Losing a voice

Many years ago, Anchorage used to have two newspapers in town. The Anchorage Daily News was the more liberal of the two, while the Anchorage Times was the more conservative. It’s been long enough now that I don’t remember all the details, but after a while, the Anchorage Times closed its doors, and Anchorage became a one newspaper town. These days, all that’s left of the Times is an editorial column called Voice of the Times that was created as a way to continue a separate editorial voice in the city.

Currently in Seattle, a similar situation is developing. Seattle’s two newspapers, the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have been operating under a joint operating agreement for the past few years. The Seattle Times now wants out of the JOA, however, and it’s looking more and more likely that Seattle may soon become a one-paper town if the Times gets its way.

Having been around for the loss of the Anchorage Times, I have to say, I’m not looking forward to losing the P-I. While in Anchorage we were lucky enough to keep the more liberal of the two papers publishing, here in Seattle, the P-I is the more liberal of the two papers, and it’s the one were likely to lose. Beyond even just the editorial slant of which paper survives, though, I think that it’s important that there be more than one major public voice in a city, especially one the size of Seattle.

Once the Anchorage Times folded, I felt that there was a marked decrease in the quality of the Anchorage Daily News. Without the constant competition and opposing viewpoints, there just didn’t seem to be as much drive left at the ADN to keep up the quality that it had had before, and it wasn’t long after the fall of the Times that I stopped bothering to read the ADN on a regular basis. It just felt like much of the heart and fire that used to drive the paper was no longer there without the Times to challenge it.

On the bright side, though, Seattle does have two good weekly newspapers — the Stranger and the Seattle Weekly. This weeks edition of the Seattle Weekly has a wonderful story looking at the history of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and ruminating on everything we could lose if the P-I is forced to close.

The P-I’s newsroom culture in the 1960s and 1970s was far more freewheeling than what the staid management of the Times could have handled. At the Times, reporters wore sport coats and ties and trimmed their hair neatly and were largely a well-behaved bunch. The P-I was a newspaper that tolerated long hair and beards among its male staff at a time when those were firing offenses in many of the country’s newsrooms. It would, in the mid-1960s, send future novelist Tom Robbins and gonzo writer Darrell Bob Houston, both then copy editors, and cartoonist Ray Collins to cover Timothy Leary’s LSD conference in Berkeley, Calif. It ran a Hearst-dictated editorial endorsing Richard Nixon in 1972 but then allowed a group comprising more than half its news staff to take out an ad in their own newspaper endorsing George McGovern.

[…]

Frank Herbert, author of the Dune series and one of the most successful sci-fi novelists of all time, wrote the first Dune book while covering higher education for the P-I. He retired from daily journalism in 1971 after optioning Dune to a movie studio. Tom Robbins quit the P-I in 1970 and moved over to the Washington coast, where he eventually wrote Another Roadside Attraction, the first of seven novels. He now lives in La Conner.

There are a lot more good stories buried in the article. It may be nearly hopeless, but I’d be very disappointed if the Times ended up being the sole daily newspaper in Seattle.