Drinking coffee while reading your daily newspaper may become a thing of the past in Seattle as the city's only two dailies -- The Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer -- could both go bankrupt.
Based on an e-mail from a union administrator that represents Times employees, online source The Slog reported Thursday that The Seattle Times may file for Chapter 11. "Within the Guild we have been preparing for a number of worst-case scenarios, including the possibility that the Times might enter the Chapter 11 bankruptcy process," wrote Liz Brown, administrator for the union, the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild.
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Meanwhile, the Times' competitor Seattle Post-Intelligencer has been on the auction block since Jan. 10, and according to its owner the Hearst Corp., the paper will stop printing by the end of February if a buyer is not found. Hearst did say it would either shut the paper entirely or make it an Internet-only operation with a smaller staff. Overall, the owners of the Post Intelligencer have lost money every year since 2000, including $14 million in 2008.
The problems of the Times and the Post-Intelligencer is emblematic of the entire newspaper industry, which has been sideswiped by declining subscribers, sluggish advertising that could be partly blamed for the declining economy and a changing audience that is turning to the Internet usually for free content for their news. Senior Deal writer Chris Nolter asks in his recent Deal magazine cover story: "If advertisers won't pay and readers won't pay, who will support the leverage so many publishers shouldered to either buy their rivals or to go private through leveraged buyouts?" At this point, there seems to be no answer. Meanwhile, the Intelligencer could possibly join the growing number of other ailing dailies such as the Chicago Sun-Times, the Union-Tribune of San Diego and The Miami Herald, which put themselves up for sale last year.
It's long been rumored that the Times and Post-Intelligencer would merge, but the economics of owning a daily newspaper have so deteriorated over the last few years that even that option no longer seems feasible. Since 1983, the two Seattle dailies have had a
joint operating agreement, maintaining separate, competitive newsrooms
while sharing advertising, production, marketing and circulation costs. Those savings obviously have only gone so far. The real cuts may come in the form of bankruptcy, and if that happens, in one blink of the eye, Seattle will go from a two newspaper city to a no paper town -- and people will have to find something else to read with their morning coffee. - Gerald Magpily
See The Deal magazine: Black and white red all over
See The Slog article
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