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: Injustice in Seattle

Is Seattle Now A One Newspaper Town?

By David Packman

Speculation as to when, not if, one of Seattle's two major newspapers would stop printing has abounded ever since the paper's owner, Hearst, announced that they would be shutting the paper down if no buyer was found by mid-March.

Tonight the newspaper's site, seattlepi.nwsource.com, which is hosted from the same domain as the other Seattle newspaper, The Seattle Times, redirected to a failover site with limited availability for a brief time as part of a split that put the Seattle PI in it's own www.seattlepi.com domain, which subsequently broke just about every link that anyone ever put up to an article that was published on the Seattle Post Intelligencer's site.

(I'm currently looking into fixing the links on this site, if possible, so bear with me if a link to any given story isn't working for a while. I just hope that these stories don't end up gone for good if the whole paper and site go down completely.)

Hopefully, instead of shutting down completely the Seattle PI will be going to an online-only format at least, even though that would mean that they likely won't have some of the really hard-hitting investigative pieces that Seattle desperately needs to read about... like police misconduct stories for example. (and yes, police officers have been gloating and cheering about the shutdown at the newspaper's site since the announcement was made) But it would be better than nothing as rumors are that the The Seattle Times may not survive through this year either, leaving Seattle a newspaperless town.

The sudden splitting of the domain tonight may be a sign that the paper's demise is imminent though... and if so the temporary domain left up during the switch was an unintentionally prescient "http://disaster.seattlepi.nwsource.com".

Full post as published by Injustice in Seattle on March 16, 2009 (boomark / email).