January 10, 2009 Hearst Looks to Sell or Close Seattle Paper By RICHARD PEREZ-PENA NY Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/10/business/media/10paper.html?_r=1&ref=business&pagewanted=print The Seattle Post-Intelligencer will stop printing in 60 days unless the newspaper’s owner, the Hearst Corporation, can find a buyer by then, the company said on Friday. Hearst said that if it could not find a buyer, it would either shut the paper entirely or make it an Internet-only operation with a much-reduced staff. Steven R. Swartz, president of the company’s Hearst Newspapers division, flew from the corporate headquarters in New York City to deliver the word at a 10-minute newsroom meeting convened shortly after noon in Seattle, standing alongside Lincoln Millstein, Hearst’s senior vice president for digital media; Roger Oglesby, the Post-Intelligencer publisher; and David McCumber, the managing editor. After the meeting, the company issued a press release confirming the news. Mr. Swartz, who took over the newspaper chain last month, said The Post-Intelligencer, owned by Hearst since 1921, had lost money every year since 2000, including a $14 million loss in 2008, and that the picture would only worsen in 2009. He explicitly ruled out a Hearst purchase of the rival Seattle Times, which had long been rumored to be the company’s plan. “People are crushed,” said Lewis Kamb, 38, a reporter at The Post-Intelligencer. “My wife and I both work for the P-I, and we’ve got a 5-month-old baby boy. We probably have to put our house on the market, and there’s no one buying homes right now.” Several employees who attended the meeting said that Hearst executives refused to answer questions about potential severance payments. The Newspaper Guild’s contract with the paper, which provided for severance, expired in 2008 and has not been replaced. The employees said they and their colleagues were stunned by the announcement, and that many of them left the meeting in tears. Some were insulted at first hearing the news in a report by local television station on Thursday night; as one reporter said, “they let us get scooped on our own news.” The prospects of finding a buyer appear poor, in a deeply troubled industry, during a recession and a credit crisis. Many newspapers have been put on the block in the last year but have not sold, including The Chicago Sun-Times, The Union-Tribune of San Diego and The Miami Herald. The Hearst announcement echoes one made last month by the E. W. Scripps Company, which said that if it could not find a buyer for The Rocky Mountain News in Denver, it might close the paper. Very few American cities support more than one major daily newspaper anymore, and Seattle and Denver, each with about 600,000 residents, are among the smallest. Since 1983, The Seattle Times and The Post-Intelligencer have had a joint operating agreement, maintaining separate, competitive newsrooms while sharing most other expenses. For years, the prevailing guess was that The Times, owned by the Blethen family and the McClatchy Company, would be the one to throw in the towel, and that Hearst might buy The Times and merge the two papers. But as newspaper circulation slipped, The Post-Intelligencer lost ground much faster than its rival; its weekday circulation averaged about 118,000 in 2008, down from 196,000 a decade earlier. The Times’s weekday circulation was 199,000 last year, and the two papers’ combined Sunday edition averaged 382,000. -- ================================ George Antunes, Political Science Dept University of Houston; Houston, TX 77204 Voice: 713-743-3923 Fax: 713-743-3927 Mail: antunes at uh dot edu *********************************** * POST TO [email protected] * *********************************** Medianews mailing list [email protected] http://lists.etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews
