In this week's Stranger, I look into a question that a lot of media-folks have been asking: Will the online-only Seattle Post-Intelligencer be unionized?

Take away the nostalgia and emotion that surrounded the death of this city's oldest daily newspaper, and what you had was a large business with a unionized workforce suddenly becoming a much smaller business with a nonunion workforce. Hearst didn't even have to recruit a whole new staff to accomplish this. All it had to do was announce mass P-I layoffs and offer to hire a small percentage of the P-I's journalists back for a new online-only entity, and the combination of a deep recession and tremendous anxiety about the future of newspapers took care of the rest. According to accounts from P-I staffers, many took significant benefit and pay cuts—in addition to dropping out of the union—in order to secure their new jobs at seattlepi.com.

The Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild has apparently reached some sort of agreement with Hearst that ensures it will be the collective bargaining agent for its former members who were let go from the old P-I and then hired on board the new, non-union (for now) seattlepi.com. But the question is: Do these former union members—and their colleagues, many of whom were never in the union to begin with—even want to be part of the Guild?

Even Joel Connelly, the resolutely pro-labor columnist, said he was "torn" about the idea of unionizing seattlepi.com—though he has made it clear that he had to give up a huge potential severance payment from Hearst and take benefit cuts in order to join the venture.

To at least one seattlepi.com employee, the idea of unionizing is simply too much of a distraction at the moment—a moment that, for the site's employees, is a bit like the frenzied launch of a start-up. "I just haven't given it enough serious thought to know what I'd do or what I'd want," this person said, adding: "I feel my salary is just fine."

I'll be discussing this story tomorrow morning on KUOW's Weekday (94.9 FM starting at 10 a.m.) if you want to listen in. And if you want to comment, the thread is over here.