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Key links:
Primary website:
seattlepi.com
Primary Twitter:
@seattlepi

Editor’s Note: Encyclo has not been regularly updated since August 2014, so information posted here is likely to be out of date and may be no longer accurate. It’s best used as a snapshot of the media landscape at that point in time.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is an online news organization and former newspaper based in Seattle.

The P-I is the first major daily newspaper in the United States to become an online-only news outlet.

The P-I was founded in 1863 and has been owned by Hearst Corp. since William Randolph Hearst bought the paper in 1921.

It was kept afloat largely by a joint operating agreement formed in 1983 with the Seattle Times, an arrangement that the Times fought for years to leave.

After losing money each year since 2000$14 million in 2008 — Hearst put the paper up for sale in January 2009, then stopped printing the paper and went online-only in March 2009, cutting its editorial staff from 165 to about 20, with another 11 in advertising.

Though the P-I was a smaller newspaper than the Times, its web traffic before the online shift was comparable to the Times’. A year after the P-I went online, its traffic was holding steady, though the organization was not yet profitable.

The P-I hosts a network of more than 200 local blogs, both staff-written and reader-contributed. It has also focused more on local aggregation than strictly original reporting as an attempt to be “Seattle’s home page.”

The P-I has an arrangement with several of Hearst’s lifestyle magazines to provide features content for the site.

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Primary author: Mark Coddington. Main text last updated: May 11, 2011.
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