Bye Bye Seattle P-I, 10 years on

For much of the world March 17 is St. Patrick's Day. Around these parts it's the day, in 2009, of the last print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. This being the 10th anniversary of that sad day, it's worth pausing a moment to commemorate the event, even if via a blog post.

When the end finally came, it was almost anticlimactic. Even when we thought we'd won a reprieve in the ongoing JOA battle with the Times' ownership several years before, many were skeptical that we'd make it to retirement age with the P-I, such were the trends of the industry and the public and our own precarious position as the weaker partner in the arrangement. The trends worsened, the Great Recession arrived, and one January evening in the newsroom up popped a report from a local TV station that the P-I would close in 60 days if no buyer could be found.

Of course no buyer was found. Who would have wanted it? One of the striking aspects about the P-I's demise, in contrast to similar stories elsewhere, was that there wasn't the slightest hint of a rumor of a suggestion there might be an 11th-hour rescuer. There was a bit of initial shock, but even that was muted by the fact we'd seen other papers go down, and we'd been through years of uncertainty about the paper's future. So the 60-day clock began ticking, people began cleaning out desks, everyone tried to put out a newspaper as though nothing was wrong (although it's hard to invest much in a project when it might not make it to print) and we all tried to figure out a life plan with 150 journalists dumped on the market at one time in the middle of a recession. When the grim announcement came that we were done, we had one more day to get out a paper. Then we had to return to 101 Elliott Ave. West one more time to be officially laid off.

We've scattered to the winds; some have found new homes in journalism, others new careers. There are scattered pockets of P-I alums at Amazon, at Boeing, at the Fred Hutch, in government in Seattle and Olympia, at local non-profits and at tech-news site GeekWire (launched by two former P-Iers) ; until recently the two top editors and the columnist (me) at Seattle Business magazine were ex-P-Iers . Some journalism ventures sprung up from the ashes of the print P-I, including Art Thiel's and Steve Rudman's sportspressnw.com, Robert McClure's InvestigateWest, my own subscription-based newsletters (on manufacturing and railroads) and a bookstore. We count several people in the legal profession, as attorneys, paralegals or researchers. One went on to buy and run a bar.

Sadly, we've lost some from our ranks too, including a longtime poster to this site.

Whether anyone beyond our own small band will remember the P-I on March 17, 2029 is debatable. We all know of newspapers' diminished role in the cultural life and memory of their regions; when the P-I went under in print form, the community was preoccupied by a much bigger corporate calamity of just a few months prior, the failure of WaMu. And with the massive influx of newcomers drawn here by Amazon and the other tech companies, the percentage of the population that knew what the P-I was, much less actually read it, drops by the day. Eventually the only reminder will be the globe that still sits atop the building with the motto "It's In the P-I."

It was. And some of us still remember when we were too.