A Digital P-I , or None at All?

Personally, I'd like to see the PI survive in some form. If it's gotta be online only, so be it. Arguably, they've done a pretty good job with the online news delivery; certainly better than The Times. Granted, at first, they'd be mostly an aggregator, or at most, a large blog covering many subjects and not actually doing original reporting, but it'd be better than nothing until someone figures out a business model for online news delivery that makes money.

Otherwise, we're going to be left with The Times (a terrible newspaper in all respects) setting the tone for news coverage in the city. Finally, one day, we'll just have a ton of kids all thinking that the echo-chamber shouts of a million bloggers who all read the same aggregators pulling from the few sources with limited resources themselves to really dig out the news left to grab from anymore is an acceptable situation. I said as much, albeit more coherently, in a blog post myself. Ironic, isn't it?

The CSM doesn't go online-only until April. Hard to know whether that business model is sustainable with its current content offering regardless of its international status.

Agreed w/ ASM on one point though, there's no way the P-I will be able to retain its best writers as an online-only enterprise. Guys like Art Theil won't stand for being glorified bloggers (with apologies to present company).

Well, that's how I envision an online-only P-I: an aggregator with opinions. To be an actual news source is expensive. You need salaried professionals who don't necessarily have daily or even weekly deadlines, and enough of them so that you're publishing news every day, because if you're not no one's listening when you finally come around with a story. Television news, in 40 some years, hasn't figured out a way to do that (IMO) so I'm not sure why it would suddenly be possible with a web-scaled budget.

There are really only 2 things that a local paper are good for (well, 3 if you count the comics).

1) Local sports reporting. There are other venues to get a handle on the M's but I do like to kill a tree or 2 to read about their exploits

2) Local city/county news/opinion. Somehow, it seems neither paper seems to grasp this is actually a useful function they could fulfill. I'm much more likely to understand City Council issue from reading the Stranger than I am from either the Times or the PI.

So when you add it up, I'm sorry to say it doesn't amount to much. And this from a guy who doesn't go to work in the morning until he's read the NY Times and a local paper in hard format.

Ah, that's unfair, Dan. Crosscut isn't a real news source. They are an aggregator with opinions. I do subscribe to the dead-tree version of the P-I, but it's more out of habit and hoping to keep them going. I read it just as much online, just differently. If they developed an app for my iPhone that made it easier to skim/read top stories and such, I'd probably even pay real money for it.

As a digital only paper, the P-I won't retain the best of its journalists or its reputation, so it will lose readers and advertisers, in either order. It can't stay alive without a high volume, long time readership. And god knows how many advertisers are already jumping ship.

The Christian Science Monitor is an international newspaper. Big difference.

I'm not particularly excited by the idea of a web-only P-I, I don't think, even though I very rarely read it in dead tree form as things stand. Do we really need two Crosscuts?