Seattle Paper Is Resurgent as a Solo Act
By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
Published: August 9, 2009
SEATTLE — When The Seattle Times became this city’s only surviving daily newspaper in March, even The Times itself could not muster much optimism about its chances.
Frank A. Blethen, the publisher, said then that the demise of the rival Post-Intelligencer, known as The P-I, was no guarantee that his money-losing paper would make it. In an article in March on Seattle’s becoming “a one-newspaper town,” The Times asked, “will it become a no-newspaper town?”
But less than five months later, a nearly forgotten word has crept back into Times executives’ vocabulary: profit. “On a month-to-month basis, we are starting to operate in the black,” Mr. Blethen, who is also chief executive of The Seattle Times Company, said in an interview last week.
How much black ink and by what measure, the privately held company will not say, and amid a sharp advertising downturn, no one denies that its situation remains precarious. But The Times has improved its prospects by picking up most P-I subscribers and managing to keep them so far. It says its daily circulation rose more than 30 percent, to more than 260,000 in June, from about 200,000.
Oddly enough, what remains of The P-I is also faring better than expected. The Hearst Corporation kept the paper’s Web site alive as a news operation with a small staff, heavily reliant on more than 200 unpaid bloggers who write on things as diverse as their neighborhoods, cooking and marathon running.
Industry analysts called it a long-shot experiment, but SeattlePI.com has kept most of the reader traffic it had as a newspaper site. Hearst will not say whether it makes money, but it says that audience and revenue are ahead of projection.
The Times and The P-I had a joint operating agreement, sharing production and delivery expenses, an arrangement that is meant as a life raft for failing papers but that has often turned into concrete shoes for the stronger partner. The Times had been fighting for years to get out of its pact with Hearst, arguing that it drained resources and artificially kept a weaker competitor afloat.
Joint operating agreements “delay the inevitable death of the second newspaper, which becomes a drag on the operation,” said John Morton, an independent newspaper industry analyst. “It’s not too surprising that The Times is doing better on its own.”
The Times, long seen as one of the best regional papers in the country, has had an unusually big newsroom for its circulation, and a devotion to time-consuming investigative work. Mr. Blethen resisted cutting the staff or the size of the paper long after most big papers started to shrink.
But cuts became unavoidable, and the newsroom has dropped to 210 people, from about 375 five years ago. Now, Times executives have an unexpected hope that the cutting has stopped, at least for a while.
“We’re about at the floor of what we feel we can have and still put out a Seattle Times we can be proud of,” said David Boardman, the executive editor. “We’ve had to be more thoughtful in choosing what we do, but I’m not one to claim that less is more. Less is less.”
SeattlePI’s news staff of 20 people, down from The P-I’s 165, covers only a few subjects closely, like crime, the aerospace industry and transportation, while offering links to news on other sites. Michelle Nicolosi, the executive producer, said the site, rather than resembling a traditional news organization, “is trying to be Seattle’s home page.”
Other news sites populated by former P-I staff members have also cropped up, expanding Seattle’s already-vibrant range of alternative news choices, and turning the city into something of an online news laboratory.
“There’s still a lot of competition, but only in certain niches,” said David Brewster, publisher of Crosscut.com, a two-year-old news site. “The Times is weaker than it used to be, but a lot of the people who said the loss of The P-I was the end of the world, now they’re reading The Times and saying it’s better than they expected.”
The Times has repeatedly defied the odds just to get to this point.
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