P-I Pride

It seemed that the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was just getting into a rhythm when The Seattle Times last week tripped the trapdoor in their joint operating agreement. Cartoonist Dave Horsey had just won his second Pulitzer Prize in three years. The P-I last year made a dramatic showing in the leading Northwest journalism competition, scoring 32 awards for excellence, compared to the Times' 19. It was the first time in decades the P-I had bested the Times in the contest sponsored by the Society of Professional Journalists.

By most accounts, it was the arrival of new publisher Roger Oglesby and managing editor David McCumber in 2000 that began to turn things around for the P-I, after years of distant but tight fiscal control by the Hearst Corp. Oglesby, who came from the Los Angeles Times, apparently brought with him corporate guarantees of material support for improving the P-I's content, staffing, and, perhaps most important, morale. During the Newspaper Guild strike later that year, Oglesby endeared himself to P-I staffers by settling with them before the Times reached agreement with its union workers, and then he hosted a gala welcome-back celebration. Times publisher Frank Blethen, on the other hand, seemed to take the strike personally and lashed out at staff members he felt had betrayed the Times "family." For once, it felt really good to be working for Hearst.

All that goodwill and recent success under the P-I globe might be irrelevant now that the Times, which owns the printing presses, has given notice that it wants to negotiate closure of the P-I. By its own admission in a lawsuit last week, Hearst has taken substantial profit out of the P-I over the years under the JOA. How much better the P-I might have been if it had plowed more of that profit back into staffing and creative developmentwho knows? Hearst's newspaper history is one of complacency. It does what little needs doing to keep the doors open and bleed the competition into either folding or selling, which is what Blethen fears would be the result of continuing the Seattle JOA.

There has always been a competitive spirit between the news staffs of the two papers, even under joint business operation. Hearst and the Seattle Times Co. forged their alliance 20 years ago under the Newspaper Preservation Act, the federal law with the noble purpose of preserving two editorial voices in cities where the weaker of two newspapers was threatened with financial collapse. The act exempted newspaper joint operating agreements from federal antitrust laws. But skeptics looked at such arrangements and saw not editorial voices as the main beneficiary, but publishers' bottom lines. Two newspapers operating under an arrangement that allowed them to combine nonnews and noneditorial functions could dominate a metro market as never before, setting a single ad rate for both publications.

By 1981, the P-I had been losing money steadily for some 12 years. In Justice Department proceedings, Hearst argued that the P-I eventually would have to fold because the market could no longer sustain two newspapers. The actual financial distress of the P-I was hard to determine, even after the Justice Department required both companies to open their books. One thing was clear to Times executives: No matter what Hearst was telling the Justice Department about imminent failure of the P-I, the deep pockets of the corporation could underwrite red ink for an indefinite period, making an end to their business competition desirable, sooner than later. Many wondered why the Times didn't simply continue to drive the P-I out of business. The Times had a weekday circulation of about 235,000 in 1980, about 50,000 more than the P-I. With Boeing booming and blue-collar reading habits strongly tied to the afternoon paper, there seemed to be nothing in the way of the Times simply running the P-I into the ground.

In fact, the Times had launched a morning edition in 1980 that it marketed only at news racks. And there were signs that it was making a small but worrisome dent in the P-I's newsstand sales, which constituted more than a third of the P-I's total circulation. Some of the Times' most aggressive reporters (including this writer) were put on a beefed-up night staff, then headed by Mike Fancher, who today is the Times' executive editor. He kept them charged up with the hint that it was the beginning of big, new thingspossibly a complete conversion by the Times to the morning market. Reporters at both newspapers found the competition invigorating, even fun at times. It was a departure from the usual "Fairview Fanny" blandness that had characterized the Times for years. Stories that the P-I had traditionally beat the Times on were now appearing first in the Times morning edition.

Then it was over. The 1981 announcement that Hearst and the Times had reached terms on a joint operating agreement shocked both newsrooms. For the P-I, it would mean no more Sunday edition and, without it, permanent second-class status. For the Times, it was the end of its incursion into the morning and, so it seemed at the time, it would be stuck in an afternoon market showing signs of erosion. As the JOA commenced in 1983, after more than 18 months of hearings and appeals, the news competition between the two papers took on a sort of artificial quality in the minds of some. But animosity was an easily accessible emotion on both sides.