Yet another one off the streets

The LA Times reports on what seems like an almost daily occurrence:

"The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, whose giant globe has been a fixture on the city's skyline for much of the newspaper's 146-year history, will print its last edition today and become the largest metropolitan daily to switch to an online-only publication.

The announcement was delivered Monday morning by Publisher Roger Oglesby to a shattered newsroom that -- in classic P-I style -- wiped back tears, broke out the whiskey and then went back to work.

"We knew it was coming," Oglesby said as he handed out copies of the statement from the Hearst Corp., which has published the P-I since 1921 and which lost $14 million on the paper last year. "Hearst fought for years to keep this place going. But time and these rotten economic conditions finally caught up with us."

The P-I's nearly 118,000 weekday subscribers are being switched automatically to the city's only remaining daily paper, the Seattle Times, which for 26 years has published under a joint operating agreement with the P-I.

The Times, with about 199,000 subscribers, is under so much financial duress it can hardly declare victory in one of the nation's most intense newspaper rivalries."

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