohn