Seattle P-i Seeking Closure

Detail of cutaway illustration of the iconic Seattle P-i globe.By Mark Kaufman

The state of the newspaper business is in shambles. Here’s an example, above is a detail from an illustration I did for The Stranger an alt-weekly newspaper. You can find the article and the complete illustration of my take on the inner workings of the iconic P-i globe here. In the online version of the paper. Which of course is where most people saw the article and my illustration (scroll down a bit to enlarge the illustration in all its sad glory), not in the print version.

Nobody reads the newspaper anymore. I must say it’s not the first time I have seen a shakeout in the newspaper business, off the top of my head I can think of 8 daily newspapers in New York City when I was a kid in the early 1960s, plus 4 more New Jersey dailies available to me and my dad across the river from Manhattan where we lived in Union City, NJ. So, yes it is bad, yes it is hurting my bottom line, yes people are losing their jobs all across the country, but no, newspapers are not dead. Smaller, less papers, on life support, but there will be newspapers in the future. How many, and how much influence they will have is another matter altogether.