Seattle PostGlobe

» see seattlepostglobe.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The thing that died first was the paper. On 17 March 2009 the Seattle Post-Intelligencer printed its last edition after 146 years and kept a small staff for a website, which meant a newsroom of about 165 people became about twenty. Everyone else walked out of a building in a city that still had all the same stories in it.

Some of them came back the next month with a website of their own. Kery Murakami, who had covered politics and metro for the P-I, started the Seattle PostGlobe in April 2009 with a budget of two thousand dollars and one full-time person, which was themselves. Other former P-I journalists wrote for it because writing was what they did and there was nowhere else to put it.

For two years it worked better than the arithmetic says it should have. The PostGlobe covered city government and the neighborhood stories a second daily used to carry, with KCTS on public television and KPLU on public radio as partners. Researchers cited it as evidence that a city could grow new journalism faster than it lost the old kind. What it never had was a way to pay anybody.

I have never lived in a city that lost its newspaper, and the Turkish press has failed in different ways than the American one, so this is a story I am reading rather than remembering. The part that carries anywhere is the shape of the labor. A newsroom made of people between jobs is real journalism for exactly as long as they are between jobs.

~ the case file ~

~ the volunteers ~

Murakami was blunt about the model on the way out: in the beginning they worked as volunteers, and at the end they were still mostly volunteers. Advertising never produced meaningful revenue on a site with a local audience and no sales staff. Donations came in at first, the way they do when something is new and the cause is visible, then thinned out across two years the way they do when it is neither.

The failure mode was not that readers stopped coming. It was that unemployed journalists stopped being unemployed. Every time one of the contributors landed a paying job, the PostGlobe lost a reporter and gained nothing, because there was no revenue to hire a replacement with. A newsroom staffed by the consequences of a layoff is dissolved by the recovery from that layoff.

~ what the paper left ~

It stopped publishing on 29 July 2011, two years and four months after the last P-I press run. There was no buyer and no merger, just a notice and an archive. Seattle kept the other experiments that had started in the same window, and the city ended up better covered online than most American cities its size, which is the reason it got studied at all.

The uncomfortable finding is in the accounting rather than the journalism. Nonprofit local news works when somebody funds it before the reporting starts, not when laid-off staff donate their own time and hope the donations catch up. The PostGlobe did the work first and looked for the money after, and it turns out that order only buys you about two years.

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