R.I.P.

Some things are just wrong. One of those things is death, especially the death of an old friend.

The Hearst Corporation announced today that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer will publish its final edition tomorrow. After tomorrow, the name will refer to nothing more than a trimmed-down, on-line news site. As a long-time subscriber, I will suddenly find my subscription transferred to the P-I's traditional rival, the Seattle Times.

J. R. Watson founded the Seattle Gazette on December 10, 1863. Four years later, a new owner re-named the newspaper the Weekly Intelligencer, becoming the Daily Intelligencer in 1876.. In 1881, the Seattle Post and the Intelligencer merged, forming the Post-Intelligencer. California newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst bought the P-I in 1921.¹

For years, the P-I was Seattle's "liberal" newspaper, and the family owned Times was its more conservative, business-oriented rival. In recent years, as Seattle became an increasingly liberal city relative to the rest of the nation, both papers have become too liberal for the sort of people who consider "too liberal" an intelligible concept.

I began subscribing to the P-I when I started graduate school in Seattle. At that time, the P-I was the only morning paper (with an early edition that appeared on newstands the night before), and the Times came out in the afternoon. The P-I at that time taunted its rival with the slogan: "Read the P-I. Stay ahead of the Times." The P-I's masthead in those days, like the masthead of all the Hearst papers, contained a stylized eagle with wings extended across all eight columns, carrying a banner in its talons reading "America First."

I never had any illusions that the P-I was a great newspaper. It wasn't the New York Times or the Washington Post. For years, the Hearst papers were forced to carry a weekly publisher's message from William Randolph Hearst, Jr., an irritatingly provincial diatribe carried by a newspaper that itself was much more progressive. But for all the P-I's oddities and quirkiness, it was our paper, Seattle's paper, at a time when Seattle itself was perhaps an odder and quirkier place.

I'll miss living in a two newspaper town. I'll miss the P-I. May its inky soul rest in peace, and may whoever ends up with its revolving globe treat it with loving care. It represents another vanished facet of our city's history.

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¹The Hearst family began its newspaper empire with the purchase of the San Francisco Examiner in 1880. In the 1990's, the Hearst Corporation sold its flagship, the Examiner, so it could it buy the more profitable San Francisco Chronicle, without risk of violating anti-trust laws. The jettisoned Examiner has ended up as a free tabloid, and Hearst now appears to be on the brink of shutting down the recently unprofitable Chronicle. San Francisco, where the Hearst Empire began, will become the largest American city without a daily newspaper. Sic transit gloria mundi.