Stevan Morgain
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Five years ago, The Seattle Times celebrated its 100th birthday by repainting a large portion of its delivery fleet with 100th anniversary colors. Among the first to notice this centennial makeover was its joint operating partner, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which apparently preferred the trucks' former side inscription, "Seattle Times/P-I."
So goes the testy relationship between the two Seattle dailies, which were conjoined in a permanent big brother/little brother relationship by the signing of a 1983 joint operating agreement. And the Times likes being big brother. It has the city's only Sunday paper, more Pulitzer Prizes, around 300 newsroom workers to the P-I's 160, and a full century of ownership by the Blethen family, making it a rare family-owned daily in an increasingly chain-dominated business.
Now the Times is stuck with a prize it doesn't want: the largest share of the rancor resulting from the 49-day strike by the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild— settled Monday after workers approved a new contract by a 359-116 vote. Some of the damage stems from the company's dominant role: The Times handles all advertising and circulation duties for both papers, so its employees comprise the vast majority of the 1,000 strikers and almost all of the union's lowest-paid workers.
The Times' immediate challenge is to dispel those ill feelings and restore its luster as Washington's best daily newspaper. This task is by no means academic; the very survival of the Times is at stake. When it became a morning paper last year, analysts predicted Seattle would eventually become a one-daily-newspaper town. Many assumed that the Times would win the battle of the dailies, but now that the paper has lost millions of dollars, had its reputation in the community as a fine family employer tarnished, and faces ongoing major internal strife, its victory is no longer a sure thing.
The company brought part of the damage upon itself. The Times can act as if it holds the copyright on the word "family"—Executive Editor Mike Fancher's first column during the strike began with the phrase "This feels like a death in the family." Although Guild officials wisely cautioned strikers against taking personal shots, signs mocking the company's "family" values started appearing on picket lines after President H. Mason Sizemore outlined plans to lay off some 1-in-10 family members, er, workers, just a month into the strike. The Times, not the P-I, was the target of several unfair labor practice complaints by the union.
At the P-I, absentee ownership became an advantage. Although both papers denied the union claim that worker pay has lagged behind inflation, P-I publisher Roger Oglesby's full-page letters to the public were low-key and somehow corporate in a good way.
The P-I has had good reason to practice its PR. A significant share of the newspaper-buying public believes the claim that the family-owned and Pulitzer committee-anointed Times is the better of the two rival rags. And the Times' own writers and editors have always displayed fondness for this concept. One Times scribe recalls higher-ups bristling when someone compared how the two papers covered the same political issue. The Times, writers were told, aims for an ideal far beyond anything the P-I could ever strive for. Wait, the reporter thought, aren't we both putting out daily newspapers?
The competition knows the score. The Times was nicknamed "Fairview Fannie" decades ago because the serious, gray paper seemed a dour dowager in contrast to the down-to-earth P-I. On the occasion of the Times' recent conversion to a morning publication, P-I editorial cartoonist David Horsey updated the image by depicting "Fannie" as a mirror-gazing beauty celebrating the fact that now she'd have all day to tell people how wonderful she is.
But beyond the occasional ego excesses, there's plenty of evidence that the state's largest and most self-absorbed daily newspaper is also its best. Over the years, the Times has earned a reputation for having a reporter-friendly newsroom and an at-times excessive love for in-depth feature stories and special projects. They've also routinely cherry-picked the P-I's best employees. Sure, some angry Times reporters may have inquired about jobs at the P-I during the strike, but reversing this talent flow on a long-term basis is as unlikely as reversing the flow of the Columbia River.
So it's worth asking: How does the Times get its swagger back?
"You just asked the question that we all want the answer to," says Elizabeth Rhodes, a 22-year Times veteran who writes a Sunday real estate column. Everyone returning to work is hoping things will get back to normal, she says. "What we're all feeling now is we don't know what normal is."
Executive Editor Fancher says the paper can't look back. "Rebuilding isn't the right word," he says. "That suggests we're going back to something—we need to create a new newspaper with the resources available to us."
This sounds like a nice way of saying things will never be the same again, but however you put it, he's got a point. Some immediate employee turnover is expected, even required. The strike settlement includes programs to encourage early retirement and provide severance pay for employees who decide to move on. Given the company's estimate that 10 percent of its workers need to be cut through attrition, that's a lot of people going out the door in a short period.
