Rick Dahms
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IN THIS CORNER, celebrating 137 years of bringing you news in the morning, it's that scrappy, newsy underdog—the Seattle Post-Intelligencer! In this corner, toting Pulitzers and forming investigative teams at will, it's that regional giant, The Seattle Times!
And boy, are they ready to rumble.
With its March 6 switch to morning distribution, the Times is the prohibitive favorite, even if this battle sometimes has the air of an inter-squad scrimmage. In 1983, the then-financially struggling P-I signed a joint operating agreement with the Times, under which the two newspapers' noneditorial functions (circulation, advertising, production) are run by the Times as a single business entity. Authorized by the feds in hopes of maintaining newspaper competition in major cities (and preserving newsroom jobs), most JOAs have only been able to slow the demise of the smaller newspaper in the partnership. The difference here is that as afternoon newspapers steadily become a publishing anachronism, the Times discovered it had made a major mistake by signing the JOA, losing access to the growing morning newspaper market. While the original JOA gave the Times two-thirds of joint corporate profits and enabled it to block the P-I from posting its editorial content on the Internet, the long-term business impediment of being restricted to the afternoon market forced the Times to bargain for access to mornings. Last February, the two JOA partners signed the deal that makes this morning newspaper war possible.
Tough-talking longtime P-I editor/publisher J.D. Alexander says that newsroom pride will more than negate any tempering effect of the two papers' corporate ties. "Remember, they're coming in on our turf," he says, boasting of his paper's reputation for covering the city better and bringing readers the news first.
"I think the P-I tends to pursue stories in rather predictable ways," responds the Times' Executive Editor Michael Fancher. "We've always had to be good at the nondeadline content—and we can't lose that—but we have to add to it the greater sense of timeliness and urgency in the a.m. field."
A year ago, the leadership at the two papers offered up an "Only in Seattle" scenario: Perhaps our literate, cosmopolitan population could make this the first midsized city to support two thriving morning dailies. Now, with the Times and P-I entering battle mode, the sweet talk has been set aside and both staffs are focused on making sure their paper ends up the survivor.
It's hard to see this as a fair fight—the Times has about 320 editorial employees to the P-I's 170—but morale at the P-I has clearly rebounded since the announcement of head-to-head morning competition.
THE TIMES HAD TO PAY dearly to amend the JOA and enter the morning market. Hearst Corporation, owners of the P-I, upped their take of the profits to 40 percent (from the original 32 percent), extended the agreement another 50 years, and gained the right to operate a full Web site. Far more controversial in the two newsrooms were new provisions covering the possibility that Seattle could become a one-newspaper town. Under the amended agreement, if the P-I folds, Hearst would continue to receive 32 percent of the Times' profits until the JOA expires in 2083. While the agreement also addressed a possible Times failure, critics smelled conspiracy. "If they eliminated the newsroom at the P-I, that would be pure savings," grumbles Peter Horvitz, president of King County Journal Newspapers, which publishes the Eastside Journal and South County Journal, papers that compete with the Times and P-I for suburban readers. "Basically, the Times would write [Hearst] a check every year."
The nagging suspicion that the P-I was being sold down the river by Hearst has diminished greatly, at least in its own newsroom. Staffers were buoyed by recent investments, such as a newsroom remodel and a much-needed new computer system. The P-I also saw a rare management shuffle, with Alexander shifting to a job with the Hearst national division, managing editor Ken Bunting moving up to executive editor, and Los Angeles Times veteran Roger Oglesby taking over as publisher. A new managing editor will be hired later this year.
But the biggest reason for P-I elation occurred two states to the south, where Hearst bought the San Francisco Chronicle, the morning rival to its failing Examiner. This demonstration of Hearst's deep corporate pockets and determination to stay in the West Coast newspaper biz did far more for morale than new desks and Internet access. Now P-I staffers are quick to remind you that the latest round of JOA changes gives Hearst dibs on buying majority control of the Times should future generations of the Times-publishing Blethen family prove less dedicated to the concept of family-owned newspapers. (The Blethens own 50.5 percent of the Times' voting stock; the Knight-Ridder chain owns the rest.) Bunting calls the assumption that the P-I was doomed "a phony spin" that Seattle newspaper readers quickly saw through. "I do have a sense that those members of the public who bought into the 'Woe is the P-I' version of things have since come to realize that was sort of silly," he says.
The local mass communications swamp is full of alligators. Competitive challenges come from all sides: national newspapers (Wall Street Journal, New York Times, USA Today), alternative weeklies (Seattle Weekly, The Stranger), the community press (small papers in a host of city neighborhoods and suburban cities), news Web sites (Salon, Slate), and even the two papers' own Web sites, which dish up the majority of each publication's news content free of charge. But afternoon papers like the Times have faced a particular challenge—a growing public preference for getting news in the morning. Before the switch, the Times stood as the largest afternoon paper to hold the top spot in its market—and one of just five afternoon papers among the Top 100 US dailies.
