The Moment

摘要

Newspapers used to die allrnthe time, and nobody thought a thing about it because other newspapers were being born. The law of the jungle is brutal but not particularly sad. Somewhere around the time television got big, though, the newspaper birthrate fell close to zero; after that, every death was one step closer to extinction. You see the difference in the history of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Its 146-year life span is a tale of dead start-ups, relaunches, mergers, fiercerncompetition-all bloody and robust and healthy. Now the P-Iis gone but for a skeleton crew of Web producers and opinion writers, and there won't be another paper along to replace it. With the Seattle Times also struggling, Seattle could become one of the first major cities to go newspaperless.rnDeclining readership is normally blamed, but that's not quite it. Newspapers still attract readers-more than 400,000 each Sunday in Seattlernwhen the P-Idied March 17. That's more in one town than most cable-news shows draw nationwide.