Time to abandon print for the ether?

In Seattle on Tuesday, the venerable Post-Intelligencer delivered its last printed copy of the newspaper to the city’s doorsteps. Today a mere shadow of its former content it is delivered via the Internet.

The news organization’s staff has been reduced from 165 to 20, including one photographer. It relies heavily on links and community blogs. Advertising spots are few and far between.

This follows both Detroit daily newspapers announcing they will deliver printed papers only three days a week and the daily Christian Science Monitor saying it will print a weekly news magazine and go online only daily.

Is this the wave of the future or a last gasp effort to hang on?

This change in the business model of a news outlet comes on the heels of the annual “The State of the News Media” report from the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism.

In the introduction to the report they “do the math.” Quoting from “Trends and Numbers” by Newspaper Association of America, Pew explains:

“In the current calculus, it does not make sense for newspapers to kill their print versions and go online-only. The Sunday paper and some late-in-the-week issues still are flush with ads, and print still commands premium ad pricing. Papers still make roughly 90% of their revenue from print and, although the numbers vary by paper, the cost of printing and delivering the printed newspaper averages 40% of costs. For now, it doesn’t add up to sacrifice potentially 90% of revenues to save 40% of costs.”

Here is what the ad revenue looks like: