Every morning I have copies of the Financial Times, New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal delivered to my office.  These are all fine newspapers — and perhaps the last in the dying breed.  But it was with real lament that I read in a front-page, below-the-fold story in today’s Times, about the demise of the print Seattle Post-Intelligencer, “Seattle Paper Shifts Entirely to the Web,” by WILLIAM YARDLEY and RICHARD PEREZ-PENA.

It was the P-I that made me a newspaper reader.  It was 1978.  I was studying for the bar examination, and I made reading the P-I part of my daily routine.  I’d buy the paper in the morning, and start studying as soon as I finished reading the paper.  It’s amazing how fascinating every page became, when I knew that what awaited me after I was done was memorizing the Rule Against Perpetuities.  The front-page, the op-ed page, the sports pages, the columnists, the obituaries — all fascinating reading.  No more.