Bird on a Wire, silent for over a month, blinked up an update yesterday and brought my attention to the striking Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild.
Both Seattle papers are affected. The striking workers, some of them rival writers, are collaborating to publish their own paper online and in print. It’s the Internet age, of course, and you can put stuff on the web in a jiffy. You don’t need your publishers to get the news out — hey, what if you start selling ads and adding infrastructure to create a truly competing paper? I’m certain that is not the intent, but Internet publishing definitely gives them a leg up. The Times and Post-Intelligencer say they are going to give their papers away for free, but I wonder what they’ll say to the advertisers. According to this article, “The Times put some advertising inserts planned for Thanksgiving editions in Monday papers.” That can’t be as good as getting the eyeballs of turkey-stuffed paper readers.