The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, one of the better mid-sized papers in the country (apparently in spite of their corporate owners), and the only newspaper that ever publishes me with anything even approaching regularity, is being "sold" by its parent corporation, Hearst. I say "sold" with quotes, because in today's market, the word basically means "shut down in the near future, if not immediately." Here's the story from the paper itself: [link]

Their article mentions that if the paper continues to exist at all, it will be online-only – which might be kind of cool, if it acted as a new, innovative model for paperless journalism that could keep local reporters and other contributors employed. But I have my doubts that this is going to happen. They've had opportunities to seize that attitude which they passed on because somebody thought it would cost too much–oddly enough, people with the skills and talents necessary to produce online content and New Media want to be paid a wage for their efforts, and yet corporate, with all the wisdom inherent in questioning the second law of thermodynamics, continues to think that it should instead be done by unpaid interns.

It's like this at almost every newspaper now, of course. Everybody's losing market share to the web, because news for which you have to wait a day and pay in print is available instantly online for free. So the solution newspapers seek to the problem of not having enough unique content to make people want to buy their paper is to... eliminate what unique content they have, like local columnists and staff cartoonists, and run in its place MORE generic stuff off the wire that any other competing media source could pick up. Did that train of logic derail into Bizarroland, or was its ultimate destination always Failureville?