Seattle PI vs. Seattle Times – It’s a Deathmatch

Will over at Horsesass.org turned us on to a story today from a news source I hadn’t heard of.  And I should. Their name is Crosscut, and they link to me and thus, I apologize.  But as disturbed as I am about not giving back the eternal link in my news source roll (I will), I am even more disturbed by the story that Frank Blethen’s, Seattle Times is at the forefront of completely hijacking print media of the most populated western half of our state.  But I’m not surprised…

A potential bombshell is buried in 3.5 million pages of documents and testimony collected for a winner-take-all arbitration between Seattle’s two daily newspapers, which begins next week. In a deposition, a former Seattle Times Co. executive claims that Times officials in the mid-1990s secretly violated their joint operating agreement (JOA) with Hearst Corp., owner of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, using unfairly lopsided circulation spending to keep the Seattle Times‘ circulation lead over the P-I. Times executives then tricked Hearst into giving up their paper’s exclusivity in the morning, the former executive claims. Since the joint operation began 1983, the P-I had been the morning paper and the bigger Times had the less-desirable afternoon publishing cycle. Today, of course, both are morning papers and the P-I is in a circulation death spiral.

[...]

“The mandate” from Times Publisher Frank Blethen “was that the Times would maintain its dominant position,” Sparks told the investigators.

Oh yea… that is business for you.  Well, not exactly.  Watching the Times editorial and you find the republican consistency of mud in most all of its content related to the interests of Frank Blethen himself.  While there has been a little dissent amongst Times reporters, much of it could be filed under the “We don’t want to look like Fox News” chapters.

Crosscut’s story makes me wonder even more about the fate of traditional media in that the efforts to drown the opposition isn’t one more effort to narrow the conversation to the few shallow talking points that live in the hearts of editors. Will that ultimately be the beginning of their own end?  After all, the continual decline of news print media is an exact opposing reaction of doing just that.  And ultimately, citizen journalists, bloggers, and online media like Crosscut, win.   And even more oddly, and something to think about, is we, at least us bloggers, are seemingly more polarized than them.  Hmmm… Where is this going?

 

Jimmy on April 2, 2007 | Filed Under General

2 Comments

Darci  on April 5th, 2007

No offense to my hard working, well-intentioned host blogger and his cohorts, but the traditional style media is valuable and necessary. Just because fair and balanced is a joke at Fox News and an unattainable ideal everywhere else does not diminish the importance of news coverage that strives for that ideal. Whatever the format, I appreciate the traditional approach to news coverage and consider blogs a supplement to, not a replacement for, that coverage.

So I say, GO P-I! Two papers really ARE better than one.

Jimmy  on April 5th, 2007

I think my point was hard to get. I agree that two papers are better than one. But one, with a pretty heavy slant, is trying to squash the other to dominate the market. In doing so, and with that political slant potentially being the only “major” print news in that market, to me puts them at risk of being more like a blog and less like a traditional media source. Is that the future of print media? I don’t know about that but drifting that way is an odd symptom to watch for.