For some reason, all the rough news for local print reporters yesterday morning inspired me to dig this t-shirt out of the bottom of a dresser drawer. Click the image to enlarge—it’s easier to count the ironies that way.
The online Union Record, the strike paper put together by picketing Seattle Times and Seattle Post-Intelligencer employees over the winter of 2000-2001, is, in retrospect, an odd thing: journalists using new media to compete against their employers at time before most people fully realized how powerfully disruptive new media competition in general would become for newspapers.
I forwarded the above image to a bunch of people in the local media world yesterday to see what their reactions were given the current death-by-Internet troubles for the Times and P-I. Call it a Union Record Rorschach test. A number of people considered this still too hot to touch, but here are two responses:
Employee ownership worked for 49 days then. Why not now?
I see the t-shirt and it makes me proud. The Union Record was, in the end, the world’s most talented college paper (no pay, balky equipment, much beer.) But maybe we missed the red flag in all of that black cotton. Maybe we shouldn’t have forgotten that our fates are tied more to the boardroom than the newsroom.
I loved how it was packed with sports photos. It was unfettered and had panache.
The thing that killed the local papers is not the medium, but the message.
Journalists, like SLOG who do it well, are supposed to fight for truth and the People.
The PI and Seattle Times seemed devoted to being a newsletter for the entrenched interests. At one point the PI was running 3 ARTICLES A DAY on what Bill Gates was doing after retirement!
Ok, so that gives them a circulation of all the billionaires in the Puget Sound and not much else.
There are so many puffed up buffoons and dimwits running Seattle that it’s a wonder no one isn’t lambasting them night and day!
This is coming out in TIME this week: http://www.time.com/time/business/articl…
Interesting ideas.
The Union Record was really inspiring, but it was sustained by the high spirits of an epic strike. Hard to say whether that kind of work could be duplicated in a more mundane context. (BTW: I’m not and never have been a journalist)
Don’t forget Blethen’s classy antics once he found out whose press printed Vol. 1, No. 1.
I still have my t-shirt, Eli, and every single issue of the Union Record. I am very proud of my small part in producing it.
I think the Times went down the toilet when they decided to let a bland, boring, white, middle-aged soccer mom run the “entertainment” section and every other article was about “The Bachelor” or Blake Lewis.