| It's official about the Seattle P-I The last print edition will be on Tuesday, March 17th, but it will continue online at seattlepi.com. As Sue Frause, a journalist and Whidbey Island resident says via our FB wall, "It's the best case scenario for a very sad situation ... and also the first large daily paper in the country to go strictly online. So hopefully it can become a model for other newspapers ..." Apparently, the NY Times was there to witness today's events, and this news made Huffington Post's "front page"; an honor of sorts.
 "Tonight will be the final run, so let's do it right," publisher Roger Oglesby told the newsroom
"Seattle Post-Intelligencer To Go Online Only
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The P-I's roots date to 1863, when Seattle was still a frontier town and James Watson founded its precursor, the Seattle Gazette, as a four-page weekly.The newspaper changed hands, names and offices several times _ including when the 1889 great Seattle fire destroyed its office _ before newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst bought the P-I in 1921 through a representative. Hearst later revealed his ownership of the newspaper in an editorial, according to the P-I archives. "Every idea, every movement, every debate in Seattle's civic life was reflected on the front page of the paper," said Leonard Garfield, executive director of the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle. Some of the newspaper's more famous employees over the years included novelist Tom Robbins, columnist Emmett Watson and Frank Herbert, author of the science fiction novel "Dune." Former P-I columnist Susan Paynter, who retired in 2007 after 39 years at the newspaper, said the P-I pushed the envelope on stories, running early pieces on abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment. "The P-I was really on the forefront of telling the average person's story and why it mattered," Paynter said. Horsey, the cartoonist who won the newspaper's only two Pulitzer Prizes in 1999 and 2003, said much would be lost when the print product ceases publishing. 'A daily newspaper tells the stories of a community and lets the people of a city know who they are, who their neighbors are, and the life and issues they share," Horsey said. "When you lose any one newspaper, you lose a piece of that.'
[snip]..." Gordy and I were just talking about how we love the tactile and need to "feel" paper when we read. We can't wrap our minds around a Kindle II as a replacement for books and newspapers. We like our personal library, and we like to borrow from our public library. I know that there are advantages to being online only, or something to download onto an electronic device, even ecologically, but I won't let it go without much kicking and screaming along the way. It's sad to see that my grandkids will probably not have much memory of newspapers in "hard copy", especially Robyn who is a voracious reader like her Papa and me. She already proudly displays her library, it was one of the first things she showed us when we visited her -- atta girl! So, this is a sad day, and a portent of the future of paperless reading methinks. On the plus side, it will now have a broader audience opportunity, and trees will be saved, and ink won't be all over my hands and clothing and face when while reading.
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