Seattle's oldest newspaper to go online-only Tuesday

SAN FRANCISCO, March 16 (Chinese media) -- Seattle Post-Intelligencer (P-I), the longest-publishing newspaper in the northwest U.S. city, will publish the last print edition Tuesday and become an online-only news operation, its owner Hearst Corp. has announced.

The P-I will "become the nation's largest daily newspaper to shift to an entirely digital news product," Hearst said in a statement released on Monday.

The P-I's history can be traced back to 1863. It was bought by Hearst in 1921 and eventually emerged as one of Seattle's two surviving daily newspapers, along with The Seattle Times.

On January 9, Hearst put the money-losing P-I for sale and said the newspaper would stop printing if no buyers were found within 60 days.

As no buyers emerged, Hearst decided to stop publishing the newspaper which has more than 117,600 weekday readers, and to move it to an all-digital news model.

While making the announcement, senior executives at Hearst vowed to turn seattlepi.com, website of the newspaper, into a leading news and information portal in the Seattle region.

"Seattlepi.com isn't a newspaper online -- it's an effort to craft a new type of digital business with a robust, community news and information Web site at its core," Steven Swartz, president of Hearst Newspapers, said in the statement.

"The Web is first and foremost a community platform, so we'll be featuring new columns from prominent Seattle residents; more than 150 reader blogs, community data bases and photo galleries. We'll also be linking to the great work of other Web sites and blogs in the community," He added.

According to a report posted on Seattlepi.com, P-I editor and published Roger Oglesby emotionally addressed the newspaper's staff in the newsroom Monday morning.

"Tonight we'll be putting the paper to bed for the last time. But the bloodline will live on," Oglesby said.

"Hearst fought for years to keep this place going, but time and these rotten economic conditions finally caught up with us," he noted.

In an e-mailed letter released by Seattlepi.com, Frank Blethen, publisher of The Seattle Times, said that although his newspaper and the P-I have been fiercely competitive, "we find no joy in the loss of any journalistic voice."

"Today's announcement is an acknowledgment that in the current economy it is a struggle for even a single newspaper to be profitable and impossible for multiple papers in a single market," he said.

The P-I is the second U.S. daily newspaper to shut down in 2009as big newspapers across the country are rocked by severe financial problems.

The Rocky Mountain News, the oldest newspaper in the U.S. state of Colorado, shut down in February after publisher E.W. Scripps Co. failed to find a buyer.