The Seattle Times' suburban retreat
First of a series: Publisher Frank Blethen sought to conquer the Eastside but helped turn the suburbs into a daily newspaper desert.
Editor's note: This is the first of a series of articles on the financial crisis facing The Seattle Times.
What was that famous quote about the Romans? "They made a desert and called it peace." It came to mind when I read that The Seattle Times was closing its suburban bureaus, including its once substantial Eastside operation in Bellevue. In a story about the newspaper's hefty layoffs and cutbacks, Eastide columnist Sherry Grindeland was quoted by Eric Pryne saying: "It's a sad day. I feel the Eastside is going to not be getting the attention it should get." That's an understatement.
During its years of empire, the Times considered any territory Times territory, and for years a war was fought on the Eastside for daily newspaper supremacy. I used to work for the original parent company of the old Bellevue Journal-American, which later was called the Eastside Journal and, in its final death throes, the King County Journal. I was also editor and publisher of Eastsideweek at its founding in 1990 – an alternative newsweekly launched by Crosscut founder David Brewster as a foray into the suburbs by Seattle Weekly. For a time, I had a front seat view of the competition for the growing Eastside market.
The old Journal-American had been founded in 1976 when John McClelland Jr. of Longview, Wash., merged two weekly papers into the state's first daily in 60 or so years. It also turned out to be probably the last. The idea was that the paper would serve the booming suburbs in a way the Seattle papers couldn't and wouldn't, and like a town getting a pro-sports franchise, Bellevue's daily served notice that the town had arrived and had world-class ambitions. That was punctuated for Seattleites when Bellevue's first skyscrapers began popping up on the skyline in the 1980s. What the hell is going on over there? people asked.
McClelland made no bones about wanting a full-service, regionally competitive paper. The Seattle Post-Intelligener competed for morning circulation, mostly newsstand. The afternoon Times gained a stronger hand after it got the joint operating agreement with the P-I renegotiated, freeing it to compete in the morning against smaller game on the market periphery. Frank Wetzel, former editor of the J-A and former Times ombudsman, thinks the JOA was a turning point:
I have little doubt that the JOA contributed to the demise of the Journal-American. The JOA permitted the Times to concentrate on developing its coverage of the suburbs instead of competing full-scale with the P-I. Now, it appears, the Eastside will be bereft of the sort of careful coverage that only a daily newspaper can provide. The damned JOA should never have been approved.
In the 1990s, the Times decided to really muscle in on Eastside turf. It opened a big bureau in Bellevue, even shifting its printing operation to Bothell to better distribute in the suburbs. In 1995, it bought the Issaquah Press. It established a beachhead in the burbs and produced daily zoned editions for the city of Seattle, the Eastside, Snohomish County, and South King County. That allowed them to go head-to-head with the J-A (and the Everett Herald and Tacoma News Tribune) in local news.
While the Times was getting stronger, the J-A was weakened by ownership changes and a decline in editorial quality. As a latecomer to the daily game in a market that was a mile wide and an inch deep, the J-A had trouble taking root. It had tended to be Bellevue-centric, which was off-putting to fast-gowing towns like Redmond and Kirkland, and its brand of localism failed to give an increasingly sophisticated readership the type of coverage it wanted. For example, in the late '80s and early '90s, the J-A was the go-to paper to learn about Kemper Freeman Jr.'s new plans for Bellevue Square, but not for coverage of companies that were the future of the area, like Microsoft and Nintendo.
Times Publisher Frank Blethen's move into the market ratcheted up the pressure. The then-money-rich Times threw resources at the J-A's strengths, and the Eastside edition not only dramatically improved and expanded Eastside news coverage but also became the go-to source for basics like prep sports and gossip. They hired fixtures like Grindeland, the Eastside's Jean Godden. The zoned edition allowed the Times to pick off local advertisers. With the near-monopoly power of the government-sanctioned JOA, the Times campaign took a toll on the J-A, which eventually wound up in a death spiral of cost-cutting, mismanagement, and confused identity.
The battle became bitter. One famous skirmish was during the newspaper strike in 2000, when the Journal's publisher, Peter Horvitz, agreed to print the first edition of the strike paper, the Seattle Union Record. Enraged at this breach in the fellowship of publishers – even one who intends to put you out of business – Blethen sent Horvitz an email: "Fuck you to death," it said.
Comments:
Posted Tue, Apr 8, 10:20 p.m. inappropriate
Seattle Times Closures Sad for Eastside, but Open Opportunities: Nice article Knute. I didn't realize some of the history (although I did deliver the Journal American when I was a kid).
This is a sad time for the Seattle Times (and the entire newspaper industry) - and especially for great people like Sherry Grindeland who has served our community for so many years.
It does, however, open the door for a lot of opportunity.
Eastside Business newspaper is here to serve the Eastside and we will look into any and all options on how to increase that service - perhaps printing more frequently and including more community news and journalism. If anyone has any ideas or suggestions - I would love to hear them.
I have personally reached out to Sherry and offered her a venue for her great stories (although I know she is worth A LOT more than we could ever pay her). I'm hoping that she will continue to write such poignant stories - and that we get to print them.
Posted Wed, Apr 9, 11:13 a.m. inappropriate
History of dailies in Washington: Excellent article.
One tiny nit: You mentioned the J-A was the first new daily in Washington for 60 years or so. In fact, the Tri-City Herald launched as a daily newspaper in November 1947 (out of the weekly Pasco Herald).
Additionally, I'm not sure when the Bremerton Sun started. My grandfather was a reporter for the Bremerton Searchlight, which I believe was its predecessor. That would have been in the '20s or '30s. And speaking of, my grandfather launched the Shelton Daily Spokesman around 1931, which also would have been inside of that 60-year window. It was a short-lived effort, folding in 1933. Why he thought Shelton needed a daily during the Depression is beyond me.
Posted Wed, Apr 9, 1:01 p.m. inappropriate
Also, while I was referring to traditional daily newspapers, another trend should not be overlooked: the free commuter mini-daily. Sound Publishing, which moved heavily into the Eastside market after the King County Journal folded, publishes many suburban newspapers in the region. In 2005, they launched The Kitsap Free Daily. It claims a circulation of 10,000. It's part of a national trend that follows the success of city newsweeklies in attracting solid circulation with free distribution, something conventional daily newspapers have always disparaged. The rise of the Web has erased some of the stigma of "throwaways," which is what daily people used to call free papers. It's possible that as traditional daily papers continue to struggle with costs and declining readership, more smaller, targeted dailies will start to crop up. They seem appear in connection with some kind of commuter mass transit: rail, subways, or in Kitsap's case, ferries.
Posted Wed, Apr 9, 2:07 p.m. inappropriate
Look at the Times-PI settlement: I liked this series, but think you should have scrutinized more closely those documents Blethen and the PI signed last year, ostensibly settling their disagreements. Reading between the lines, what Blethen had done was to siphon off operating revenues from the two papers to pay for that $200 million Blethen expedition into Maine. Remember that the old Knight-Ridder operation opposed that purchase, because they said Blethen paid wildly higher than the real worth of the Maine newspapers.
How right those Knight Ridder execs look now that Blethen is reportedly shopping them for $100 million. Some in the newspaper industry I know say he will be very lucky to get $50 million if he can find anyone interest in this climate.
The other interesting facts to come out of the 2006 Times-PI settlement is how much Blethen was siphoning from Seattle to pay for his Maine ventures. We don't really know the figures, but we do know the settlement said Blethen would pay the PI $24 million, stop as siphoning off $2 million for Maine, and stop charging the salaries and administrative expenses of various Blethen execs and family members to the JOA.
Reading between the lines, what I get out of all of this is that Blethen has made an historic mistake in Maine, and cannot pay his expenses for this money-losing boondoggle. He also has to pay for Ryan's very extravagant life. His fix is now he can't get out of Maine (where there is established and very clever competition).
A very long post explaining why I personally do not believe the Seattle Times is really losing money. It is a cash cow, and always has been. What I think is happening is Blethen is losing money, and buckets of it.
I encourage you to devote more resources to covering this modern-day perversion of the Citizen Kane story. It's a real tragedy for Seattle and journalism, and I can't think of anyway Blethen can move other than sell off more of his holdings either to the PI, or McClatchy. God, I wish there was someone with deep pockets and an interest in journalism who would move in here.
Posted Wed, Apr 9, 3:23 p.m. inappropriate
Thanks: Knute ... Thanks for an insightful article.
As someone who moved from North Seattle (Maple Leaf/Northgate) to Newport Hills in 1992, I really knew very little about the Eastside in general, partly due to the regional editions of the Times and the fact that the PI rarely covered anything on the east side of the Lake.
I was delighted when Eastside Week first came on the scene, finding it a valuable source of real information about what was going on at that time, especially with Bellevue's annexation activity.
You are dead on regarding the Journal -- sometimes it seemed as though it should be entitled the KFJ (Kemper Freeman Journal) or maybe the BWJ (Bob Wallace Journal). I actually sat on the Journal's editorial board for a few months in 1995 and was not particularly impressed with the major players at the table.
I agree with the last post about someone with deep pockets coming into the picture to fill the holes left in coverage of the Eastside. We really do need our own publication/website -- we are very different from the city of Seattle and are really in the throes of great cultural and social change. Maybe we can get someone like Ron Sher interested in the idea of news coverage ...
Posted Thu, Apr 10, 9 a.m. inappropriate
Interesting article...: Interesting article...
It seems to make sense and sheds some light on the war room decisions being made over at the Times.
I am sure that what happened to the J-A was greatly impacted be the Times' struggle with the P-I and the focus that Blethen had on Bellevue and the rest of the Eastide suburbs. You mention: "the Times campaign took a toll on the J-A, which eventually wound up in a death spiral of cost-cutting, mismanagement, and confused identity."
A great deal more could be said about this spiral though. The death of two once proud daily newspapers, the Journal American (J-A) and the Valley Daily News, can be attributed to the botched actions of those at the helm: Peter Horvitz and Barbara Morgan.
Ask any former newsroom worker that was present during the bumbling transition from Journal American to the King County Journal and I am sure that 90% would list the unwavering focus that Horvitz (and his editor, Morgan) placed on a terribly flawed business plan.
Faced with a tidal wave of competitive measures from the Times Horvitz instead chose to focus on how to connect the J-A and the Valley Daily News. THe VDN was purchased by a previous owner and was part of the overpriced package that Horvitz paid for. The centers of these two papers were Bellevue and Kent respectively. Horvitz, with razor like focus set out on a course of not only connecting the two newsrooms, but connecting the two circulation areas. It never worked. For readers in Bellevue Kent might as well have been Alabama.
Over the years the newsroom suffered with expensive computer systems that never worked and implementing the stumbling plans of connecting the circulation areas. During this spiral the paper changed names not once but twice. It was like the paper could never figure out its own identity. Experienced journalists ran for the exit doors. Excited new faces were unceremoniously laid off in waves of desperate cost cutting measures. The plan never wavered though. Everyone could foresee the end coming. The newsroom joke was that "Peter was rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic."
The story of the J-A is tragic. If there was never any connection to the Valley Daily News then the mission statement of the Journal American would have been so much simpler: become the newspaper of daily record for the Eastside. Who knows? If the J-A was allowed to operate this way then perhaps all the folks living on the Eastside would still have focused local news they could read in a daily newspaper...