There’s some irony in one of the first major daily papers going down the drain being a major daily in Seattle with San Francisco close behind. The Hearst Corporation couldn’t find a buyer for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and plans to build an online property from its ashes. Tomorrow, St. Patrick’s Day, 2009, is its last day. The San Francisco Chronicle is next on the list. These two west-coast metropolises that pioneered the information-technology boom are leading the way toward saving the forests by killing their print newspapers. Perhaps with their heavy concentration of techies, not too many folks from Seattle will miss their second newspaper.

My guess is many there and everywhere will miss these grimy rags, and that one doesn’t have to be a Luddite to bemoan this massive transformation of journalism. The demise of the newspaper industry is quite different than the death of the typewriter. Newspapers have been central to free societies that encourage debate and transparency even when they are irresponsible and journalists get their facts wrong. They’ve been part of the American heritage going back to Ben Franklin. Web-based sites including blogs may well take over this mantel but it remains to be seen whether the web business model will sustain the quantity and quality of coverage that has proved important to our democratic society for centuries.

Of course the fat lady hasn’t sung yet. New technology—the thin flexible displays we’ve written about here –the possible emergence of a handful of national newspapers, and new business models that charge for content may still lead to a situation where we have fewer newspapers but still have serious journalism. But let there be no doubt—by the time we come out of the other end of this financial crisis (in a few years in my view) the journalism business will be far different than it is today.