Monday, January 12, 2009
City / Media "Please join me in the newsroom for a few minutes for an announcement."
Posted by Eli Sanders on Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 9:14 AM
(Originally posted on Saturday and moved up today for our non-weekend readers.)
That was the subject line of the e-mail that Seattle Post-Intelligencer staffers received Friday, at 12:01 p.m., from the paper's publisher, Roger Oglesby. Everyone at the P-I already knew something was up. King 5 television had reported on Thursday evening that the newspaper, which has published in Seattle since 1863, would be put up for sale by its owner, the Hearst Corporation. Afterward, there had been hopeful speculation inside the P-I newsroom that this might be a step toward purchasing the Seattle Times, the paper's longtime cross-town rival. But that was just the hopeful speculation of a group of people who still believed what they had been telling themselves for years: that Hearst Corp., with its deeper pockets, would prevail over the Blethen family, the majority owners of the Seattle Times, in this city's seemingly endless newspaper war.
Over at the Times, after the King 5 report broke on Thursday, there had been more of an immediate realization of what was about to occur. "We got a tip something was coming on at about 5 to 5," one reporter told me. "As the news started, people were starting to gather around the TVs in the core of the newsroom. Everyone was shocked, and some people started crying. It was pretty emotional. I saw one reporter head out in tears to go report the story."
Tears because, though the papers have had a serous and intense rivalry, many journalists in town have worked at both the Times and P-I, or are good friends with someone at the other paper. Tears, too, because at moments like the one that was occurring, journalists tend to realize that their shared experience of working in a declining industry and at the pleasure of publishers and corporations whose motivations and financial situations can't always be known, and whose actions can't easily be predicted, is a powerful commonality—more powerful than, say, the fact that they write under different mastheads in newsrooms with slightly different cultures.At the Times, David Boardman, the paper's executive editor, was seen running toward Times publisher Frank Blethen's office as soon as the Thursday report finished airing. In the newsroom, it immediately became a story everyone wanted a piece of. By the time Boardman came back a short while later, reporters had been assigned and he'd clammed up; he didn't want to be quoted. Stories were written, put to bed, printed, published online.
Then, on Friday, the e-mail message from Oglesby. It was a body-less e-mail, the only text being that foreboding subject line: "Please join me in the newsroom for a few minutes for an announcement." People in both newsrooms by now had a sense that it wasn't going to be good news for the P-I. The King 5 story, though it was anonymously-sourced, still hadn't been knocked down—despite the fact that many of the best reporters in town had been trying hard, for about 20 hours, to prove or disprove its accuracy.
Mike Lewis, who writes the Under the Needle column for the P-I, was out of the office working on a column and received Oglesby's e-mail via Gmail. “Well, that meant obviously something was going to happen," he told me. By the time he reached the P-I newsroom, Steve Swarz, president of Hearst Newspapers, was already there and addressing the staff while P-I managing editor David McCumber stood behind him, a heartbreaking collection of fidgets and downcast expressions. Swarz, Lewis told me, "kind of did the journalistic equivalent of the breakup speech: 'It’s not you, it’s me.'”
It wasn't about the quality of their journalism, which was great. It was about the business, which was losing money—$14 million from the P-I alone in 2008.
“And then he slowly talked the air out of the room," Lewis said. People cried quietly, or stood there with the thousand-yard stare. Some tried to ask questions. Swarz wouldn't answer them. “It wasn’t a dialogue, obviously, it was a monologue," Lewis told me.
The paper would be put on sale for 60 days. Then, if there were no buyers, it would cease printing.
Reporters asked: Does this mean the P-I will become an online publication? (Implied: Can we still work for it if it does?) What does it mean that our union contract is currently expired and about to be renegotiated? If we are laid off while the contract is expired, will we get the severance guaranteed under the old contract? Does this mean Hearst is purchasing something else in the area? Maybe the Belo-owned King 5?
“He just gave his half-sheepish, uncomfortable smile and didn’t respond.”
Mental gears began churning, those skeptical, suspicious, competitive gears that reporters use to their advantage in the normal course of work. Why had they been scooped on the story of their own likely demise? What the fuck?
"It seems clear that Hearst and/or the P-I publisher who works for Hearst intentionally leaked the news to King," another P-I staffer told me. "Maybe that's obvious to you guys, but in the whirl of yesterday's news, it took me a few hours to put it together. King reported the news Thursday at 5. King's report was very accurate. And some of the language sounded similar to Hearst's own announcement language. More importantly, by mid-day Friday, several Hearst executives from New York had visited the P-I news room. It seems extremely unlikely they all ran out and bought plane tickets because of the story King ran at 5 p.m. Thursday. Rather, it seems more likely they had previously planned the announcement and had themselves leaked the news... Hearst did not let us get scooped on the story of our own demise, Hearst arranged it. To me, that's disrespectful and plain tacky. Fuckers."
Other gears churned, too. Self-preservation gears, logical gears. Could they hang tight and hope someone would purchase the P-I? No, probably not. Who wants a newspaper these days? And what would anyone even get by buying the P-I? (Which, because of its Joint Operating Agreement with the Times, doesn't own any printing presses or employ any significant number of advertising or circulation staff.)
“There’s nothing to purchase," Lewis said. "We’re a room of people in a rented building. I’d happily offer my services. But I don’t know what they’d buy. I guess they’d get a letterhead and some pretty battered laptops, but there’s just not a lot there to buy.”
Time to drink, then.
People left the building. People took walks. People came back inside bearing inexpensive scotch and whiskey and a case of Rainier. People opened the bottles and cans, talked, mourned.
“What can you do?" Lewis said. "It’s turned into a wake, essentially. A 60-day wake. The career is drying up. It’s not just this paper.”
Over at the Times, the mood was similarly dour. A reporter there wrote me: "The mood in the newsroom is somber and—in the case especially of longtime reporters—devastated. I have heard of one editor who expressed some happiness over the end of the P-I, but that's it."
Among the ambivalent, a newsman with a long memory who wrote to me: "Remember when the P-I was so sure that they had won the newspaper war that they came and pissed on the Times lawn? I'm tempted to take a leak myself tonight, but will restrain myself."
Boardman, the Times' executive editor, took a different approach, sending an e-mail to P-I staffers that read: "While we have long been fierce rivals, please know that we take no joy in the likely closure of the P-I. Whatever future there is for a daily newspaper in Seattle will be built upon the legacy of courageous, competitive journalism we've built together with you over the decades."
So, again, time to drink.
P-I staffers gathered after work at Buckley's in lower Queen Anne, just a couple blocks away from their offices overlooking Elliott Bay. They sat around, hugged, talked about what to do next. Present were several P-I couples whose incomes are entirely dependent on a Hearst paycheck: Dan DeLong and Vanessa Ho, Angela Galloway and Lewis Kamb, Claudia Rowe and Dan Kearney. One P-I couple with a 5-month-old kid talked about spending the weekend cleaning up their house and getting ready to put it on the market.
An editor offered to buy Mike Lewis a drink. “I said, 'Just double up whatever you’re getting.'”
Lewis is 43 years old. He's worked at the P-I for eight years, and in journalism for 20. “It’s all I know, and it’s all I’ve ever wanted to do," he told me. “What I do is who I am, and I’m proud of that.” People from other newspapers have been e-mailing him to offer condolences, but that doesn't mean they have any work to offer him. “I’ve got friends in journalism. That always counted for something. It doesn’t anymore.”
Sure, Lewis knew for a long time that he wasn't in a thriving industry, and that the P-I, like every other newspaper, was struggling with declining revenues and circulation. “It’s been like being on this endless flight, on this plane where the engine’s on fire, and it won’t crash," he said. He never really wanted off, though.
So what to do now besides a few more columns before the 60 days are up?
“I don’t know," Lewis said to me. "You guys hiring?”
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Rainier Beer at the Seattle PI's wake. How apropos. Goodbye, old Seattle.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iz-WuLQz_…
Ah, that's the newspaper industry I'll miss. Seriously.
Lynne Varner from the Times and Dave Horsey from the P-I were both on, and Varner did everything short of breaking into song about how great a thing this was, how happy she was to be on the "winning" side, etc.
I've always hated Varner with a passion - so much so that I had to go look up who she was when I heard her talk because, well, WHO IS THIS IDIOT? - but it was rude and tone deaf even for her.
She set a new low bar for professionalism.
Horsey was diplomatic about it of course. Not much you can do when you're on "the losing end" and will probably have to work for the bitch in 60 days anyway.
?
BIG ISLAM obviously is behind this failing of a business model, you inbred hick.
Good suggestion in the comments that the Stranger beef up its local news reporting. You guys may be the only game in town in a couple of years. I don't think the P-I's demise is going to make the Blethens profitable again.
cuz i ain't giving blethen another dime.
Rags, entertainment or tabloid, have often been in a position to move into a "record of source" position based upon the economic failing of others. One door closes and another opens. And they have remained true to the entertainment/tabloid roots that got them there in the first place.
Will The Stranger, come later this year, tap the experience and talent of those investigative reporters wanting to stay in this market at any price, as a freelancer or staff? Those hard hitting reporters who want to drop Stranger-style f-bombs or two to make a point, but with the street-cred of style it takes to be recognized by media peers? Hire or purchase the subtleties of fact based vs. editorial based reporting?
The Stranger has been crowing and blowing its own horn about how it is not a "family paper", proud as to how it provides a wider and deeper perspective into the community then what MSM can, that the MSM by its very business structure can only ever appeal to the lowest-common-denominator through its reporting style . Will The Stranger step up and shift to a newsroom which provides credible coverage time and time again? Will it expand its local (and regional) (or dare to say it, national) reporting standards? Will its operating model be added to?
Or are the publishers, and through extension it's senior editors, going to adopt a "too bad, so sad" here's another issue of puff pieces and the once in a blue-moon "see, we ARE a news organization, SEE!! SEE!!!" top-notch investigative story? Will The Stranger mature as a business, or remain merely a rag based on news-worthy opinions of others? Remain at its core an entertaining rag?
Seattle can still be a major two newspaper town, with two newsrooms of source.
Time will tell, I suppose.
Resume the love-fest.
Maybe the games are better, I don't know. But I have never, ever gone to a newspaper website for the games.
The P-I's articles tend to be posted more often, are easily accessible, the commenting function is popular and easy to find and use (unfortunately, this means the Sound-Offs are often full of idiots, but sometimes they can be great), they have neighborhood-specific sections... It's easier to use and to find things throughout the site, whereas the Times site is more opaque and frustrating.
Its the bottom line, ultimately.
Regina Hackett is a community treasure and I hope she rides this out somehow.
The Slog is daily reading for me, but this is my first comment post. I think you accurately captured things from the P-I side, and it was fascinating to read what happened across town at the Times.
Boardman's e-mail to our newsroom chokes me up every time. And your post made me cry a couple of times.
One of my early assignments after I began writing for the P-I in 2006 was to cover the King County Journal closing. I lingered outside in the parking lot, interviewing the laid off employees.
Two years later, I'm writing about the demise of my own paper and interviewing the folks I've grown to love.
I don't think that Hearst purposely leaked the news to King 5. That makes no sense. We were all wrapping up our stories for Thursday, a lot of them about the flooding and the closed roads.
Next thing, King 5 is reporting that the P-I might close. We're all like, "Is this some sick joke?" Then we look to our editors and bosses and they're just as stumped. WTF indeed.
Thanks for your report.
Andrea James
P-I reporter
I mean, that's all journalism has amounted to in the past few years...changing words here and there on press releases (both from the Bush administration and from corporations) and plugging holes with them.
Seriously, I've been a P-I person my whole life-- my parents never brought home the Times. There are some great reporters there and if the Stranger is at all able to, pick some of them up. Please.
Fucking hell.
The bolded evil-corporation diatribe might fit if the PI didn't lose $14MM in 2008 and have a 6+ year streak in the red. Anyone who didn't expect either the PI or Times to give up has been living in a cave.
Stopping the newsroom's paychecks will kill this paper's only assets, but it certainly isn't going to save Hearst $14 million. Hearst had obviously strapped an immovable load of crap to these people's backs, now they'll cast them off and bounce above the surface momentarily to gorge themselves on more arbitrage spoils and dump more crap somewhere else.
The news is heart breaking. What is happening to journalism? Everyone should go out and buy a newspaper... or find a way to make newspapers more profitable. The newspaper I report for is entirely dependent on ads, which is hard to do in a recession!
I wonder if there's any way forward there. I'm going to guess that it's impossible to charter as both a business and a non-profit simultaneously. Yet newspapers like the P-I clearly are both businesses, and producers of a greater social good. I'm sure I'm not the only person who doesn't want a newspaper at his house but does want one in his town. This problem will have to be solved eventually, but unfortunately the answer will come too late for the people who work at the P-I.
Yes, the Stranger covering local city council meetings! I can hear the opening graph now:
"Shit, I can't believe my editors sent me to cover these shitbags again. Fuck, I'm gonna miss out on the midget tossing up on the Hill, and have to sit for 4 hours listening to that squirmy asshole Licata talk about affordable fucking housing.....What's a rock 'n roll queer like myself gonna do?."
Thank you for playing Slog.
The Stranger has survived by maintaining a small, underpaid staff with crappy benefits, and can probably continue for some time. But suggesting it can somehow hire the cream of the P-I crop, or become a daily newspaper, is delusional.
I'm sure Stranger leadership would tell you the same thing.
Divide by $45k, for example, and you get about 311 very average paychecks and there's none left over for expenses. No building rent, no electric bill, no server hosting, no pens. No money for the pressmen and advertising staffers they're borrowing from the Times, either.
I'm not sure how big the PI newsroom and staff are or how much they get paid. But saving $14 million on salary alone sounds, sickeningly, within reason.
So long, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, you had a great run, but the only question to be resolved now it seems is where MOHAI is going to put that big, beautiful neon globe.
Wow, Dan, guess my satire wasn't far off the mark. No wonder the Stranger's not been shortlisted for any Pulitzers. When you hire those old 'hacks' over from the PI, better let them know that the best journalists use the F-bomb at least once in the opening graph.
And I love the "F" word, as you all know. In fact, I think the "F" word, and the "F" word alone, can save print journalism.
Thank you for playing Slog.
Well it's certainly easier and cheaper than actually going out and doing reporting, but better?
It was a fine story, but I think the reason Sloggers were so overwhelmed by it was that it did something unusual for a staff-posted Slog:
Eli actually went out and did interviews and placed how the people he wrote about first, instead of his opinions.
What he did was what reporters are supposed to do, as opposed to linking to a newspaper story that somebody else researched and then making snarky comments.
If you looked through the back issues of both The Times and The P-I for the past year, you'd see plenty more such stories, on plenty more subjects.
So perhaps this might be something for The Stranger's editors to consider.
That is, tell the staffers they can link away to the mainstream media stories, and post away with snarky comments.
But that, also, half of the time, they cannot post something unless they have left the office, done some interviews, made phone calls for independent research.
And that, after that, they let the people they're writing about tell their stories in their own words and actions.
It's kinda of a rad idea for The Stranger, I know, but look at the reaction that such a story by Eli got.
It will not, and could not, expanded into the aging boomer market, nor into an fuddy-duddy audience offended by the occasional use of FUCK as an exclamatory point maker. But into the educated, open minded, but aging 25-35 year old demographic.
It is a market fact that consumer preferences change as folk’s age and that audience/consumers could be lost if their market needs and demands are not met.
The Stranger’s audience is 78% single, 79% straight, are Gen-x’s, is read by 2% more men than women. Over half the audience graduated college, ¾ of its audience votes. And ¾ of the audience owns pets (an aside: why did you pay for that stat, stranger?)
Contrast this to the PI (JOA combined stats)… it’s not known if the readers are married or single, straight or gay. But more of them are college educated than not. Close to 3 times the number of its readers owns a home than rent. More than half of its readers have a household income greater that $75k. The PI is read by more people between the ages of 45 and death. 6% more men than women read the PI.
The Stranger knows that nearly 700,000 unique individuals read it online and 400,000 will grab a copy of the paper. The PI reaches 1.4 million readers weekly, with 1 million grabbing the physical paper 5 days a week.
These numbers exist for one reason, to generate revenue from advertisements. Subscription revenue for each is not a reportable figure. I would guess at The Stranger the subscription revenue is slightly above nil and the PI it's too embarrassing to put next to the 1.9 million possible readers.
What makes money? An interest in the content of the written word gets folks' eyeballs, but that interest alone will not keep the paper (news org) open. Neither would all the Pulitzer winners with all the best prose that ever existed, if advertisers and by extention consumers, found it to be of no value. I doubt The Stranger could afford the cream of the PI crop of reporters (the ugly truth is, in the long haul, neither could Hearst or the PI). But, there is talent that wants to write, that want the freedom to be wordsmiths, that want to work in this market but need somesort of income.
If it were my wish list, I would go with sports (weekly stats and some of those great first person Stranger interviews with sounder & storm players. Those string players that are often overlooked by other organizations, but who want their name in print) (and not too mention, adult league soccer). What does what it take to get another syndicated column or two? talent would be a start, then longterm audience appeal.
Oh, while its on the table, how about a column targeted at that pet audience? That’s an awful big number of eyeballs that is going to waste, isn’t it?
Sad whenever anyone loses a job. Sadder when a company goes down. Sadder still when it's part of an industry going down.
And I find myself saying, "yeah but ... "
It's great having two major newspapers in town. Good for the city. The papers keep each other on their toes. We'll likely see the quality of local reporting go down (further than it's already fallen with the many layoffs, etc).
But ... the two web sites really aren't very different from each other. The newsrooms aren't that different. The staffs aren't very different. I've worked both places (as many people have) and read both for years and years.
Having two papers is a luxury the market simply doesn't support. Things have shifted. It has happened in other industries. It the way of our economy and society.
Should we bail out this industry? You could probably make more of an argument for this industry than a lot of others. Contributions to civil discourse and engagement are immense.
But ... that's not the way our economy works (or should anyway, in my opinion, acknowledging the bailouts of the financial and auto sectors).
Which brings me to my final point. I honestly feel bad for the folks at the P-I (as I said, I hate to see anyone lose their job, company go down, industry, etc).
But ... these folks stayed with the P-I, which was fighting mightily to outspend and outlast the Times so that this very thing would happen -- except with the roles reversed. So while many, many other folks left the P-I for other papers or other industries, these folks took a gamble and stayed and fought. And now they have lost.
I respect that. And I'm saddened by this latest downturn in a lethal spiral.
To me, it's sad.
But ... not tragic.
Hey, I'm a product of English public boys school, f-bombs came 5-pence a dozen and were used with far more panache in the halls of my House that any Stranger writer could imagine. I only have a problem with the f-bomb when you read through a copy of the Stranger or Seattle Weekly and realize there's little more to it than that: f-bombs used to cover lousy writing with no reporting. But I guess some readers like it because angers their bourgeois parents.
Only half-joking, folks. And I second the motion that The Stranger should hire D. Parvaz, and Cathy Sorbo too.
It no longer surprises me that few writers write well (yes, I realize the staffer may not be a writer).
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/import…
The main reason to get a newspaper was to see what movies were playing, or what bands or where to go eat, or in the case of The Stranger, where to go get drunk; and with ads for call girls in the back of some publications - The Stranger and Seattle Weekly - how to get serviced sexually.
The American public school system surely didn't help matters, as it essentially ceased to teach reading, writing and what was once called simply "arithmetic" to so many students. It became a race to the bottom, educationally.
When Craig Newmark, creator of Craig's List (sic) came along, and took most of the classified advertising that had been the cash cow for daily papers, the fix was in.
The empty suits at the Hearst Corporation were just along for the ride, like anyone else. They didn't create the death of daily papers, just tried to make money on them, while they could. After all, it is that not the American way?
This is why copy editors used to hover over copy, wearing green eye shades.
To 77:
Newmark, that evil fellow, for figuring out his email list of web sites he thought were good was such an industry killer in 1994 - 1995.
TV! yes, and radio before it.
Those schools. Taught by the same union members most in the newspaper business eagerly support. So how many educators now will be hiring ex PI staffers for substitute teacher gigs?
And most of all those evil corporate suits that want to make a profit but had no idea how once you took away the "little nickel" and sex ads function of the daily paper.
See, every argument made is just not a credible one. Evolution is not very fun if you're a dinosaur. But it is evolution none the less.
"Computers will never replace newspaper until I can buy a copy for a quarter then leave it on the bus when I'm done with it."
Well, you can't quite do that yet. But you can read the news on the bus, and have been able to for a few years now. And everything from ebay to craigslist to the Stranger cannibalized the classified -- but where was the Times and PI when this was happening? Scoffing at those scummy fringe medias probably.
I will miss Editorial Layout and I will miss Editorial Judgement. I'll sometimes miss an omniscient reporter / editor setting the agenda for an entire readership. But over all isn't it better right now for the reader with literally thousands of sources -- most of them interactive -- than it was in the Good Old Days when one only could buy a paper and leave it on the bus when they were finished?
(Fuckers).
In 50 years, it should be pulled out and read again. I am hoping by then we will wonder how we put up with the corporate greed. When the rest of the story comes out on this deal, I hope the Stranger will do another fantastic job of bringing us what actually went down in the private jets and closed rooms.
And a bonus is of trading up from Slog to a newspaper site is the absence (mostly) of random bolding. (That crap insults my intelligence, as if I can't figure out the important parts of a story on my own.)
But reading some of these SLOG comments, I'm thinking that many posters are unaware or simply ignoring the fact that the quality of the P-I has been sliding for at least the past decade. Like most dailies in the US, it's been between the rock and hard place of wanting to be a real newspaper with hard news but knowing that it had to do something else to get people who love television to buy a copy. Thus, the fluff content of the P-I is enormous these days: food, fashion, sports, auto, real estate, and of course, TV--all of those sections take precedence over hard news. The staff was still capable of doing excellent work on multi-part, well-researched analytical stories on a wide range of issues, but the frequency of such stories appearing on its pages has been declining for a long time.
There was a period in the early 1980s when the P-I regularly published an 8-12 page Sunday section of extended hard news pieces and meaty features. Freelancers were able to submit stories and get published, but the union wanted that money for its own members and stopped that practice. I view that as the best period for the P-I; it regularly ran stories that required some commitment to read.
Compare that with the last decade: lots of headlines above the fold on TV--celebs, shows, gossip. Lots of gigantic front page photos taking up space that used to contain words. Sports sports sports. On pages 2-3, reviews of world events in 2 paragraphs or less. Frustrating for long-time newspaper addicts like myself, but a reflection of online realities.
I wish it could be different, but I think bemoaning the loss of a major daily that was drowning in fluff is a waste of breath or typing. I do hope that some of the real reporters can land jobs where they can act like the watchdogs they're supposed to be, but where are those places?
Lindee
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