This will have an influence on the Startup and company reporting in the Seattle area, what the reporting will look like in the future is anyone’s best guess. While being an avid reader of both (in google reader, sometimes at the web site), the loss of these two excellent reporters means that technology reporting for Seattle is basically going to fall to bloggers to cover the scene.

Cook, the author of the widely-read John Cook’s Venture Blog, joined the newspaper in April 1999. As he says in his biography on the blog, Cook has covered hundreds of entrepreneurial ventures over the past decade in Seattle – from Avenue A to Zillow.com. Bishop, who covers Microsoft, will be doing his second tour of duty at the weekly Business Journal. He joined the P-I in 2002, according to his biography on the P-I site. His Microsoft blog has been named to the Blog 100 list of top tech blogs by CNet News. Source: xconomy.com

While they will be going to the Puget Sound Business Journal, and they will be writing, the loss of the three or four entries a day at the Seattle PI leaves a huge gap in reporting the technology scene. There are very few bloggers who are coving the Seattle technology scene as well, so this gap is going to be a hard one to fill. What is really sad are the comments on Briar Dudley’s blog (he is the only one left of the major reporters) as shown in the picture below.

Today, there are not enough bloggers in the Seattle area with enough contacts to fill in the gap, and while the Seattle PI should be scrambling to fill in the gap, it is going to be hard to do so. Unless they pull people from the blogging community, whose standards and practices will vary widely from the news paper, they will have to bring in someone from the outside. Someone without all the contacts, and that means for a while there will be a lot of work for bloggers to do, while the Seattle PI gets people in to fill the gap.

This is a great coup for the Business Journal, but being regulated to a weekly might be difficult, unless Todd and John work out a way to keep us all entertained by continuing the three to four blog entries a day.

Tags: seattle PI, Todd Bishop, John Cook, Business Journal, loss, reporters, seattle, startup, community, loss