…asks the musical question, “Why didn’t the P-I fold sooner?”
The simple answer: The Joint Operating Agreement with the Seattle Times, proposed in 1981 and first enacted in 1983, kept the P-I alive lo those many years, despite all the subsequent efforts by the Times to kill it.
There’s another question others have asked in recent weeks: Why didn’t the Times die and the P-I live?
For that answer you have to go even further back in time.
When Wm. Randolph Hearst Sr. bought the P-I in 1921, it was the dominant local paper. By 1930, the Times had more readers, and would always have more readers thereafter.
The Times successfully marketed itself as the local paper run by local people. Hearst, by this time, had turned his papers into cookie-cutter local variants on the same chain-imposed formula, from the typography and the logos to the emphasis on celebrity gossip and hard-right politics (hmm, sound like any current media firms we know?). While the Times shared many of Hearst’s editorial stances, it was run by a local family that hobnobbed with the local business titans and kept close ties with local politicians (especially the Republicans).
Hearst Sr. died in 1951. His heirs were generally more interested in magazines than in newspapers, and gave their local publishers more leeway. (They still had to run W.R. Hearst Jr.’s weekly “Editor’s Report” column, which (heart symbol)ed the Vietnam War and Augusto Pinochet.)
But caring less about newspapers also meant the Hearsts underfunded them. The pre-JOA P-I was manufactured on creaky old presses. They could only print and distribute so many papers between the end of evening sports events and the start of morning rush hour. The P-I never regained the natural market advantage of a morning paper.
But, while Hearst closed up shop in most of the cities in which its newspapers operated, it stayed in Seattle through thick and thin. As late as 2007, when it legally forced the Times to keep the JOA alive, Hearst wanted to hold on to its position in the Seattle media marketplace.
It was only with the national collapse of the daily-newspaper business model that Hearst’s current management swooped in and gave the order to surrender.
