by Alex Stonehill

Created on: January 22, 2009

2009 promises to be another tough year for the journalism industry, and it looks like it's our turn to take a beating here in Seattle. The imminent closure of the Seattle Post Intelligencer, the city's oldest and second largest newspaper was announced last week, just a few months after the second round of major staff cutbacks in 2008 went down at our other major newspaper, the Seattle Times.

With the country sliding into a massive recession, two major foreign wars raging, federal investigators uncovering a series of juicy political scandals, and our first black President entering office, all on the tail of an exciting local weather emergency, it's hard to imagine the newspaper industry is having trouble finding news people want to read.

So what's the problem? Industry insiders blame the internet for all of newspapers' woes. But it's a bit more complicated than that.

Here's my basic take on what really happened: As control of papers and other news sources were consolidated and corporatized over the last decade, decision making was wrested away from editors and publishers who actually know and care about journalism, and into the hands of businessmen and boards of directors who brought the wisdom of the business world to newspapers and promptly ran them into the ground.

At the first hint of internet-induced financial trouble, they started cutting costs, and the first thing they cut was enterprise
reporting' investigative beats and international bureaus that are the darlings of old school, prestige-oriented newspapermen, but that business school economics tells us are products with very elastic demand.

News consumers won't miss investigative reports into corruption in local government or coverage of important events taking place on the other side of the globe, the logic goes, because if the paper doesn't
cover it, it won't make it onto readers' radar at all. Better to focus on coverage of local sports and weather things that readers care about because they're happening right outside their windows and that is cheap to produce.

The trouble with that logic is that it's in coverage of these local events that newspapers face their biggest competition from the
internet. Anyone can live-blog from a local sporting event or repost forecasts from the national weather service, so why would news consumers wait until tomorrow's paper comes out to read about things they can find out about online as they happen?

Web 2.0 has universalized the means to distribute information that is easily

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