Bye Bye, PI

The Seattle Post Intelligencer ceased publication today with only truncated online version of itself as a memorial–while it lasts, anyway.

I can't say that I'm too unhappy about this. It's always sad to see a newspaper go belly up and it does raise the question about how news reporting is going to carry on until it learns to adapt to the new technology, but the loss of a left-wing rag like the PI is no great loss. Newspaper bias is no sin. In fact, in Britain it's a sign of a healthy market of opinion. However, British papers must operate in actual competition. Cozy Labour papers must rub shoulders with Conservative papers who must contend with Liberal Democrat broadsheets and this keeps them all on their toes. In the United States, however, daily papers generally operate in a monopoly–or worse, a false duopoly with two so-called "competing" newspapers sharing plants, facilities and world views. In Seattle, this boiled down to the newspaper business dividing between the leftist Seattle Times and the raving leftist Seattle PI. We will pass over the paper for aging Troskyites, the Seattle Weekly, and the sexually incontinent Stranger with more quiet dignity than they deserve. This sort of bias is tolerable if the papers concerned remain open about their bias, but when, as the PI did, the bias is marketed as the only reasonable and "moderate" view this becomes unacceptable. When the paper in question is published in a city and state run by a political machine with whom the paper is ideological hand in party glove and willing soften the pedal and turn the blind eye, then it becomes a disservice.

It's also an appalling business model. As one commentator pointed out, it's like a burger bar refusing to offer cheeseburgers to the half of the market that is clamouring for them because the manager doesn't like cheeseburgers and he thinks that people who eat cheeseburgers are beneath contempt. In the Seattle PI's case, they refused to sell cheeseburgers and now their burger bar has been reduced to those little wheelie carts that you see in the West End after the pubs close.

Trouble is, there are a heck of a lot of those carts out there, as the online PI will soon learn. As for myself, I'm truly going to miss the Letters to the Editor page. Browsing through it was to be transported into a strange, parallel world where it is always a tie-dyed 1968.