I’ve freelanced in the past for the Seattle Times, and hope to do so again. But that doesn’t mean I want it to succeed at its current drive to become a true monopoly paper.
I opposed the original joint operating agreement between the Times and the Post-Intelligencer, which took effect 20 years ago this month. Unlike the JOAs in some two-paper towns, which set up a joint-venture agency to handle the papers’ non-news operations (sales, printing, distro, promotion, etc.), the Seattle JOA put both papers’ fates squarely under the Times’ control. The Times was free to undersell the P-I to subscribers and advertisers alike, or to be laggardly about trucking the P-I off to outlying corners of the region. All of which it’s been accused of doing at one time or another.
The 1999 revision to the JOA only increased the Times’ capacity for mischief. When the World Wide Web came along, the Times ruled that a P-I website would fall under the promotional duties ascribed under the original JOA’s terms to the Times. In other words, the Times got to choose what kind of website the P-I could have, and naturally chose a bare-bones PR page without any actual news items. In return for the right to put its full text online (and a slightly higher share of the JOA’s proceeds), the P-I agreed to a revised JOA that would allow the Times to (1) come out in the morning, and (2) invoke an escape clause should it report three consecutive money-losing years.
The latter clause, in retrospect, was a lot like the escape clause former Mariners owner George Argyros demanded from King County in the mid-’80s. Argyros claimed, and the Times and P-I editorially agreed, that the only way to keep the M’s in Seattle was to rewrite the team’s Kingdome lease so Argyros could more easily move the team to Tampa. (Really!) Argyros got his new lease, then promptly attempted to invoke his bug-out option at his first contractual opportunity; the team’s future wasn’t secured until the 1992 sale to the Nintendo-led group that still owns it today.
Similarly, the Times took an agreement that was ostensibly meant to keep both papers in business, and has reconfigured, interpreted, and exploited it in order to try to kill the P-I. The Hearst Corp., which has owned the P-I since 1921 while allowing so many of its other once-mighty dailies to die over the decades, is taking the whole mess to court.
It could end up in any number of ways. Times bossman Frank Blethen says he wants the Times to emerge alone from the fray, and he insists it’ll do so with his family still in charge. But there could conceivably also be a full merger of the papers into one lumbering goliath, or a Hearst buyout of the Times.
What nobody’s openly considering is a return to full competition, with Hearst or some future P-I owner amassing a separate load of presses, trucks, and ad sellers.
But that’s what I’d like to see.
It’d be a perfect opportunity to try and re-invent daily newspapers for the Internet age, when the tiny-print items that have continued to make dailies essential for urban society are more handily available online (movie times, stock prices, sports stats, want ads). In the TV age, dailies survived (albeit in consolidated, monopolized forms in most cities) as the only place you could get such data. With that advantage gone, what would a paper need? Perhaps a strong aesthetic, a sense of the zeitgeist, a coherent package of articles and pictures that at least pretends to try and make sense of a crazy world.
That’s where the P-I, the closest thing the Northwest has to a progressive daily, shines best. Its livelier copywriting and more aggressive feature coverage make it a more intriguing read than the Times has ever been (though both papers were sufficiently compliant suckers for the Bushies’ propaganda massages this past year).
I prefer the P-I as a news product, but I want both papers to live. Any industry that can’t figure out how to make that happen ain’t much of an industry.
