March 2009
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer (P-I) has announced its transition to digital, become America’s largest daily newspaper to make a complete move to the Internet.
This announcement comes after the failed sale of the P-I and its interest in the Joint Operating Agreement (JOA) under which the P-I and The Seattle Times are published.
“The P-I has a rich 146-year history of service to the people of the Northwest, which makes the decision to stop publishing the newspaper an extraordinarily difficult one,” said Frank A. Bennack, Jr., vice chairman and CEO, Hearst Corporation.
“We extend our profound gratitude and admiration to our P-Icolleagues who have done such an exemplary job under extremely difficult circumstances over the past several years. Our goal now is to turn seattlepi.com into the leading news and information portal in the region.”
“Seattlepi.com isn't a newspaper online—it’s an effort to craft a new type of digital business with a robust, community news and information Web site at its core,” said Steven R. Swartz, president of Hearst Newspapers.
“It will feature the breaking news reporting of Chris Grygiel and others covering City Hall; Levi Pulkkinen reporting on the court system; popular staff blogs like Seattle 911 with Casey McNerthney and the Big Blog by Monica Guzman; columnists like Joel Connelly, Art Thiel and Jim Moore; and of course, the cartooning and commentary of two-time Pulitzer Prize winner David Horsey. The Web is first and foremost a community platform, so we'll be featuring new columns from prominent Seattle residents; more than 150 reader blogs, community data bases and photo galleries. We'll also be linking to the great work of other Web sites and blogs in the community."
“On the business side, we are assembling a staff to form a local digital agency that will sell local businesses advertising on seattlepi.com as well as the digital advertising products of our partners: Yahoo! for display advertising, Kaango for general marketplaces and Google, Yahoo!, MSN and Ask.com for search engine marketing,” Swartz said.
“The site will also feature a digital yellow pages directory powered by Hearst's yellow pages unit, White Directory Publishers.”
Seattlepi.com will be led editorially by Michelle Nicolosi, executive producer, who has headed the site since 2005. Nicolosi was previously an investigative reporter at theSeattle P-I. She was also previously the editor of Online Journalism Review (www.ojr.org) and taught journalism at the University of Southern California. Prior to that, Nicolosi was a reporter at the Orange County Register, where she was a lead reporter on the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fertility Fraud series.
In January, Nielsen ranked Seattlepi.com among the top 30 newspaper websites with 1.8 million unique users. The site has an average of 4 million unique monthly visitors, according to internal Hearst tracking.
The P-I was founded in 1863 as the Seattle Gazette.
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