And another one down..

Good-bye, Seattle Post-Intelligencer. On the heels of the Rocky Mountain News’ demise, comes the end of the P-I as it’s been known for nearly 150 years. At least the newspaper is not completely history; they’re still operating as an online publication. That’s a lot more than a lot of now-extinct newspapers are able to do these days.

Here’s an interesting article on the P-I’s history: “The Pioneering P-I Slips into the Past.” It’s an interesting read, an obituary to an institution that couldn’t survive the downturn in the economy. I particularly liked this part of the article: “The print newspaper is going away and with it, its varied afterlife. You can’t sop up your basement with your computer, or wrap a fish. And what is the paper mache — that miracle sculpting media that must have launched a million budding elementary school artists — without newspaper?”  (Editorial note here: it is definitely possible to use too many paste-drenched strips of newspapers when making a pinata. Just so you know.)

Nothing is quite like the smell of ink on newsprint, is it? But of course, we news junkies know that it’s more than just the physical paper it’s printed on that makes a newspaper a newspaper. It’s the editorial judgment that places the stories on the page, that allots a certain number of inches of the newshole to this story or that, that runs a particular photograph.

But still, I’ll take online newspapers over no newspapers any day.