SEATTLE -- March 17, 2009.
The day the final print edition of the Seattle Post Intelligencer ran off the presses.
The day the "P-I" would downsize to about 20 newsroom employees.
The day the rest gathered to mourn after the work day ended. Among them, Candace Heckman. To this day, it still hurts.
"It's like losing a family member or a really bad breakup," said Heckman, a nine-year veteran reporter with the newspaper. "The loss that I felt and my colleagues felt was difficult to overcome."
It has been one year since the region's oldest newspaper went to a smaller, online-only format. Out of about 170 former newsroom employees, only five reporters have found jobs in other daily metro newspapers around the country.
Others, like Heckman, had to reinvent themselves. She now works for Nyhus Communications in Seattle, which she calls telling stories "in a different way," as well as a way to support her and her young daughter.
A number of former P-I staffers also have gone on to form their own non-profit journalism Web sites like Seattle Post Globe and InvestigateWest.
But perhaps the only one who actually is profiting from the P-I going online only is The Seattle Times print edition. A Times spokesperson says more than eight out of every 10 former P-I subscribers now gets the Times instead. The spokesperson says that without the total ad revenue caused by that, the Times likely would've filed for bankruptcy this past year.
Heckman said she will always believe the paper that printed for 146 years could have found a way to keep going.
"We had a sense of justice at the P-I she said. "We always wanted to seek justice and that spinning globe on top of the building really reinforced that."
But one year out, that spinning globe only brings sadness. A reminder, she says, that a P-I lives on in cyberspace is just not the same as her beloved Post-Intelligencer.
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