Closure Clarity

The month of February—likely the last full month of the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer‘s existence as a print newspaper—began
with a number of unanswered questions about the intentions of the P-I’s
owner, Hearst Corporation.

On January 9, Hearst had announced that it would be putting the P-I up for sale and then closing down the paper’s print edition in the
(highly likely) event that no buyer emerged. However, almost
immediately, people started asking questions.

Is this just a part of some grand plot for Hearst to save money,
bide time, and ultimately purchase the struggling Seattle Times from
the Blethen family?

If not, is Hearst still going to make its scheduled $1 million
payment to the Seattle Times Company to retain its right of first
purchase to buy the Times if it is put up for sale?

What is Hearst’s plan for the P-I‘s website if the print edition
ceases to exist?

Local reporters tried, and failed, to get answers to these
questions. The Committee for a Two-Newspaper Town, a group that sprang
up during an earlier phase of the Times versus P-I drama to lobby to
keep both papers in business, tried to get answers, too—and fared
much better. On February 4, in response to a letter from the committee,
Hearst general counsel Eve Burton shed some light on two of the
queries.

“We are not considering an acquisition of the Seattle Times,” Burton
wrote, repeating a position that some had been reluctant to believe.
She continued: “Accordingly, Hearst has not, and will not, be making
the final payment under our ‘Right of First Purchase’ agreement.”

That seems to answer questions one and two; if Hearst was really
desperate to buy the Times, it would have made the $1 million payment.
(Although, the way the newspaper industry is going, if the Times were
put up for sale anytime soon, Hearst wouldn’t need any sort of special
status to get to the front of the line—in fact, there probably
wouldn’t be any line at all. So it’s probably more accurate, or at
least less credulous, to say it only answers the questions for
now.)

As for question three, Burton remained cryptic. “In regard to the
question about whether Hearst will maintain a web-only operation, we
are still studying that possibility and no decision has been made,” she
wrote.

“However,” she added, “if we were to move forward in this direction,
we would do so outside the [joint operating agreement],” the
arrangement by which the Seattle Times Company performs most of the
business and distribution functions for the P-I. This answered another
question that had been floating around: Would Hearst cause trouble in
the joint operating agreement by trying to claim that an online-only
newspaper was still a newspaper, and that therefore the agreement
should continue absent a printed P-I?

Still, even with that matter resolved, the basic question about a
possible online-only P-I remains: Will it happen? On February 5, a P-I writer with a strong interest in finding a buyer for his newspaper
leaked an e-mail to The Stranger that showed the P-I‘s blogs receiving
record traffic for the month of January—even as its print edition
seemed destined to die. The writer’s hope seemed to be that the traffic
figures (2.8 million page views for the blogs alone) would entice some
wealthy civic do-gooder to step forward and purchase the P-I from
Hearst and keep the paper printing. But the figures also underscored
the likelihood that Hearst itself will try to do something new with the
P-I’s online presence after the paper’s likely demise. After all, in
these internet-centric days, that’s a lot of traffic to walk away
from.