On the heels of the devastating news that the NY Times might be sold for $3 and a bottle of Ripple as early as May, comes this terrible announcement:
Hearst Corp. put Seattle’s oldest newspaper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, up for sale on Friday and said that if it can’t find a buyer in the next 60 days the paper would likely close or continue to exist only online.
[...]
Hearst said it is not considering buying The Seattle Times, the city’s other daily paper, which has handled non-news functions for the P-I since 1983 under a federally approved joint operating agreement.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.
Daniel Horowitz
Neil Stevens
Moe Lane
Steve Maley
Jake Walker
Very sad.
Thrhheggeegwc Jjtkylkfofud (Diary) Saturday, January 10th at 8:32AM EST (link)Excuse me while I find a box of tissues.
Amen . . .
Yahuti (Diary) Saturday, January 10th at 8:58AM EST (link)Hallelujah.
The best way to clean up the waters of the Puget Sound!
Now, if we could only root out some of those politicized dem-appointed retired 4-stars bat-winging around Tacoma . . .
A veteran is someone who, at one point in his life, wrote a blank check made payable to ‘The United States of America’ for an amount of ‘up to and including my life.’ That is Honor, and there are way too many people in this country who no longer understand it.
De Opresso Liber
As Powerline suggested, conservatives should
icbm (Diary) Saturday, January 10th at 10:19AM EST (link)buy the Seattle newspaper – and any number of other regional newspapers that come up for sale this year.
The economic downturn could be a major opportunity to change the press.
All aboard the Titanic! nt
Steve Maley (Diary) Saturday, January 10th at 10:33AM EST (link)The blogger formerly known as ‘Vladimir’.
The business model would need changing
icbm (Diary) Saturday, January 10th at 11:21AM EST (link)Newspapers in general are a losing business, but there is room for success – some Southwests among the Uniteds, so to speak. And it sure would be nice if conservatives owned a large number of significant newspapers around the country.
Owning more TV news networks would be even better, but picking up selected newspapers would be a good start, especially in regions where we are losing support, like the Pacific Northwest.
They're all in big, Blue cities and you have to
Achance (Diary) Saturday, January 10th at 11:33AM EST (link)print them and deliver them. A Conservative newspaper will be at war with the city government and the unions from day one. You’ll have to fight for every permit. You’ll have punitive legislation turned on you that you’ll either have to buy your way out of – with some AG more than happy to bring the bribery and corruption charges – or litigate your way out of against a government that has hundreds of lawyers that it is going to pay anyway. Then you have to print it in the face of the printers’ unions. And don’t think you can get past that with technology. Give some thought to how long it took the railroads to get rid of the firemen and the cabooses or the fights the Ports have had over containers and clipboard carrying clerks paid $150K/yr. and managing the longshoremens’ stealing privileges. And when you get past printing it, you can do business with the Teamsters about how you’re going to get it delivered or whether they’ll even deliver your newsprint to you.
That don’t sound like a business I’d want to put my money in.
In Vino Veritas
Has this happened to the NY Post, the WSJ,
icbm (Diary) Saturday, January 10th at 11:35AM EST (link)or the Washington Times? For that matter, has it happened to the Examiner?
I ask sincerely, not knowing the answer.
In Blue cities, you do business with unions
Achance (Diary) Saturday, January 10th at 11:51AM EST (link)or you don’t do business. All the big papers had one Helluva fight with the printers just in moving away for setting lead type or using matts for ads or means other than engraving for photos. There was a level of featherbedding every bit as bad as the UAW job bank. Most big papers for some time paid the linotype operators to set all the type in lead which was then thrown away.
I haven’t followed it closely, but there was a big, long strike against the SF Chronicle a few years back over featherbedding issues inter alia. In any event, the Washington Times is the only remotely conservative paper in a Blue area and is a relative newcomer to prominence. I don’t know what it’s labor issues are, I just know how unions and Blue city governments operate. I’ll betch one of the first things BHO does is cancel all subscriptions of the Washington Times to any federal office. One of the first things any transition team does is review all subscriptions and punish its friends and reward its enemies. If Republicans were smart, in the states we control, we’d repeal all the laws requiring Public Noitices and government job vacancies to be printed in all the papers – it is a major source of revenue for papers that hate us.
In Vino Veritas
very interesting, achance. thanks.
icbm (Diary) Saturday, January 10th at 12:53PM EST (link)i didn’t know any of that. i suppose i shouldn’t be surprised.
so perhaps the solution is to combat the blue city papers – whichever ones are left by the end of 2009 – with newspapers whose subscription bases are in the suburbs and exurbs. i can’t say off the top of my head if such a venture could make a profit, but it seems worth considering by wealthy conservatives and corporations.
my overarching idea here is for conservatives to take serious action to gain more influence in the media. it will be very disappointing if in a decade, despite all the complaints, conservatives remain in the same position vis a vis the media that they are in now.
newspapers may not be the best way to go, but i would think they could be a part of the solution. talk radio and blogs won’t be enough to reach the middle-of-the-road voter.
perhaps you have more ideas…
How will we ever be intelligenced if there's no Intelligencer? nt
Steve Maley (Diary) Saturday, January 10th at 10:34AM EST (link)The blogger formerly known as ‘Vladimir’.
You could listen to Radio IQ
icbm (Diary) Saturday, January 10th at 11:25AM EST (link)Virginia Tech’s studio broadcasts on a station called “Radio IQ,” which is announced each time in a British accent (what else?). The station has mainly National Proletariat Radio programming, but more BBC news than normal.
http://www.radioiq.org/
I don’t recall that listening to it ever made me more intelligent – although I enjoyed mocking it aloud – but then again, I am a member of the great unwashed.
The Seattle Intelligencer (or lack thereof) (nt)
Thrhheggeegwc Jjtkylkfofud (Diary) Saturday, January 10th at 10:36AM EST (link)Seattle Intelligencer - a contradiction in terms
peg_c (Diary) Saturday, January 10th at 10:40AM EST (link)My fave line from ” The Hunt For Red October” slightly modified.
Government cannot be the solution when government is the problem.
A dying technology.
Steve Maley (Diary) Saturday, January 10th at 10:49AM EST (link)See this brilliant post from 2007.
A Sunday edition of the New York Times consumes almost half a square mile of pulpwood. Then it has to be flown around the country in fossil fuel-consuming airplanes so that it gets to the user before it starts to turn yellow.
That’s just the New York Times. And just the Sunday edition. Extrapolate that to hundreds of dailies across the country.
If newspapers didn’t exist and an entrepreneur proposed them as a new technology, they would be opposed by every environmental group, public and private.
Oddly enough, newspaper journalists bang the Global Warming drum louder than anyone. What’s good for the goose, &etc.
The blogger formerly known as ‘Vladimir’.
Why do they have to fly newspapers around the world?
civil truth (Diary) Saturday, January 10th at 1:02PM EST (link)With communications technology, couldn’t they simply send the electronic print masters to remote print shops in their regional strongholds and print out the dead-tree copies there? That would immensely reduce transportation costs.
The greatest evil…is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern. -C.S. Lewis
http://www.gmsplace.com/
The social event of the day here
Achance (Diary) Saturday, January 10th at 1:21PM EST (link)used to be the gathering at Percy’s Liquor Store downtown just before noon. Percy’s had a deal with a bunch of the Lower 48 papers and if you were a real mover and shaker you had your own little slot with your name on it. Weather permitting and pilot willing the first plane up from Seattle got in tennish in the morning and all the chattering class and wannabes gathered at Percy’s to get their day old NYT and WaPo and walk up the street towards the Capitol or over to one of the watering holes so they could conspicuously read it.
Those days are pretty much gone.
In Vino Veritas
Sad to see, even if they earned it...
furious (Diary) Saturday, January 10th at 1:28PM EST (link)…I’ve lived in several two-newspaper towns (pre-JOA and while they had them) — San Antonio, Dallas and San Francisco — and every so often it cleansed the palate to, say, sample Molly Ivins (RIP) in the Times-Herald after some Chamber-of-Commerce boosterism in the Morning News.
I could understand one-newspaper towns out here amongst us unlettered rubes in blighted flyover country, but amongst our coastal betters like Seattle, San Francisco, or Los Angeles? And even then, what is published is either absolutely unreadable (see “Morford, Mark”) or simply badly done (most anything by the LA Times or both (again, LA Times?
Bad enough that they’re losing ad revenue to online, but they publish the journalistic equivalent of the Dodge Nitro, as well. Good day to them.
I’ll cling bitterly to my Dallas Morning News and WSJ while I stil have them. At least they’re readable and informative.
–furious
“I find your lack of faith disturbing.” — Darth Vader