SeattlePI at 155: Where are we now?

It's unlikely J.R. Watson thought, in 1863, that he would be starting a newspaper that would last through the next century and into the one after.

He would have been out of his mind to imagine the weekly Seattle Gazette would one day serve millions of readers each month through the internet.

And yet, here we are.

This week, the SeattlePI celebrates 155 years in operation, more than a century and a half of helping to relay the news of Seattle, Washington, and the world, to our readers in one format or another.

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The name, for one thing, has shifted a bit since the paper first started. While it lived for most of its life under the Seattle Post-Intelligencer banner, Hearst saw fit to rebrand it to seattlepi.com when the print version of the paper ceased publication in 2009.

At the time, the P-I was the first major metro daily to move entirely to the internet (though with a much smaller staff than had been part of the print paper). Stories across the nation (and in the P-I itself) were little more than obituaries for the newspaper, effectively deeming the organization history.

As Mark Twain once put it so well: The reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated.

With 2018 nearly behind us, the SeattlePI (as we call ourselves today) remains a part of the media landscape in Seattle and beyond.

To be clear, we did have to clear some hurdles this year, including bidding goodbye to several esteemed colleagues as our newsroom went through yet another reorganization. But even as we looked to find new footing, we continued our work in earnest.

As part of that work we hired four new staffers over the summer, including Natalie Guevara as a homepage producer, Ben Arthur as Seahawks reporter, and Aaron Alter and Alex Halverson as editorial assistants (though Alter has taken to covering college sports while Halverson runs the homepage in the afternoons and produces regular features).

RELATED: 'The Bright One': Happy 155th birthday, SeattlePI

No, we don't have the depth of staff or resources of the major metro daily we once were. But that doesn't mean we have stopped the important work we all got into this business to do.

This summer, we partnered with several other news organizations for the third year in a row to write about Seattle's crisis of homelessness. We have also continued to keep our eyes on the transportation issues facing the city, not least of which will be the "Period of Maximum Constraint" starting when the viaduct closes in January.

Writer Joel Connelly continues to produce a wealth of coverage on Seattle and Washington's politics and environment, including the impacts from what's happening in the other Washington. He also lends his seemingly unending knowledge of our region's outdoor wonders in regular features.

Crime and courts reporter Lynsi Burton continues to dig up the dirt on Seattle's worst or weirdest offenders while also making time for bigger projects when she can. Last month, she completed an in-depth story on the mounting challenges faced by immigrants trying to escape domestic abuse by coming to the U.S.

Photographer Genna Martin continues to document the history of our rapidly changing city, including protests, and she and I will continue our coverage of the city's homelessness crisis in the coming year.

Zosha Millman is keeping her finger on the pulse of how Seattle is changing, with an eye to the issues Seattleites are talking about the most, including traffic, housing and culture. And if you need a dose of film and TV culture? She's got you covered there, too.

Ben Arthur, while keeping up with the Seahawks as they appear headed for another playoff berth, is also gearing up to cover the new Seattle NHL team and whatever else might come (Sonics, anyone?) once the KeyArena remodel is complete.

We are a small team as we head into our 156th year, but we're nimble, which allows us to move incredibly fast when news breaks, as we did during the 2017 Amtrak derailment south of Tacoma or during the Ride the Ducks crash in 2015.

The P-I started as a one-person shop, a solo endeavor to produce a newspaper "sufficient for time and place" in a Seattle that would soon be a booming metropolis. One hundred and fifty-five years later, as our city rides through a boom even bigger than that of the Yukon Gold Rush, the P-I strives to keep up its sufficiency and then some, to tell Seattle's story as it happens, to remember what has gone before, and to look ahead to what comes next.

And who knows what that will be?

Senior editor Daniel DeMay can be reached at 206-448-8362 or danieldemay@seattlepi.com. Follow him on Twitter: @Daniel_DeMay.