After two years the grand experiment of trying to produce a non-profit online newspaper in Seattle has come to a screeching halt with the demise of the Seattle PostGlobe.
The site which was to serve as a place for former Seattle Post-Intellingencer staffers to continue writing after the newspaper ceased printing in 2009. At first the site did attract several well known former P-I writers but many of them soon left after either finding new jobs or deciding that working for free wasn’t so rewarding after all.
Sally Deneen, PostGlobe co-founder explained it thusly:
Donations have fallen off. Ads have generated no meaningful revenue — ever. We began with no startup money. We obtained no grants. All of which actually provided unusual freedom. But as a volunteer-run site, we’ve run out of helping hands as unemployed journalists have left for jobs. (Which is a good thing!)
Even non-profits need some money to survive and without an aggressive fundraising campaign the site was probably doomed to fail from the beginning.
Don Irvine is the chairman of Accuracy in Media and its sister organization Accuracy in Academia. As the son of Reed Irvine, who launched AIM in 1969, he developed an understanding of media bias at an early age, and has been actively involved with AIM for over 30 years.
