The last edition of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer rolled off the presses early this morning, taking with it 146 years of publishing history and leaving behind a whole lot of doubts among us ink-stained wretches trying to figure out the future of journalism.

While folks in Seattle try to sort out the damage (and this collection of blog posts from The Stranger, Seattle's super-cool alt-weekly, is a good place to start), others are wondering what the P-I's transformation into a lean online-only publication - with only 20 newsroom employees and 20 sales reps, from a staff that used to number 181 - will mean for that city and for newspapers elsewhere.

Joel Connelly, a P-I columnist and one of the lucky few who still has a job there, calls the new online P-I "an adventure in journalism, not just for P-I writers but for an audience that seeks information, has opinions and is willing to speak its mind." And David Domke, a journalism professor at the University of Washington (my alma mater), told NPR that if this online experiment has a chance anywhere, it's a wired city like Seattle (which, after all, is home to Microsoft and Amazon.com - not to mention the source of all tech junkies' power: Starbucks).

Some former P-I staffers, speaking to the Columbia Journalism Review, aren't sold on the new web-only paper. Art critic Regina Hackett decries the P-I's parent company, the Hearst Corp., for a history of nickel-and-diming the paper: "A skeleton looks plump compared to poorly-paid online crew. ... The future according to the Hearst Corporation seems to be, journalism without journalists." Reporter Debera Harrell remarked that "a huge truth is that online journalism is being deployed to break unions."

Reporters everywhere watch when a paper, like the P-I or Denver's Rocky Mountain News, shuts down and they wonder: What if it happens here? When our readers start asking the same question, the urgency of finding a solution will grow exponentially.

(Illustration: David Horsey/The Seattle Post-Intelligencer)

Labels: journalism