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So, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer has printed it's last print edition.

The newspaper world is full of angst.

Even Dave Workman, Gun 'Riter guy, has cautioned the gun community not to over-celebrate.

In today's auto-obituary to the Post-Intelligencer, I note this auspicious beginning to the paper's history:

In 1863, a disgruntled Horace Howe Jr. strode into the offices of the Overland Press in Olympia and plugged a bullet into editor Bion F. Kendall over a story whose details are now lost to history.

A little factoid that should be pasted on the wall of every editor's desk in the nation.

And one of the few P-I columnists whom I found consistently sensible, Business Analyst Bill Virgin, had this to say in his final:

It has become fashionable to attribute this industry's woes entirely to external forces including: the Internet and its components draining away advertisers and readers; those darn kids who won't pay for information and won't sit still for information that takes longer than five seconds to consume; and most recently a recession that has clobbered what few advertisers the industry still has.

To put all the blame, or even the bulk of it, on those factors is not only too convenient, but also downright deceptive. It obscures a long-standing truth about this business: American newspapers have been and continue to be, as a sector, the worst-run of any industry in this country.

The Internet may have helped weaken the precipice upon which the newspaper industry was standing, and the recession may have given it a helpful stomp to send us into the chasm. But it was the industry itself that walked out onto a ledge of crumbling shale and stood waiting for it to collapse.

If American newspapers want to look for the underlying source of their troubles, a mirror would be a good place to start -- and finish -- the search.

What sorts of mistakes did the industry make? Its reaction to the Internet is a mother lode. Instead of using the Internet as a complement to its print product, the industry went chasing after the Web and offering its most valuable property -- the news it so carefully and expensively gathered -- for free, while chasing the chimera that online advertising would support the whole thing.

The trend was no service to either readers or advertisers -- people read far more in print, and see more ads, than in an online version. The bandwidth for delivering material may be nearly infinite online, but readers' ability to absorb it isn't, and it gets even narrower online.

In the process, what newspapers did was devalue their brands and the heritage and legacies built into them, their core products and the value proposition that brought them readers and advertisers in the first place.

...

Those were hardly the only blunders made by the industry. The strategy of going after younger readers with pandering and condescending content managed to both drive away older, loyal readers, while also alienating younger demographics who understandably weren't buying what papers were selling. Newspapers treated conservatives with a mixture of revulsion, contempt, indifference and puzzlement, and there went another potentially loyal segment of the reading audience. {Emphasis added. DWD}

Those mistakes were compounded at the local level by missteps made by this newspaper. The emphasis on a Seattlecentric view of the world accomplished the task of bifurcating the market into two and then focusing on the smaller, slower-growing portion. The strategy also rendered the paper irrelevant to those who lived on this side of the lake but worked on the other, and vice versa.

...

In business there is a phenomenon known as the death spiral, in which the measures intended to rescue a company or industry not only fail to stem the losses, they actually accelerate the decline. In the case of newspapers, the loss of readers and advertisers led to cuts in content and features and greater irrelevancy, which led to more lost readers and advertisers, which led to still more cuts, which led to ...

Frankly, the biggest reason I kept the P-I for years was that the carried Tinsley's Mallard Fillmore; I suppose I could have dropped them when they started running it in only an electronic version, but I always hoped they'd bring it back in the dead tree edition.

Guess not.