This department hasn’t been updated in a while. During those past months, the SeaTimes has pretty much stabilized at a probably unprofitable level.
Circulation dropped another 5 percent in the past year.
The paper’s Wednesday and Friday editorial sections have gone back to single pages.
Actual “this happened yesterday” news items are decreasing, especially early in the week, in favor of prewritten features (easier to plan and to budget for).
Display advertising in the daily paper continues to be nearly nonexistent, with the four page Fry’s section on Fridays as the only consistent exception. If not for that, the paid obits, and the car and real-estate ads on Friday and Saturday, the daily SeaTimes would essentially exist (as a business venture) only as a wraparound for the Bartell’s and supermarket inserts.
The Sunday paper still has 30 to 40 pages of ads, not counting the inserts. And now the Sunday TV section (12 full-page equivalents with almost no ads) is gone. It’s been replaced by something called TV Weekly, a separate listings magazine for which subscribers have to pay extra.
And the paper’s planning to vacate its handsome 1930 art deco HQ on Fairview Ave. by the end of the year. Remaining employees will move into the nearby 1000 Denny (née Seattle Furniture Mart) building, which the company has sold and partly leased back. The historic-landmark SeaTimes building dates back to when almost all newspapers had their newsrooms and printing presses on the same site. (The SeaTimes is now printed at an increasingly under-capacity facility out in Mill Creek.) The old building will be mothballed pending a development scheme; such a plan would need city Landmarks Board approval.
In past installments of this department, I’d speculated that the Blethen family’s final endgame might be to turn the paper into an even smaller nonprofit operation, designed to live on the kind support of corporate benefactors. Now, as David Goldstein speculates on the basis of a recent editorial, the Blethens could be contemplating just such a scenario, and may be pushing for Federal help to make it so.
