As part of the State Library’s participation in the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) we’ve been researching Washington’s historic newspapers. In the process we  take a chronological snapshot of the life of a paper. It is a bit like doing genealogy work. For instance, we track when the paper was born, if it changed names, if it was sold or merged with another paper, and when it died – so to speak.

Seattle’s Post-Intelligencer. As seen from Olympic Sculpture Park, Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA. Photographed by afagen. Available on Flickr.com. Used under the Creative Commons license.

When the Washington State Library received news about the Seattle Post-Itelligencer’s demise – er, sale, like most other subscribers, we heard about it on the news and read about it in the PI. Besides the discussion it bears of newspapers and their business models today, it’s an interesting look at how a news organization breaks news about itself.  Over at Time.com, PI reporters become the interviewees and talk about the slim chance of the paper’s sale. They’ve begun to write their paper’s obituary.

A similar situation is happening with other newspapers around the US. Another NDNP colleague took note of the Detroit Free Press news and asked if this was the “middle of the end” of newspapers? Perhaps so, in their current format anyway. As someone who works to digitize and make accessible the pages of historic newspapers, I’m not surprised when I hear people express a desire to get information online and to be able to do research across various titles and media. Aside from the format or delivery, people still want well written, fact-checked, fast and professional information.

This isn’t the first time Seattle has lost a major newspaper. It’s been over 60 years so many people may not know that before there were two main papers, the Seattle Times and the Post-Intelligencer, Seattle had three major newspapers. The Seattle Star was considered one of the three big papers in Seattle until 1947, when its battle to be profitable ended.

Next time you visit your local research library, look at the drawers of microfilm (yes microfilm still exists and continues to be created – for now anyway) bearing the names of newspapers of the past. It speaks volumes about the history of newspapers and bears witness that while newspapers come and go, their importance lives on…

Tags: newspapers

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