See disclosures at bottom of story.
Nearly 13 years after New York-based Hearst Corp. made the Seattle Post-Intelligencer the country’s first major metro daily newspaper to go online-only, seattlepi.com will revamp its staff and put a new emphasis on email newsletters.
Hearst says it will continue to publish the website, while implementing “a newsletter strategy that complements seattlepi.com and takes advantage of original reporting and curates the most important information for Seattleites.”
The company is hiring a new city editor to lead the initiative, seeking someone to “develop and write a daily newsletter that delivers sharp, insightful and useful news to the Seattle community, building on the strong journalistic legacy of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper.”
The move follows a steady decline in the size of the seattlepi.com news team in recent years, through job cuts, departures, and promotions within Hearst. The editorial staff now numbers two people, down from about 20 people a decade ago, according to current and archived versions of its staff page.
Publishers sometimes use newsletters to operate with minimal staff, by aggregating and linking to work by others. However, Hearst describes the move as a growth strategy, not a cost-cutting measure. Seattlepi.com’s revamped team is expected to be comparable to its size last year, which ranged from three to five people.
“The P-I is hiring staff, including a city editor, who will lead a small team of entrepreneurial and ambitious journalists to drive this next phase of the brand, gaining insights from product, business intelligence and editorial leadership across Hearst’s newspapers,” a Hearst spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
Hearst said it “continues to invest in new ways to serve its readers in Seattle.” Asked to square that statement with the 90% reduction in staff over the past 10 years, the Hearst spokesman cited larger trends in local media.
“Over the last 5 years we have consistently attracted over 1M readers to our website each month, while navigating a very disruptive period to local media,” the spokesperson said, adding that Hearst has “every intent of investing further.”
That current audience of more than 1 million readers a month compares with 4 million monthly readers in 2012, according to a press release at the time marking the three-year anniversary of online-only publication.
Seattlepi.com is far from alone in experiencing this trend. The rise of local blogs, social media, and now newsletters have chipped away at the audience for major news sites over the past decade.
The site’s decline in employment also generally follows broader industry trends, although it’s more pronounced than average. For example, newsroom employment at U.S. newspapers fell 45% between 2010 and 2020, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
From hard news to lighter fare
One former seattlepi.com staffer, who recently left her role as a web producer for a job in nonprofit communications, expressed skepticism about Hearst’s long-term commitment, based on her experience.
Callie Craighead was part of a team of eight people when she started as a seattlepi.com editorial assistant in January 2020, her first journalism job after graduating from Seattle University. At that size, Craighead said, she felt the newsroom was able to produce strong original content, with staffers able to specialize in different coverage areas.
But over time, she said, boosting web traffic seemed to become an overriding focus for the company, even as positions weren’t backfilled when people left.
About 85 local news, lifestyle and weather stories were published on seattlepi.com last month, December 2021, leaning toward topics of broad interest such as schools, local elections, regional travel, real estate, holiday light displays, unclaimed lottery winnings, and used vehicle prices, according to GeekWire’s review of an online database of seattlepi.com articles maintained by the Seattle Public Library.
Another 45 articles were published under the “shopping” category, featuring discounted products, news about concert tickets, and tips for where to watch Seahawks games.
By comparison, five years earlier, in December 2016, the site published more than 170 local news articles alone, with a noticeably heavier focus on crime and government news, including an in-depth piece on the mental health crisis in Washington state’s county jails.
Seattlepi.com’s team of 10 at the time included several staffers who worked previously for the print Seattle P-I newspaper, none of whom are still there.
“I don’t think it’s the fault of any of the journalists on staff,” Craighead said of the overall changes in content, explaining that the reporters on the front lines are trying to make the best of the direction they receive from above.
Crowded market for newsletters
Hearst and seattlepi.com will face no shortage of competition in the market for local daily email newsletters. It’s a trend in media across the country, driven in part by the rise of Substack, Mailchimp and other tech platforms for creating and distributing newsletters to loyal audiences.
Current examples in the Seattle region include:
- The Evergrey from Florida-based WhereBy.Us, a Seattle newsletter originally co-founded by SeattlePI.com alum Mónica Guzmán;
- SEAToday from South Carolina-based 6AM City, whose executive team includes former Puget Sound Business Journal Publisher Emily Parkhurst;
- And coming soon: Axios Local. Seattle is on the 2022 expansion list for the local news initiative from Virginia-based newsletter publisher Axios, known for its “smart brevity.”
That’s in addition to newsletters published by established general-interest news organizations, including The Stranger, KUOW, Crosscut, and the Seattle Times, the city’s remaining daily newspaper.
In some ways, daily newsletters are a throwback to the regular cadence of newspaper delivery, said Guzmán, who left WhereBy.Us in 2020 and has written a soon-to-be-published book on bridging the nation’s political and cultural divides.
“Newsletters have really taken off for the same reason that newspapers used to be so popular, which is that they come in at a routine time, and you can build a habit,” Guzmán said. “At a time when we’re inundated with information, that’s more appealing than we used to give it credit for.”
Overall advertising impressions for a local newsletter generally won’t rival the millions of pageviews received by a regional news website. However, sponsored newsletter content often gets more attention and engagement per reader, Guzmán said, because it’s aligned with the rest of the content in the newsletter.
A newsletter’s role as a “trusted filter” is another benefit, said journalism veteran Hanson Hosein, president of HRH Media, who co-founded the University of Washington’s Communication Leadership graduate program.
Modern news consumers are expecting “a certain amount of narrative editorializing, or something sharper in the content” than a traditional newspaper article, Hosein said. Thinly staffed local news organizations can “camouflage the lack of reporting resources,” if they have a sharp voice, he said.
“You can camouflage the lack of reporting resources, if you have a sharp voice.”
Hanson Hosein
Newsletters are a “really economical model for much smaller organizations,” Guzmán agreed. “To publish a newsletter just doesn’t take a lot in terms of resources. And you can do it very successfully at a big scale, so long as you have some loyalty.”
Editorial and business leaders at Hearst’s SFGate have played key roles in seattlepi.com’s operations in recent years. However, the new seattlepi.com city editor position will not be based outside the Seattle region, Hearst executive Bridget Williams said on Twitter, correcting a mistake in the initial job post.
Several other Hearst sites are also expanding newsletter efforts, the company says.
The Seattle P-I newspaper employed about 160 people before the final print edition on March 17, 2009. The newspaper was run under a joint operating agreement with the Seattle Times in which the larger paper handled advertising, printing and other business operations for both newspapers.
The iconic P-I globe, which became an official city landmark in 2015, still sits atop the newspaper’s former headquarters at 101 Elliott Ave. W on the Seattle waterfront, where it moved in 1986. In the years following the end of the print edition, Seattlepi.com moved out of the building to a nearby office, but it has vacated that space during the pandemic, and the newsroom is expected to remain virtual.
Despite the smaller size of seattlepi.com, Hosein said, Hearst’s ability to maintain the seattlepi.com news operation is a better outcome for the region than if it were to go away, given cutbacks on editorial staffing in recent years at The Stranger, Seattle Weekly and other local news operations.
“Even if this is a drop in the bucket, it’s still helpful,” Hosein said, “and they might give us perspective that we don’t otherwise have.”
Disclosures: GeekWire co-founders Todd Bishop and John Cook were business and tech reporters at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and pitched Hearst on an early version of the business plan that later became GeekWire. They left the P-I prior to the announcement by Hearst that it planned to end print publication. Several GeekWire staffers and contributors, and many friends and colleagues, worked for the P-I and seattlepi.com.
