March 16th, 2009
The Seattle P-I bites the dust
I’m from Seattle, so this story caught my attention. For quite some time, Seattle had two daily papers, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Seattle Times. The Post-Intelligencer, or the P-I as it’s called, is actually Seattle’s oldest business and has been publishing papers for 146 years. No sentimental value for me; I’m young enough to have never been a big fan of newspapers. CNN was around by the time I cared about news and, Seattle being the social place that it is, was an easy place to discuss local issues.
No, it isn’t sentimentality that has me bringing this up. Rather, it’s a fundamental shift in the way our students will be getting their news and what they consider news to be. To get a glimpse of this shift, we can take a look at the notes from P-I’s owner, Hearst, and a farewell article published in its final print edition:
Steven Swartz, president of Hearst Newspapers, said in the release the Web site “isn’t a newspaper online — it’s an effort to craft a new type of digital business with a robust, community news and information Web site at its core.”
He continued: “The Web is first and foremost a community platform, so we’ll be featuring new columns from prominent Seattle residents; more than 150 reader blogs, community databases and photo galleries. We’ll also be linking to the great work of other Web sites and blogs in the community.”
This strikes me as an eminently good idea and one that provides another legitimate source of news and views for students. The concept of a community portal means that residents of Seattle and its sprawling suburbs will have a destination more useful and relevant in 2009 than a newspaper. Seattlepi.com just might represent where citizen journalism and the formal press finally come together.
Although it remains to be seen how this will play out and whether seattlepi.com will be more profitable than its dead-tree predecessor, it seems quite likely that our students will increasingly turn to sources like it for news. CNN.com, Google News, and many newspapers have an online presence that students can use for current events and national/international news. Local news, however, tends not to be sought out in the same way by our students.
A dynamic, people- and content-driven portal just might change that. As educators, we need to encourage our students to interact with and participate in this new model of news and community. This is an opportunity for students to once again engage in local news, politics, and culture through a medium with which they identify more than they ever have with newsprint. Will it take them off MySpace? No, of course not. However, anything that can make the real world as accessible as the virtual to our students is a good thing.
Follow Chris Dawson on Twitter! Christopher Dawson is the technology director for the Athol-Royalston School District in northern Massachusetts and a member of the Internet Press Guild. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations, but always keep in mind that the opinions expressed here are his own and not those of his daytime employer, even if he talks incessantly about his day job.
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