07/09/2005

By GENE JOHNSON  / Associated Press

The city's oldest newspaper, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, is betting on a new editorial direction to improve readership as its legal battle with The Seattle Times unfolds.

In the past few months, the P-I has started to refocus its efforts on covering the city proper, rather than the suburbs to the north, east and south. All suburban reporters but one have been recalled to newspaper's main building on Seattle's waterfront — and even the one who's left, Gordy Holt in Bellevue, doesn't expect to be there long.

"This region really revolves around Seattle," P-I Managing Editor David McCumber said. "We feel like it's a smart place to concentrate our resources, on making this newspaper indispensable to people who not only live in Seattle, but care about the city."

The 142-year-old P-I was historically the dominant newspaper in Washington state, though that started to change late last century and was further cemented when the 109-year-old Times switched to morning publication in 1999.

Since 2003, newsstand competition between the two has been overshadowed by courtroom competition, as The Times, owned by the Blethen family and Knight Ridder, has sought to end or substantially modify its two-decade-old joint operating agreement with the P-I, owned by Hearst Corp. Under the agreement, The Times handles circulation, printing and advertising for both newspapers in exchange for 60 percent of their joint profits.

The state Supreme Court dealt the P-I a major blow last month, ruling unanimously in favor of The Times' interpretation of a clause in the agreement that allows either paper to end the agreement if it loses money for three straight years. The Times wanted to count losses related to a 49-day strike at both papers in late 2000; the P-I said such losses should not count.

Hearst's lawyers plan to return to King County Superior Court to argue that The Times deliberately spent itself into the red in the years after the strike. Ending the agreement could lead to the P-I's closure because it doesn't have a printing plant, advertising staff or circulation apparatus of its own.

Meanwhile, the P-I hopes to start distinguishing itself more from The Times — not always an easy task, given their similar fonts, broadsheet layouts and blackletter mastheads featuring eagles. Some at the P-I would like to become a classic big-city tabloid, with irreverent, pithy headlines and back-page sports. But it's not clear advertisers would support such a move or whether a conversion would be possible with The Times handling printing duties under the JOA.

Times executives declined to comment for this story.

For McCumber, a more important way to distinguish the P-I is to write more stories of interest to young readers, women and minorities; continue improving the Web site; and above all to focus on what P-I managers call "the Seattle narrative."

The approach is similar to that of the Chicago Sun-Times or the Boston Herald — both tabloids in markets dominated regionally by the Tribune and the Globe — but McCumber says the P-I is looking to no single newspaper as a model.

"Once people realize we're not trying to change the nature of the work they do, that we're not dumbing it down, that what we're doing is focusing our resources on something we can dominate — people respond to that," McCumber says. "Bust a couple of good stories, and people get it."

Some reporters say they aren't sure how the editorial shift will affect their daily work; haven't they been telling the "Seattle narrative" all along?

Holt, a 37-year P-I veteran and the paper's only remaining suburban reporter, hopes the coverage lines aren't drawn too tightly around a city intricately entwined in its surrounding. Seattle environmentalists have led the push to conserve wilderness in the mountains east and west of the city, for example. And the health of Puget Sound is crucial to the city's commercial fishermen.

"It's a difficult mind-set to change — do we ignore the region?" Holt asks. "Seattle's not a vacuum. It's not an easy swallow to think in terms that are so limiting."

Some change is already apparent when the P-I hits the doorstep. It has devoted several reporters recently to covering a controversy over the cost of Seattle's proposed monorail — a story the P-I broke — and has consistently given the stories front-page play.

Meanwhile, it has relied on The Associated Press for coverage of an Idaho girl abducted by a sex offender for six weeks following the murders of her mother, two brothers and her mother's boyfriend. That's a story the P-I would have covered prominently in years past.

The Times maintains suburban bureaus with six reporters in Snohomish County, home to Seattle's northern suburbs, and with seven reporters in Bellevue, covering eastern King County, home to major Northwest companies such as Microsoft. It also doesn't shy away from travel: In January, it sent a reporter and photographer to Indonesia to report on the aftermath of the tsunami. In May, it sent a reporter to Spokane, 230 miles east of Seattle, to cover a sex scandal involving the mayor.

McCumber insists the P-I isn't going to start ignoring suburban sprawl, the environment or other issues Seattle readers care about.

"These issues don't stop at 145th Street; you can't define this just by geography," he says. "This should not be viewed as us pulling in our horns. We want to be seen as dominating the Seattle conversation."

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On the 'Net:

www.seattlepi.com

www.seattletimes.com