Seattle P-I | I woke up this morning, made the coffee and walked out to get the P-I. As I began reading the headlines, I started thinking and moping about its presumed demise. Bad enough that it merged local with national news and business with sports. But in a month, we will most likely have lost it all together.
When my wife and I moved to Seattle in 1983, we rented an apartment in Wallingford that looked across Lake Union to the revolving globe of the P-I. Later on, we moved and so did the P-I, but we still depended on it and respected it for our news. Not that we agreed always with the P-I or the P-I agreed with us. Indeed, the P-I endorsed my opponent in my unsuccessful run for the Legislature last year.
But now we feel, as do thousands of P-I readers, like sitting ducks, just waiting for the next and final bullet. That’s how a lot of us feel in this great recession: helpless against the larger forces of economic catastrophe. We are unsure of our jobs, our mortgages, our credit card balances, our health coverage, our kids’ college tuition. Our economy is like an out-of-control gyroscope, swinging further and further out of balance. The demise of the P-I would be the symbolic coup-de-grace for this era of hopelessness and fear.
So what’s happened to us here in the Northwest, the home of public power, Puget Consumers Cooperative, Group Health Cooperative, Recreational Equipment and credit unions like Boeing Employees and the Washington State Employees Credit Union? Have we lost our mo-jo to figure out how to make things work? Are we really just going to passively accept the demise of our oldest and most knowledgeable source for real news, allowing the Hearst Corp. to shut it down without a fight?
We don’t have to take this.
Filed under: state economy, community, democracy, washington state
