TODAY’S PREVIOUSLY-ANNOUNCED CONTENTS have been postponed so we can instead discuss the biggest Seattle media story since the Kingdome boom-boom.
It’s the big strike by the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild. It’s the town’s first newspaper strike since ’53 (and, thanks to the Joint Operating Agreement, the first to hit both the Times and P-I).
Already, the effects have been felt. Monday’s papers included the big ad stuffers normally seen on Thanksgiving; Tuesday’s papers were printed early in the evening to avoid any truckers’ sympathy walkout, and thusly didn’t mention Monday Night’s NBA or NFL results.
The big changes start today, when the papers try to put out at least a semblance of their normal product; to be distributed for free and staffed by management and out-of-state scabs. (I briefly considered applying to be a replacement newshack, but quickly dropped the idea.)
Striking reporters, editors, ad sellers, and deliverers have already started an online strike paper, the Seattle Union Record. A print Union Record is currently scheduled to start next week.
The Union Record name, as editor Chuck Taylor describes it, comes from “a labor-backed paper during the time of the General Strike of 1919, during which 65,000 Seattle workers silenced the city for five days. Before it began, Union Record editor Anna Louise Strong predicted it would lead ‘no one knows where!’ We know how she felt.”
So how might the strike affect the local media landscape?
It will immediately hurt the papers’ finances during the start of the big pre-Xmas ad season.
If it drags on, it will further erode the Times/P-I consortium’s fat and non-sassy hold on regional discourse.
Locally and around the country, newspaper circulation’s failed to keep up with population growth. Local daily-paper readership hasn’t fallen as precipitously as local TV-news viewership, but it’s still flat. (When the Times moved to morning circulation earlier this year, it mostly took readers away from the P-I.)
And while the JOA might have a monopoly on bigtime daily circulation in town, its franchise is beset on all sides by insurgent suburban dailies, weeklies (“alternative” and otherwise), news and want-ad Websites, and the three big national dailies.
For a few years now, I’ve found rarified souls in the Capitol Hill-Belltown-U District belt who, when I tell them about something published that day in “the Times,” automatically assume I mean the New York Times. There were even a couple of early Stranger writers from out of town who took their refusal to read local papers as a matter of pride; even when the resulting ignorance led them to attempting to cross Fourth Avenue on the night of the Seafair parade.)
And if it really drags on, the Times-owning Blethen family just might finally give in and sell their controlling interest in the paper to the Knight-Ridder chain, which owns 49 percent of its stock currently. Knight-Ridder is partnered with Gannett in the JOA-run papers in Detroit, which have been stuck in a protracted strike/lockout mess that’s gone on for year after year, with no end in sight, to the papers’ detriment as well as the workers’.
Perhaps that looming threat will serve as enough incentive for the two sides in Seattle to find a settlement.
TOMORROW: A different way of exposing the news.
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