A number of people have angrily called my attention to Seattle Times columnist Lynne Varner’s comments on KUOW’s Weekday last Friday. I haven’t had a chance to listen to the show yet, but Stranger intern Aaron Pickus has helpfully typed up a transcript of the relevant portions, in which Varner, speaking before Hearst confirmed its sale of the P-I, appeared to suggest that champagne and dancing would be her likeliest response if a sale happened.
If you want to listen for yourself, it all starts at about 42 minutes in. Here’s the transcript provided by Pickus:
Host Steve Scher: What can you tell us, David Horsey?
David Horsey, P-I editorial cartoonist: Well, before I came here I called my editor to see if there was anything new and he said, to put it diplomatically, we don’t know a goddamn thing. Unfortunately, that’s the situation. So if you want me to say anything for certain…I think unfortunately, I think, it’s more likely than not that the basic report from KING is accurate so I talked to a couple of people to put together what is happening here. The question is a year and a half ago we were in a situation that was very different… (Describes some newspaper industry stuff at length.)
Scher: Can you share any news on the non-profit status of the Seattle Times?
Lynne Varner, Times editorial writer: I actually can’t. I don’t know much about that and I’m actually thinking I’ll leave Dave way out there on that limb by himself.
(Laughter)
Horsey: Well, thats a fascinating limb.
Varner: I mean clearly in this competitive…this is a competitive environment and when one of your competitors looks like its going to go out of business, that’s not a bad sign. So clearly the rumors are encouraging. But it’s still so early. Hearst is a huge conglomerate and they’ve closed some magazines this year. Is this just part of that? And what does it mean in the overall big picture for Seattle? Whether we’ll be a one newspaper town or actually someone will come in and buy the P-I in a fire sale because how much would the P-I go for? How much would they put it for sale? Who knows? In better times it might have been quite a bit. In times likes this, who knows. So I’m not dancing and I haven’t opened up the champagne yet.
Scher: Well, no, there would be many reasons why having… just being a one newspaper town wouldn’t be, would be hard, too. Aren’t there?
Varner: It’d be preferable, though.
Horsey: To be a no news…than being a no newspaper town.
Scher: Yes, but also from a business standpoint. I know, Knute, you and I were talking about, just because you have a monopoly doesn’t mean that you are then OK financially. That’s true but I think you’re in a stronger standpoint there.
Scher: You were going to say something on this issue?
Knute Berger, Crosscut: I think Seattle…I was never in favor of the Joint Operating Agreement. However, I think two newspapers are better than one. You know, for the consumers and that ideally I’d like to see two or three, competitive newspapers. And we haven’t really had that. I mean, we had a business monopoly but we’ve had editorial competition between the Times and the PI. You know, I think the idea of the P-I folding or going out of business is terrible from a reader’s standpoint and well, from a community standpoint. It is going to reduce dramatically the amount of information, the amount of visibility various points of view will have. You barely have any op-ed pages anymore at all. You’re going to end up with one op-ed page and so, obviously, projects like Crosscut and others are trying to jump in and fill. But to me, this is like the journalistic equivalent of the Great Seattle Fire and it’s not just the P-I that is possibly burning up here and the Times struggling mightly. We talk about what newspapers are worth. The sort of going discussion is, well, you’re worth your parking lot. You know, the price of real estate you own. You know, in the case of the Times they’re having trouble moving some of their real estate to help pay these bills because the overall economic situation is exacerbating the sort of media collapse that we’re seeing around the country. People used to think, “well, ok, the big brands will do great.” but then we find out that the New York Times is about to go belly up. They’re in serious, serious trouble.
Scher: I read an article today that said the New York Times would not be around in the form we know it in 3-6 months.
Berger: Right, that’s one of the predictions and you see their assets are just evaporating. They own the Boston Globe. A year and a half ago it was worth $600 million now it’s maybe worth $20 million. This is a dramatic change. The other thing that people said would work would be, “monopolies work.” Well, as Dave was point out, look at San Francisco. They became a one newspaper town and that one newspaper is sturggling. So it’s in some ways a really dark time, I think. But, there is lots of fertile stuff going on. This idea of the Times going non-profit…as far as I know they’d be the first major…
Scher: We’ll be competing with them for pledge drives.
Berger: Yeah, you will. I mean, Crosscut is going non-profit. There are a lot of these non-profit local websites that are turning to this sort of public radio because apparently the commercial world, you know, that having a commercially supported media informing our democracy, seems to be a luxury that we can’t afford right now.
Horsey: Really, as far as readers, by one count, the P-I has far more readers than ever before because of our website. We’re in the millions. But that doesn’t do us any good because there’s no money in it. So the problem is not lack of readers or lack of interest. It’s because the business model is dead. When you talk about a newspaper like the New York Times disappearing that’s a earth shaking tragedy for the country if that were to happen. So something has to be done and it may well be we go to a more European model or non-profit model, where there is public support for this function of news-gathering because I don’t how how you run a democracy without it. I don’t think a collection of a bunch of little blogs is going to do it.
Scher: Is there a place for David Horsey dot com in all that? I mean, is that what happens? Lynne Varner dot com.
Horsey: It’s a question I contemplated last night at about 4 am as I was laying awake trying to figure out what do I do if this is all true.
Varner: Or the proliferation of news blogs. A part of that is I think we’re going to have more, not less, news. It’s just going to be more fragmented. I do want to go back to one thing and say that this reminds me of school closures in that the first thing we need to do before we do what Knute wants, which is to produce more news, speak to more communities, to cover the community more broadly…the first thing we need to do is to be able to pay our bills and to do that you have to make some tough financial decisions. And that’s what’s happening with Hearst. Before you can afford any of that other stuff.
So I don’t see how a Times employee can be heartened about the collapse of the competition, when it wasn’t inter-paper fighting that caused the collapse, but a systemic industry wide implosion. The Times seems just as vulnerable, it has been losing money for a decade, even when times were good.
i think people are blowing what she says out of proportion…
I haven’t had a chance to listen to the show yet…
What do you do, Eli?
Oh, the Times will go under in a few years too. People aren’t going to pay for newspapers in sufficient numbers to keep them afloat.
It’s harder to root for the survival of newspapers when they are staffed by horse’s asses.
It’s not like the Stranger has ever gleefully celebrated the demise of the Weekly or anything.
@ 5. We’re not ALL horses asses. We just have our fair share.
Varner is an absolute idiot though, have you ever read her column?
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/op…
She is just so fucking stupid. I hope the Seattle Times goes under so that dumb ass will ahve to find a new job.
I agree with Fnarf. What bugs me most about the P-I news is that so many in the media (especially locally) are treating it like a catastrophe that will kill families, abolish democracy, hearken brimstone, etc. Uh, it’s not the only local company in danger of falling off a cliff. It’s just the one with the most news print.
As soon as Varner started appearing regularly on Weekday the enjoyment went way down for me. She has the fairly unique quality of sounding whiny and condescending at the same time, yet being wrong almost constantly. I often find myself fast forwarding through her commentary because I just can’t stand listening to her.
I think that when several people comment on something like this independently it’s not being blown out of proportion, and in my case at least it’s not even so much about defending the P-I.
Based on her comments last week I will definitely have champagne WHEN she gets canned, which shouldn’t be too long from now given state of the Times. And I don’t even drink champagne.
She’s just…and I don’t state this lightly as I usually try to be civil here…a fucking bitch.
Varner shouldn’t have said what she did because it showed zero sensitivity to fellow journalists who are going to have a tough time finding a job. Not even Blethen himself was celebrating because the Times could be next.
But, hell, don’t forget how arrogant the PI has been for years about this newspaper war. When the PI won a round of litigation against the Times, PI management paid for a party where staffers got drunk, were driven to the Times in a limo, and took a piss on the lawn in front of the Times building. They sent snotty e-mails to Times reporters crowing about “Black Friday” and how the end was near for the Times.
Is that more or less offensive than what Varner said?
Many of the PI newsroom leaders have no moral highground here after openly hoping for the demise of The Seattle Times. They were all so convinced that Blethen was the bad guy they forgot to look over their shoulders where Hearst was getting ready to stab them in the back.
@ 11,
Ha, I forgot about that! But in their defense, who doesn’t root for the demise of the Times?
The FSM Himself will do a jig.
@11,
PI mgmt paid for the party. I doubt part of the agenda was pissing on the lawn of the Times building, or that the pissees (I think I just invented a new word) were on the editorial board, which Varner is for the Times.
I heard that interview when broadcast and couldn’t believe my ears. I thought I was missing an inside joke or something, because at her word she sounded like an utter asshole. I guess I should go with my gut.
The image that just popped into my mind was Hitler dancing a little jig when the French surrendered at Versailles…
also, Patsy from AbFab.
Varner should be kissing that ground that she actually has a job. The Times editorial staff is so loaded down with no-talent, do-nothings that it’s an insult to the rest of the staff who are always having to do more with less. The editorial department sits on their velvet cushions and the writers crank out one column every 10 days. They’re useless yes-men/women who serve Frank and look down on the rest of the staff (you know: the people who do the actual work). She’ll be holding a sign on a freeway onramp within 18 months.
Put another way:
The nation is on the precipice of what at a minimum is a severe recession, while at the same time newspapers as an industry are falling apart and closing left and right.
And Lynne Varner is sitting across the table from one of the people who was just told they were going to lose their job, is openly gloating about it, and is basically saying “well, that’s the free market for ya – better you than me!”.
If there is any better example of tone deafness I’d love to see it.
And this is the voice of what will shortly be the one and only newspaper in Seattle.
I wish she’d spoken up better.
Some of the Indian local news providers on Reuters and AP wire had problems with spelling the words right for the “local news” content …
Varner clearly should have thought before speaking, and no doubt regrets her insensitivity.
But let’s face it: The JOA has been bringing down both papers. The only hope for the Times’ survival (besides being bought, which was quite unlikely) was an end to the JOA. So she understandably is relieved that her employer will likely be around longer than it appeared a week ago.
I’m sure P-I people would feel the same way if the situation were reversed, and would be particularly gleeful to see Frank Blethen go down. Hopefully none of them would speak publicly without thinking first, as Lynne did.
Varner is a columnist, which means she’s a moron. Brodeur was visibly gleeful when the sale was announced too. Reporters at the Times understand the gravity of what is happening, and are sorry to see their competition (and friends) go down.