POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST JOHN LEVESQUE points out the central irony of the P-I‘s strategy in trying to preserve the joint operating agreement with the Seattle Times: “The paper that wants to put the Post-Intelligencer out of business is responsible for selling ads in the Post-Intelligencer.“
To restate the obvious: This marriage cannot be saved.
Last month, the P-I won the first round of courtroom battles over keeping the JOA. The Times wants to kill the agreement and, at the same time, the P-I. The P-I claims it can’t survive without the JOA, in which its printing, sales, delivery, and PR functions (everything except the paper’s editorial content) is contracted to the Times. Given the lousy job the Times has done (deliberately or otherwise) at maintaining the P-I‘s ad volume and subscriber base, I’d say the P-I can’t survive with the JOA.
Seattle still needs two dailies. It needs two separate dailies.
The best-case scenario for settling this flap would be a compromise court settlement, in which the P-I gets its own sales force again, while the Times still prints and delivers both papers until new arrangements are made (such as the Times selling its job-printing subsidiary in Tukwila, Rotary Offset Press, to the P-I). But don’t expect such a rational move from a Times management out for blood.
Underlying the whole dispute, but not overtly mentioned by either party to it: The fact that the traditional big American daily paper is an industrial-age anachronism. As I mentioned around the time the Seattle dailies went on strike three years ago, I believe there is a way for newspapers to become more competitive, with one another and with other info/advertising media–if they became leaner and more specialized, and established a more direct rapport with their readership (without necessarily turning to Fox-esque sleaze).
If the P-I does succumb to the current courtroom wars, and even if it doesn’t, there’s a great opportunity to create a new kind of newspaper for a new media age. Nothing like this has been tried in the U.S. since USA Today was first formulated 20 years ago.
Wanna help create it? Lemme know.
