History
J.R. Watson founded the P-I, Seattle's first newspaper, on December 10, 1863, as the Seattle Gazette. The paper failed after a few years and was renamed the Weekly Intelligencer in 1867 by the new owner, Sam Maxwell.
1878, after publishing the Intelligencer as a morning daily, Thaddeus Hanford bought the Daily Intelligencer for $8,000. Hanford also acquired the daily Puget Sound Dispatch and the weekly Pacific Tribune and folded both papers into the Intelligencer. In 1881, the Intelligencer merged with the Seattle Post. The names were combined to form the present-day name.
Circulation stood at 31,000 in 1911. In 1912, editor Eric W. Allen left the paper to found the University of Oregon School of Journalism, which he ran until his death in 1944.
William Randolph Hearst took over the paper in 1921, and the Hearst Corporation owns the P-I to this day.
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt had a special relationship with the P-I. In 1936, their son-in-law John Boettiger took over as publisher. He brought his wife Anna, the Roosevelts' daughter, to also work at the paper. Anna became editor of the women's page. Boettiger left Seattle to enter the U.S. Army in April 1943, while Anna stayed at the paper to help keep a liberal voice in the running of the paper. After Boettiger's absence, the paper increasingly turned conservative with Hearst's new acting publisher. Anna would leave Seattle in December 1943 to live in the White House with her youngest child, Johnny. This effectively ended the Roosevelt-Boettiger ties with the P-I.
On December 15, 2006, no copies were printed as a result of a power outage caused by the December 2006 Pacific Northwest storms. It was the first time in 70 years that publication had been suspended.
On January 9, 2009, the Hearst Corporation announced that after losing money on it every year since 2000, Hearst was putting the P-I up for sale. The paper would be put on the market for 60 days, and if a buyer could not be found within that time, the paper would either be turned into an Internet-only publication with a drastically reduced staff, or closed outright. The news of the paper's impending sale was initially broken by local station KING-TV the night prior to the official announcement, and came as a surprise to the P-I's staff and the owners of rival newspaper The Seattle Times. Analysts did not expect a buyer to be found, in view of declining circulation in the U.S. newspaper industry and other newspapers on the market going unsold. Five days before the 60-day deadline, the P-I reported that the Hearst Corporation had given several P-I reporters provisional job offers for an online edition of the P-I.
On March 16, 2009, the newspaper posted a headline on its front page, followed shortly after by a short news story, that explained that the following day's edition would be its final one in print. The newspaper's publisher, Roger Oglesby, was quoted saying that the P-I would continue as an online-only operation. Print subscribers had their subscriptions automatically transferred to the Seattle Times on March 18.
As of 2012, the P-I continues as an online-only newspaper. In September 2010, the site had an estimated 2.8 million unique visitors and 208,000 visitors per day.
Read more about this topic: Seattle Post-Intelligencer
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