A new wave in Seattle's newspaper war?
By Bill Richards
December 06, 2009
Less than a year after folding the print version of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and all but abandoning the competition for the local newspaper market, Hearst now is now planning to re-enter the fray. In an email to Crosscut today, Hearst spokesman Paul Luthringer said the New York-based media conglomerate will include its Seattle-pi.com website on its newly named Skiff media service.
In response to Crosscut's query about the online P-I's future Luthringer said: "It is expected that Hearst's newspapers and magazines will be available on the Skiff platform as well as other platforms," including smart phones and web books. Hearst currently owns 15 daily newspapers including the San Francisco Chronicle, the Houston Chronicle, and the Albany Times Union. It folded the print P-I last March 17, saying the paper was losing money. Since then, Hearst has operated the online P-I website as a sort of digital holding action while it completed development of Skiff, which was formerly named FirstPaper.
Hearst's announcement of Skiff on Friday did not draw much initial coverage locally. The Seattle Times carried the news in a roundup of business news and the online P-I offered only slightly more news, drawn mainly from Hearst public relations release.
In that release Hearst said it had partnered with Sprint for 3G connectivity and would initially be selling the reader and its accompanying news service through Sprint's retail outlets. No date was set for launching either the reader or the news package, but Hearst did say that unlike Amazon's Kindle its device will allow subscribing publications to tailor their own advertising, presumably letting them collect at least two new revenue streams from subscribers and readers.
That would once again put the e-reader-based P-I into head-to-head competition with the Seattle Times, which currently sells ads for both its print and Web-based news sites but has not announced any plans to offer news on an e-reader. So far, Times executives have said only that they are hoping to see the paper's declining circulation rebound as Seattle's economy bounces back.
Comments:
Comment by Lytton, posted Mon, Dec 7, 9:17 a.m.
Hearst Newspapers development of this new digital news delivery platform might have meant more to the Seattle market when it had the full muscle of staff of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer behind it. Granted the plucky, but very small, staff of Seattlepi.com is keeping it's head above water on the headline and crime news of the city, but it seems to be a stretch to charactize the possible competition with the Times as head-to-head. In the new world order there seem to be two different types of news organizations: Those who create orginal content themselves and those who aggregate content from other sources hoping to get enough of a hit count as readers pass on through their site to sell an ad. In the end, orginal content holds readers longer.
Comment by bigyaz, posted Mon, Dec 7, 10:03 a.m.
The Times "...but has not announced any plans to offer news on an e-reader."
Seattle Times news is currently available on the Kindle. And the Times has an iPhone application as well (not strictly an e-reader, of course, but many people are using it as one).
Comment by richards, posted Mon, Dec 7, 11:22 a.m.
Thanks for pointing that out Yaz. A stripped-down version of the Seattle Times is available on Kindle for $5.99/month. No pictures or graphics though, and perhaps most important for the Times, no ads, so no ad revenue. Plus some accounts say Amazon skims as much as 70% of the Kindle news revenue off the top, so not much is going to the Times. Hearst says Skiff will have pictures, graphics, and publishers will be able to "shape publication design" and run ads. Who knows what that means, but it sounds like hearst plans to compete hard for the local ad market.
Comment by animalal, posted Tue, Dec 15, 4:47 p.m.
Party like it 2009 and readers should never pay for content. Drudge, Lucianne, Malkin, Red State, et al cover the right. Lefties have the local weeklies, Puffington, Politico, and TV/radio websites. Crosscut plays the happy medium middle. Life is good.