If all goes as planned, the next few weeks should bring the
emergence of two online-only ventures launched by former Seattle
Post-Intelligencer employees who are using their unemployed days (and,
in some cases, the cushion of large severance packages) to become
online news entrepreneurs. Already there’s the SeattlePostGlobe.org, which will
be produced by about 30 former P-I employees and launched, after a bit of a delay, on the afternoon April 14. The second will be InvestigateWest.org, made up of seven
former P-I investigative reporters and editors and directed by Rita
Hibbard, a former assistant managing editor for the paper. That site is
expected to launch in the next few weeks.
InvestigateWest will be similar to the investigative news site
ProPublica.org, but with a focus
on the Western United States. “We’d be looking to cover the West and
cover the major investigative and narrative pieces that aren’t being
done by newspapers as they shed those resources and shed those
reporters,” Hibbard said. Financing would come from foundation support,
partnerships with existing news organizations, memberships, and
news-service-style distribution deals. Among the current confirmed
staff: Hibbard, Robert McClure, Ruth Teichroeb, Daniel Lathrop, Carol
Smith, Kristen Millares Young, and Lewis Kamb.
The business model for SeattlePostGlobe is less clear; Murakami was
too busy with the launch to discuss it this week. But at a forum on the
future of local news publishing held at city hall on April 10, he said
the staff would include familiar former P-I writers such as Mike Lewis
and Art Thiel. “There are important voices that the community has lost
that I think it is important for us to keep,” Murakami said. The plan
is for the PostGlobe to play the news of the city straight down the
middle, with a non-partisan take that Murakami hopes will differentiate
itself by emphasis and attitude—an interesting approach given
that the “unbiased” niche is already filled by the Seattle Times and
the new online-only P-I.
The economics of web-only publishing are extremely challenging, but
the PostGlobe effort is getting help from the local public television
station, KCTS-9, which has provided office space for the start-up. And
their fellow unemployed P-I workers are cheering for them.
“I hope they make it,” Hibbard said. “They’ve got long odds. Long
odds for us, too. But we’re going to work hard to make it and I’m sure
they will too.” 
