SeattlePI.com's great online news experiment

Tuesday was the last day the Seattle Post Intelligencer published a print newspaper.

Starting today, the 146-year-old Seattle daily goes online only.

The print edition of the paper folded after Hearst Corp. determined the company couldn’t afford to continue running the money-losing paper as is.

So they pulled the plug. Rather, they plugged in. Hearst officials said they plan to reinvent the paper as a community platform with reporting from a slimmed down team of 20 reporters, smattering of columnists, reader bloggers and features on health, wellness and homes from magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Country Living, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, House Beautiful.

In an age of multimedia news, it’s fitting that the head of the company’s Web efforts uses the title “executive producer” rather than “editor,” a term that’s still associated with old (print) media.

That executive producer is Michelle Nicolosi, my one-time colleague at the Orange County Register and the subject of a Q&A I did last year chronicling her transformation from print reporter to multimedia maven.

It’s interesting to note that even a year ago, Nicolosi had high hopes for online journalism. She said:

In the very near future, we will all be online journalists in some way or another. The outlook for online journalists — those that play well, learn about and care about the online publication as much as we all cared about the paper 15 years ago — is much, much better than it is for people who are dragging their feet, refusing to change the way they work to accommodate the new needs of the online product.

You can read more of Nicolosi’s observations on new media on her blog, Print to Online, although one has to wonder where she’s going to find the time to update it now.

In a blog post to readers about the PI’s transformation, Nicolosi says the online-only SeattlePI.com will “break a lot of rules that newspaper Web sites stick to, and we are looking everywhere for efficiencies. We don’t feel like we have to cover everything ourselves.”

Can a newspaper successfully reinvent itself online? Nicolosi thinks so. At a time when metropolitan dailies have become the equivalent of an endangered species, you can believe editors in newsrooms across the country will be keeping tabs, and praying she’s right.