Nieman Foundation at Harvard
HOME
          
LATEST STORY
The Society of Professional Journalists faces a “dire situation”
ABOUT                    SUBSCRIBE
March 28, 2012, 1:01 p.m.
LINK: crosscut.com  ➚   |   Posted by: Joshua Benton   |   March 28, 2012

Crosscut’s Hugo Kagiya takes a look at one of the first newspaper casualties of the financial crisis, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which shut down print and went online-only in 2009, albeit with a sharply reduced staff. Three years in, Kagiya says, it’s further diminished.

“The name survived,” Murakami said. “The brand is more than the name. You can put Mountain Dew in Coke cans but it doesn’t take long to realize it’s no longer Coke. The brand died the day we shut down and when the staff that did the work that made the P-I the P-I were shown the door. Today, the P-I’s spirit is alive more in InvestigateWest than in SeattlePI.com.”

Show tags
 
Join the 60,000 who get the freshest future-of-journalism news in our daily email.
The Society of Professional Journalists faces a “dire situation”
“If we don’t change our thinking, the next incoming president will be the last president.”
Four disabled journalists on how news outlets can support staffers and audience members with disabilities
“The tools that journalists are given [should be] accessible — and designed with people like me in an advisory role.”
Press freedom means controlling the language of AI
Generative AI systems act like “stochastic parrots,” using statistical models to guess word orders and pixel placements. That’s incompatible with a free press that commands its own words.