In general, the post-strike transition has been easiest in the editorial departments. "I'm actually kind of impressed by how everybody has tried to keep things civil," says reporter Taylor, who attributes his departure to having caught the entrepreneurial bug while putting out the Union Record. "I mean everybody knows where everybody stands. There's not a lot of point in sending out signals."
Reporter Sally Macdonald, who crossed the picket line, agrees. "One of the nicest things that happened to me after the strike is that one of the Guild leaders came up to me with a piece of candy and said, 'Truce?'" High-profile strikebreaker and columnist Nicole Brodeur hasn't exactly been besieged with candy and good wishes. Asked if she is getting the cold shoulder, she says succinctly, "Uh-huh." But, she says, "It gets a little better every day."
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Even if the mood around the office continues to improve, it is in the editorial departments where some of the biggest changes are happening for readers. Sunday's personal technology section has been dropped, at least for the time being, as have the book section and zoned editions with detailed coverage of the suburbs. As people leave and positions are cut, certain beats get less coverage—aerospace, for instance.
The strike has caused a re-evaluation, allows Executive Editor Fancher. "You don't just automatically put back in everything you've lost." He says that's not necessarily a bad thing; he likens it to the '90s recession when cutbacks forced the paper to think hard about what it wanted to do and not to do. "The strength of the investigative team grew out of that," he says. He won't yet say what the paper's new priorities might be.
At least temporarily, though, the paper has scaled back its ambitions. "Nobody's talking about being the nation's best regional newspaper at the moment," Fancher says, adding that the paper now has two focal points, financial stability and marketplace competition (in other words, beating the P-I). "What that says is, if it isn't necessary to those focal points, we're not going to do [it] right now." Some plans in the works before the strike have been shelved, including the creation of a "spotlight team" for delving deeply into breaking news and the launch of online and public forums.
All in all, the relatively short strike has exacted a heavy toll on the Times—perhaps too heavy to blame entirely on the strike. Although executives have repeatedly stressed that the changes under way are due to the financial impact of the strike, they concede in interviews that they may have had to do some degree of belt-tightening anyway because of the slowdown in the economy. "Employment advertising is down by double digits across the country," Sizemore says. "Whether those kinds of factors would have led us to cost-containment measures, I don't know. All we know is the hand we're dealt." That hand is the company's financial picture.
That the economy has a hand in the current turbulence at the Times is perhaps a small, sad kind of consolation for strikers (some of whom didn't really want to be striking), who waged a difficult and costly battle on behalf of disparate groups of workers.
There aren't too many bright sides to all this, but one is that circulation—though down as a whole—is up in newsstand sales. It actually doubled during the strike, when the company gave away the paper for free, and is still doing better than usual with the paper's halved post-strike price of 25 cents. And while the strike wrecked numerous relationships, it also forged new ones on the picket line. "We really bonded out there," says reporter Chuck Taylor. For the first time, he says, editorial, advertising, and circulation employees all got to know each other. "In the long run, I think that's going to be good for the company."
nshapiro@seattleweekly.com
