Subscribers to the print version (formerly termed “a newspaper”) of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer learned on Monday that they now need to go online to get their news: the P-I is gone. Belly up. Folded (no pun intended, although the Czar thinks this could be a good one).

This affects about 117,600 subcribers. Although the online version will remain, some folks wonder how long that will last, too. After all, if paying the bills is hard enough now, how will a website do it? Charge readers? Good luck with that.

And in 2008, Detroit Free Press and The Detroit News both severely curtailed publication of their papers. The papers no longer deliver on Mondays through Wednesdays, and Saturdays are gone as well. Smaller versions are still available on newsstands every day of the week.

That sounds like really bad news, but check out how this marketing spin makes the collapse of home delivery sound like the slickest idea ever to win respect.

The Czar expects to see more of this. Circulation at almost every paper is down, and the cause is not the internet, nor USA Today, nor the cable news networks… it is, apparently, that pesky Do Not Call registry. Seems like interrupting dinners and waking small children at 8:59 each night is the best way to sell papers.

The Czar is not so certain of that. The two problems really are the three listed earlier:

• The internet has been just awful to the printed news. Why wait until tomorrow, and pay 50 cents, when you can read the latest news for free? A newsman once complained to an audience that this will prove to be disastrous: the internet does not charge its readers, and therefore the good writers will not write the stories worth reading. Free news is crap. Good news is worth paying for. The Czar thinks this is hogwash: most of your news stories are completely rebranded Associated Press releases anyway. By the time you cut out the nonsense from the news, you are left with either good news (hence the smaller versions appearing in newsstands) or editorials. Editorials? You have the Gormogons for that.
• USA Today. Yep, the dumbing down of news was a necessity to keep the early issues of USA Today down to a size smaller than a carpet sample book. That was a drastic but necessary step to avoid a $60 a day newspaper. Know what Gannett found? It is vastly cheaper to produce a week of USA Todays than a single daily major metropolitan newspaper. So did the major newspapers slash costs accordingly? No, they tried to maximize profits by cutting the news down, the writers out, and the quality away. USA did not do a bad thing: every other newspaper did.
• 24 hour cable news! Sigh. My, how we can stretch a five minute event into three hours of breaking news. But let us be honest, here, among friends: when you hear about the huge expressway crash, or the Congressional fist fight, or the celebrity drunk driving fatality, do you wait for tomorrow’s paper, or do you flip on the television and catch them restarting the same segement? You know what you do; it’s all right, you can admit it. Why does this matter? Because when the morning paper arrives, you already know the salient facts; you have already endured the exposition, context-setting, and analysis by people you don’t know.

Those are all good reasons for not paying for a newspaper. Is there another reason for failure?

Yes, and it is a clever one. Know why the newspapers are quick to declare Chapter 11 and switch to online versions?

You guess it. Websites are run by non-union IT guys. Chapter 11 allows you, in many cases, to walk away from union contracts. The greed of the unions is killing the newsprint industry in another bass-ackward move to cut off its nose to spite the face. You can some of the details here. You can already guess what they are.

The Czar of Muscovy

Божію Поспѣшествующею Милостію Мы, Дима Грозный Императоръ и Самодержецъ Всероссiйскiй, цѣсарь Московскiй. The Czar was born in the steppes of Russia in 1267, and was cheated out of total control of all Russia upon the death of Boris Mikhailovich, who replaced Alexander Yaroslav Nevsky in 1263. However, in 1283, our Czar was passed over due to a clerical error and the rule of all Russia went to his second cousin Daniil (Даниил Александрович), whom Czar still resents. As a half-hearted apology, the Czar was awarded control over Muscovy, inconveniently located 5,000 miles away just outside Chicago. He now spends his time seething about this and writing about other stuff that bothers him.