Results tagged “hearst”

You know that Real Age test? Maybe not, if you're under 30 and don't give a rat's ass. But plenty of older folk take the damn thing, which ends with a promise to shave years off your age if you join RealAge.com. After all, the spokesman, Dr. Mehmet Oz, is on Oprah, for Christ sake. Well, it turns out (according to an article in the NYTimes), that RealAge.com sells your private information to pharma marketers, who then try to sell you shit that promises to make you feel younger. And who owns RealAge.com? Hearst Magazines, that's who. They bought the site for $60 to $70 million in 2007, according to the Times. And, yeah, they also own O, the Oprah Magazine. So let's stop shedding tears for the local fish-wrapper, shall we? The suits know perfectly well how to play the internet game, and whatever they're doing over at seattlepi.com isn't some half-assed online experiment. These guys are pros.

"out of paper" by Kurt Schlosser, from the Seattlest Flickr pool

It probably means something that we just heard about the last print day of the P-I on Twitter. Publisher Roger Oglesby just made the announcement on behalf of will-they-won't-they Hearst corporate. Over the weekend, the P-I's web address simplified itself to seattlepi.com, and the word is, the online-only version is a go. The P-I is dead, long live the P-I! [UPDATE: P-I Executive Producer Michelle Nicolosi expounds on plans for the online-only version.]

• Jobs are difficult to find, but not so scarce that P-I staffers aren't feeling free to turn down Hearst's online operations job offers. "Bottom line: An online-only P-I is not a done deal. At least not yet," says Publicola's Sandeep Kaushik.
• Southlake reports on a man shot in the butt, and Queen Anne View has a kickass firefighter who won a stair-climbing competition.
• Over at Schmudget (caution: policy wonkstrosity ahead), they're talking about sub-prime lending in Washington state all week long. Today, their angle has to do with the depressing racial disparity in the mortgage market. Best of all, the post includes an infographic!

Oh, snap! According to...well, the P-I...the P-I could be going online-only--a lucky few on staff have even received new "provisional" job offers.

The same day the CityClub of Seattle was holding--and tweeting--its panel discussion "The Newspaper Business: Sunset or a New Dawn?" strange things were happening. The P-I linked directly to a story on the West Seattle Blog. KIRO 7 TV started filing stories on Twitter, following KING 5's lead, though KING 5 was using its Twitter feed today to promote its new Facebook page. News is suddenly everywhere. At the panel, tears were still being shed over Craigslist stealing all those classified ad dollars back in the late '90s--right about the time that everyone in the U.S. was reading Who Moved My Cheese? Ten years later, major newspaper chains are still at the mercy of a cramped, ugly, lo-fi site started by some guy in San Francisco. Hearst thinks the P-I is a money-loser; from where we're sitting, the guys who've been losing billions are in the corporate suites, paying themselves top dollar while they redesign the buggy whip paper to make it more attractive to younger readers.

Everyone says the Post-Intelligencer is going "all electronic," but that's manifestly untrue. If there were a secret plan to turn the venerable Hearst paper into a digital flagship, don't you think, maybe, they'd be printing banner headlines every goddamn day saying "It's in the P-I...and it's still going to be in the P-I, online"? They've got 30-odd days to convert their 200,000 or so remaining print readers into online readers, and every day they don't scream "Read it online" is a day lost. No, the only conclusion is that Hearst just don't know what they're doing. Seattlepi.com serves about 4 million unique visitors and 45 million page views each month. But those are electrons, not dead trees. Don Smith, who carries the bizarre title "Interactivity Director," must be tearing his hair out. Doomed.

Crosscut's Bill Richards has the story on Hearst's signal of disinterest: "Hearst Corp. said today that it won’t make a final $1 million payment to the Times’ majority owners, the Blethen family, for the right to bid first for the Blethens’ 50.5 percent stake in the company." Hearst also said that if they turn P-I into a pixel-only publication, they would do so outside the warm bosom of the JOA. But they haven't decided yet. "What's the big rush? Stop pestering us!" Meanwhile, the Seattle Times is in "survival mode," reports the Stranger--they're asking the unions for 12 percent payroll cuts. This is grim news indeed for Stranger staffers who were hoping to sell out and snag a cushy MSM job one day.

Probably the first question P-I staffers need to ask themselves is, How badly do they want it?

As the minutes tick past, that blurb keeps getting updated. Now, it's a full story, complete with quotes from Swartz: "One thing is clear: at the end of the sale process, we do not see ourselves publishing in print."