As we all know, after well over a century serving the public of the Seattle area, the Seattle Post Intelligencer has shut down its print presses. But, the fallen giant lives on through the massive collective of human knowledge known as the internet.
But how does the P.I.'S website stack up against its brother, the Seattle Times' site?
Well, first, let's compare the front pages:
The P.I: Here we see the P.I.'s front page is mostly local. Seattle-area news is given the most space, and blogs from P.I. journalists, right next to the local news, occupy a wider space than an AP feed of global news. None of the news items we see are bolded or given more importance over the other, there's not even a picture attached to any of them. This seems somewhat odd as I assume most readers are like me and would rather read about the Washington senate's introduction of a new income tax bill than who won the lottery, but the tax bill story is below the lottery one, easy to miss in its lackluster equality.
The Seattle Times' front page however, has a nice mix of local and global news, which is just what I pick up a newspaper for. Also, everything here is nicely distributed, the most important or pressing story is at the top of the page with a nice bold headline, and there is a picture near the top as well, just like the top fold of A-1 in the Seattle Times
Moving on from the front page, clicking on the "U.S." section on both sites gives you as different perspectives as each front page:
The P.I.'s story layout is badly cluttered, a few stories are given the same ineffective treatment the front page gives them, under those is a segue that just says "Additional headlines:"
and then there is a messy pile of stacked stories that creates a wall of news that is difficult to wade through.
On the Seattle Times' site, the layout is much more spaced, giving all the stories some nice breathing room. Each story here also has some nice links under them, including links to multimedia, such as video, additional pictures, graphs etc. This is an essential part of online journalism, especially for a journalistic organization like the Times that already has a another product, be it print, radio, or broadcast.
The P.I. just doesn't have the sheer amount of interactivity the Times' site does, and that is a little depressing. Considering that the P.I. doesn't have a print product anymore, wouldn't you think they could focus a lot of resources to gathering multimedia?
In conclusion, for sheer informational content and news gathering, I'd say the Seattle Times rises far above the P.I. when it comes to their website, but, one thing the P.I. has a foot ahead of the Seattle Times is that has a much more intimate localness to it.
There are non-journalist hyper-local blogs, the front page delivers Seattle news right to you, no matter how sadly level all the headlines are, and even has a nice searchable event calendar for the area. So, going for straight hard news, I much prefer the Times' site, but waking up at 11:30 on a saturday morning and wondering how the lovely April-rain soaked Seattle is doing on a down-to-earth level, I'd go right to the P.I.
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Nice post, man! Good job spacing your paragraphs, and very nice job engaging some of the content in depth. Visually speaking only some of your paragraphs could be just a wee bit shorter. It's also hard to read white on black.
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