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Post Post-Intelligencer

As Seattle’s oldest daily newspaper braces for a likely print shutdown, the staff hatches plans, the suits huddle, and a digital future looms.

Comments (10) By Rick Anderson Wednesday, Feb 25 2009

By the look of things, Seattle is about to become, at best, a one-newspaper town. Unfortunately for Art Thiel, his isn't the one. "I think I could be a pretty good pool boy for a wealthy widow," says the wisecracking Seattle Post-Intelligencer sports columnist, starting to riff on his future if the P-I is shuttered by the Hearst Corporation in mid-March. "I was also thinking of a career teaching English for English Speakers. Spell-checker aside, I get stupefying e-mail from doctors, professors, government officials, and I say 'My gosh, I could help these people!'"

Over the years, the P-I’s iconic symbol has moved from the Regrade to the waterfront. Next stop: a history museum?
Kevin P. Casey
Over the years, the P-I’s iconic symbol has moved from the Regrade to the waterfront. Next stop: a history museum?

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The star columnist, with 28 years at the P-I, is slapping a smiley face on an otherwise grim portrait. But, he says, "Anybody who has to go through a job thing like this, you finally get done cursing all the forces. You realize this just may be the change you needed, even if you don't know what you're suited for. I just wish I would have taken a woodshop class in high school."

Thiel's future shock arrived the morning of Black Friday, January 9, when Hearst Newspapers president Steven R. Swartz showed up at the paper's headquarters at 101 Elliott Avenue West. He had flown in from New York, called the newsroom to prayer service, and confirmed what KING-TV had already reported, scooping the P-I on its own demise. The 146-year-old paper Hearst bought in 1921 was for sale, and without a buyer in 60 days would either close or continue as an online-only electronic newspaper, whether under Hearst or a new owner who had the money and moxie.

The P-I is already previewing what an e-P-I might look like after its home page last week began linking to other local blogs and media sites that previously would have been considered competitors. The paper's historical motto, "It's in the P-I," no longer refers just to its staff's own reporting.

Hearst, said Swartz, was also ending its pursuit of the Seattle Times, which has its own debt problems and could eliminate at least some of its daily print editions. The Times cut almost 500 employees last year and still may not make it, according to publisher Frank Blethen. He was in Olympia last week, asking legislators for a business tax break for newspapers, saying the state's publishers are "literally holding on by our fingertips today."

Liz Brown, administrative officer of the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild—which represents P-I and Times circulation, advertising, and news employees—sees a risk that Seattle will become a no-daily-newspaper town. "Is the Times upside down, financially? Yes," she says. Blethen has asked his downsized staff to approve an equivalent 12 percent cut in pay and benefits, plus a pension freeze. When the Guild asked to see the Times' books, "they answered yes," Brown says. "When that happens, it's bad." A financial review is being scheduled.

The larger Times won't have the weaker P-I to kick around as a partner, either. Swartz told the P-I staff that Hearst was exiting its 1983 Joint Operating Agreement (JOA) with the Times. That will end the P-I's 40–60 split of profits (or losses) after the Times subtracts costs of handling the P-I's advertising, production, marketing, and circulation.

Though the papers have been news rivals with separate staffs, the Times has had some control over the P-I's future for three decades. It tightened that grip on March 6, 2000, when the evening Times, under a rewritten JOA, converted to morning publication and went head-to-head with its rival and partner. Though a revised JOA allowed the P-I to post more editorial content on its Web site, the Times newsroom saw it as something of a knockout punch. In a 1999 staff memo in advance of the morning conversion, then-Times managing editor Alex MacLeod declared that "Hearst has consistently starved its papers while pocketing big profits," and has now "sold the P-I's future without a serious second thought."

With his fat budget and dominant newsroom (about 320 editorial staffers to the P-I's 170), MacLeod could smother the P-I, and did. On the day the morning switch was made, the Times had a daily circulation of 219,000 to the P-I's 191,000. By March 2007, the Times circulation was unchanged, while the P-I had plummeted to 128,000. Today, after the Times cut distribution of both papers, the Times has dropped to 199,000 and the P-I has faded to 114,000.

The new JOA has turned out to add injury to Frank Blethen's insult: infamously showing up in his newsroom on the day of the morning changeover wearing a T-shirt depicting the eagle from the Times' logo destroying the P-I's globe with its claws. P-I staffers are now aware of the coming final indignity: The Times will soon begin delivering its paper to P-I subscribers, asking them to cross over—though it might be a tough sale.

"P-I readers are rabidly brand loyal," says the Guild's Brown. "Our members in circulation say that, 2-to-1, they get more complaints from P-I subscribers who get the Times by mistake than vice-versa."

There was always a natural newsroom rivalry with the Times. But some P-I staffers clearly loathe Blethen and his managers, who've long belittled the "smaller paper." Cheers sounded in the P-I's newsroom in 2007 after Blethen blinked in a long court battle with the P-I to end the JOA, and instead had to hand over $24 million to keep the agreement going. But mere rejoicing wasn't enough: That night, a carload of P-I employees pulled up outside the Times headquarters, piled out, unzipped, and pissed warm revenge on Frank's front lawn.

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