The winners are...

I had 26 submissions and only three copies (if you don’t include my own) of the final edition of the Seattle Post Intelligencer to give-away. Most of you made VERY compelling arguments about why you should win this contest and a few, well, didn’t really try that hard at all.

Here’s some of the lack-luster efforts:

I never read the paper, but would like to. 

I just want to make some money. What do you have against that? 

Hmm… my dog ate my last copy. I swear. No, really!

This guy is just down-right mean:

I would line my birdcage with this rag. Should have died a long time ago. Good riddance.

Now, here’s the moment you all have been waiting for (play drum roll in your mind)…

The winners are:

1. I would donate my copy to the annual fund-raising auction for Old Mill Center for Children and Families, a school for developmentally challenged children. The Center is in Corvallis, Oregon, and I know has many ex-Seattleites who would be interested in bidding on the P.I. Thanks for the opportunity.
2. My son Alex is doing a report for school. They are studying the various different news sources as part of a communications class. He decided to write his report about newspapers. They just assigned the project and he's just starting to gather information. He and I were just talking about how people are starting to move away from printed materials. The future lies in devices like Kindle. If I win this I will give it to my son for his report.
3. Wow. I live in Florida, and I just heard today about the demise of the Post-Intelligencer. I never read a print copy, but when I was a broadcast news producer, I learned that I couldn't always trust the truncated AP broadcast wires, and for breaking news out of Seattle, I visited the PI website to read the full accounts of what was going on. Sure, I get a lot of my news online (I rarely even see TV news since leaving the biz), but I still feel great sadness at seeing a publishing institution fall by the wayside. Yes, times change, but saving a printout from the computer (or saving the file) is not the same as pulling a yellowed piece of newsprint out of a scrapbook to recall a world-changing event, a personal accomplishment, or the life and death of a loved one. I'm sorry for Seattle's loss, and I mourn the decline of the print media in America.

Sorry to all of you who didn’t win. It wasn’t easy picking from among your stories. One lady even twisted her ankle as she prepared to do battle for the last copy in a newspaper box. I almost gave it to her so that she would have something to read while icing that ankle.

The good news is that I decided to give away my own personal copy in a couple weeks to a random Twitter follower (my user name is SEABlogger). I really just wanted to hold the final edition in my hands and have the opportunity to read it cover-to-cover.

One final word of thanks to this contests benefactor who himself is unemployed and could have joined others on E-bay who are seeking to profit personally. He’s been a great friend to this blog and, hopefully, we can become personal ones too.