Post Intelligencer Death Watch

We enjoyed reading Eli Sanders' piece in The Stranger this week about the imminent death of the Post Intelligencer and how he's personally all for it and everything, but for the record we personally aren't. We've said as much every time a few JOA tidbits leak out to the public (which is infrequently) and we'll say it again now. We would prefer if there was a little more ideological space between the Times and the P-I, sure, but we'll take the two squabbling siblings over one big daddy paper any day.

For us it's a numbers game, though. The more journalists, reporters, editors, proofreaders, fact checkers, press release cut-and-pasters,etc there are in the city the better for all of us. We'd like to know how many reporters there are here per resident and we guarantee it isn't currently enough. Twenty thousand to one? Forty thousand to one? Those are just wild guesses but we think that's probably somewhere close and it doesn't sound like nearly enough already. Can we afford to lose the P-I, then, and roughly double our citizen-to-reporter ratio?

It's like the monkeys and typewriters thing. Sit enough monkeys down in front of the city newsrooms' keyboards and sooner or later they're going to produce Shakespeare, or at least uncover an impropriety or two. The more monkeys you have the more news you'll get - We think that's pretty clear. These have to be full-time, dedicated reporter monkeys, though. Part-time monkeys are a supplement. Yeah, the massing blogger brigade represents a hell of a lot of part-time monkeys, but we're never going to completely replace the paid, full-time pros. Good journalism doesn't come for free. Actually, not even bad journalism comes for free.