Chronicling the Times and P-I as they fight to the death

One of Crosscut's goals is to broaden the definition of journalist and to accommodate many notions of what journalism is. Besides showcasing and pointing to what we regard as great professional work by our writers and others, we want to give voice to those who aren't professionals and even those who might have a conflict of interest but who offer unique wisdom. The only way this mix of expertise and perspective can succeed is if we are committed to context and transparency. That would include disclosing conflicts of interest and advocacy activity.

The interminable contractual dispute between Seattle's two daily newspapers, which we write about in this inaugural edition of Crosscut, is rife with conflicts of interest. In a moment, I'll lay out Crosscut's conflicts so you can factor that into our coverage. But first some background on other conflicts.

The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer themselves are conflicted when they cover this important news story, of course. I'm confident their reporters aren't pressured from above to write about the dispute in any particular way, but when key sources for a story reside in the same building and sign your paycheck, the circumstances aren't ideal for detached reporting.

A few years ago, the Times came up with a creative solution to this problem. It hired Bill Richards, a veteran reporter who had worked for the P-I but spent most of his career with The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, to cover the newspapers' dispute – not as an employee but under contract. Richards was semi-retired on the Kitsap Peninsula. He had strong business-reporting credentials and knew the area. He was told to report the story as he saw it. While he answered to a mid-level Times editor, he was unencumbered by loyalty to coworkers or to his employer. The arrangement, which was to last at least three years, was widely hailed in the journalism business as the best any news outlet could do under the circumstances.

But in December 2005, the Times told Richards it would not be renewing the contract. This seemed oddly timed. The Times had been seeking to end or renegotiate the paper's federally sanctioned joint operating agreement (JOA) with the P-I, saying that it had been losing money and that the market could no longer support two papers, even if they were effectively a monopoly. Hearst, the P-I's owner, didn't believe this. It sued to block the closure, questioning whether the Times had lost money and whether the Times had properly managed the joint venture's advertising, marketing, production, and circulation tasks. When the Times cut Richards loose, the lawsuit in King County Superior Court was heating up. It didn't make sense to let Richards go. If nothing else, he was up to speed.

In an interview with Seattle Weekly at the time, Richards said: "Reading between the lines, I could sort of guess they were not happy with the aggressiveness of the coverage." Then-Managing Editor David Boardman disagreed: "It's not true that we didn't want aggressive coverage. We valued that. Where we sometimes differed with Bill was on what information was truly relevant to this ongoing struggle and what wasn't. ... It was just a whole combination of issues, and we made the decision that, moving forward, we would try a different approach."

At the time, I was managing editor of Seattle Weekly, so I hired Richards as a freelancer. He wrote three stories for SW before I left the paper last summer.

Now I've got a new job as editor of Crosscut. Neither Seattle Weekly nor The Stranger, the city's other weekly paper, is covering the JOA. It seems like a logical assignment for Crosscut and Bill Richards.

But we have conflicts of interest, too.

Richards' conflict might not be much. It's simply that he was disappointed at losing his contract job covering the JOA for the Times. I don't think that affects his judgment, but there it is.

As editor of Crosscut and editor of Richards' story today, my conflicts, feelings, and biases are more numerous and complicated. This might be more than anyone wants to know, but here it is:

• I worked for The Seattle Times for 16 years and loved it. My wife, Anne Koch, worked as a reporter there for 13 years. We have many friends there. I think it's a really good regional paper.
• We also have a lot of good friends working at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
• I left the Times after the newspaper strike of 2000-01, disillusioned by the post-strike atmosphere. It was ultimately a good change for me. For my part, during the strike I organized and ran the Seattle Union-Record, which was published by striking journalists from both the Times and the P-I.
• I'm really disappointed that the end of the joint operating agreement, which was blessed by the federal government as being in the public interest 26 years ago, is being negotiated in a closed arbitration. It's downright cockeyed given all the sanctimonious talk we hear from newspapers about fighting for public access to courts and government, about how much they care about readers, about how vital their businesses are. In the end, none of us readers gets to know what's going on.
• Like a number of journalists, I have been subpoenaed to appear at the arbitration this month, in my case by Hearst's attorneys regarding a trivial matter unrelated to my Times employment. Answering such a subpoena, even one from a pseudo-court, is kind of a slippery slope for a journalist, but I decided to honor it so I could write about what it's like inside the arbitration room, even if I'm there for just a few minutes. I'll tell you what happened after I've testified – if they still want me after today.

If I've forgotten something that could affect my judgment, I'm sure someone will point it out in the comments below. That's the thing about journalism on the Web today: Readers shape the stories, and the stories are never finished.

Have a look at Bill Richards' story and comment on it. It lifts the veil of this private Times-P-I arbitration a bit. And it's only a start.