Newspaper Guild Turns to Cyberspace in Seattle

It’s a story too good, too sad, too deliciously poignant, to pass up: Three days before Christmas. Paralyzed man lies in hospital bed, recovering from spinal surgery. Vicious windstorm sweeps city. Dog waiting for man at home, man’s longtime companion, flees his kennel in the storm and disappears.

Any editor worth his salt would have one reporter at the paralyzed man’s bedside, another out documenting the search for the dog.

The Seattle Union Record figures it can go that one better.

“Do we have a picture of the dog?” someone suggests at the Friday news meeting. “We can run it on the Web. Maybe somebody will find the ‘Dog on the Run.’ ”

“We’ve got a picture of the dog,” the morning assignment editor reports.

There are general nods of satisfaction around the room.

This is how news happens. And in Seattle, a town where both major daily newspapers are on strike, this is how some of the best news happens these days. The Seattle Union Record, the 5-week-old Newspaper Guild publication, aims to battle the daily print competition by establishing one of the most comprehensive Internet news sites in the Pacific Northwest--and, with a staff of the city’s best columnists, photographers and several Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters, be the fastest off the mark.

The dog’s face goes worldwide. So does news of an unexpectedly bitter labor dispute--a Thanksgiving Eve strike that started out relatively cordially, as strikes go, and turned nasty when the Seattle Times a week ago moved abruptly to hire permanent replacement workers for striking advertising, circulation and newsroom employees. (The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which maintains a separate newsroom but shares advertising, circulation and distribution with the Times under a joint operating agreement, made no similar threat.)

Predictions of a Lasting Cold War

One Seattle Times reporter ended up Thursday nose-to-nose with a reporter who had crossed the picket line. Both women were on the verge of a fistfight when they realized, as the striking reporter put it, “how ridiculous this was.”

As several photographers and writers have trickled back to work, striking reporters are predicting newsroom conflicts that could take years to mend. “People won’t want to eat each others’ birthday cakes,” predicted veteran Times newsroom receptionist Mike Larson, now a receptionist at the Union Record.

Even Seattle Times owner Frank Blethen hasn’t been exempt from the rancor. When the weekly Eastside Journal printed the first of the Union Record’s three-times-a-week print editions, Blethen fired off an e-mail to Journal publisher Peter Horvitz. The Seattle Weekly, which has been offering rack space to the Union Record, gleefully printed it last week. “[Expletive] you to death,” it said. “Your ex-friend Frank.”

Since then, the Union Record has been printing at a secret location, its press run now up to 40,000 copies. The paper’s Web site, https://www.unionrecord.com, gets as many as 60,000 page views a day. (By comparison, traffic at the Seattle Times and Post-Intelligencer Web sites is in the millions weekly.)

The air at the Union Record’s cramped offices at a union-owned building is one of a college newspaper--casual, wisecracking, often chaotic--except it’s a staff of veteran journalists who actually know what they’re doing.

“The idea was to create a paper that would raise the bar for strike newspapers, that would not be a mouthpiece for the union but would cover union issues like any newspaper would. More importantly, [we] wanted to showcase the talent of the Seattle Times and P-I writers, editors, copy editors, photographers, artists, to show that it takes more than just a publisher to put out a good newspaper,” said Stanley Holmes, a veteran Seattle Times aerospace writer who quit this week to take a job at Business Week.

Holmes co-wrote for the Union Record the single most significant piece of strike reporting to emerge from the labor dispute, a lengthy article that examined how a Teamsters union boss apparently guided his membership into an early contract settlement that took much of the wind out of the sails of the Newspaper Guild strike. The Union Record piece reported that ad stuffers represented by the Teamsters actually had rejected a contract settlement but the Teamsters official helped head off a strike, just in time for the Times and the P-I to distribute their lucrative pre-holiday advertising packages before the guild strike.

The Union Record also scored a coup when it carried an exclusive interview with Mayor Paul Schell as the city hunkered down for the anniversary of last year’s calamitous World Trade Organization demonstrations. (Schell was refusing to talk to both striking papers.)

Readers of the Union-Record were the first to read that an Alaska Airlines employee had told federal investigators that the carrier knew of potential lubrication problems before Flight 261 crashed in January, about a plan by Starbucks to substantially increase the size of its corporate headquarters and about a last-minute labor settlement at the University of Washington (both morning papers said a strike was likely).

They had the city’s only access to the work of the Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, David Horsey--displayed in a prominent graphic gallery on the Web site.

They also were notified by Jean Godden’s column (which used to appear in the Times) that the Times’ weather map had put Spokane, Wash., in Idaho and Lewiston, Idaho, in Washington.

“I think it’s been an important weapon in the strike. I’m getting many, many e-mails, hundreds every week, from people who say they do notice that the two dailies don’t have the content that they’re used to seeing, and they’re finding it on our Web site, in our newspaper,” said Chuck Taylor, a Times writer who has become managing editor of the Union Record.

With the aid of two tech specialists, Taylor had the newspaper Web site up and running at 2 a.m. Nov. 21, two hours after the strike commenced.

“I thought it was time to try a local newspaper whose main mission was to put up a Web site and the print product would be a kind of secondary thing,” Taylor said. “I also wanted it to be every bit as good as the Times and P-I normally are. And I wanted it to have the integrity that those two papers have under normal circumstances.”

A Way to Maintain Sanity

For many staff members, who draw $200 a week strike pay while working for the paper, the Union Record is an opportunity to keep busy and make a contribution.

“Personally, for me, it just sort of keeps me sane. I can keep coming in and doing what I normally do. . . . It’s much better than sitting at home. Those are the people who have had the hardest time. It’s a lot easier to go crazy if you’re just sitting at home, thinking of the ashes of your career,” said Mary Ann Gwinn, the Times’ book editor, now the morning assignment editor at the Union Record.

“It’s kind of kept everyone’s morale a little higher than it might have, because you’ve got something to do,” said Horsey, the cartoonist. “It’s kind of like a great place to go in and feel like, OK, I’m not alone in this mess.”

The national Newspaper Guild has been injecting $10,000 a week into the Union Record, but with printing costs alone averaging $20,000 and substantial expenses for computers and film processing, the strike fund has taken a hit.

Offering advertising rates one-tenth those of the two major dailies, the Union Record is approaching 10 to 12 pages of advertising in its 32-page print issue. Mary Hinderliter, the Times’ high-volume retail account manager, has won over such clients as Ikea furniture, and well-known jewelry, drug and automobile retailers.

But the Union Record remains very much third-string. The Times and the P-I, nearly paralyzed in the first days of the strike, have quickly rallied. Both papers, thanks to other settlements, were able to keep distribution networks in place, and printers declined to honor the picket lines.

Getting Back to Normal Editions

Printing sharply scaled-back, 24-page editions in the early days, both papers now have come back nearly to full size, with a number of staff bylines. The papers again are charging for subscription and rack sales.

Fear that both sides could possibly gut the strike to the point of mutual ruin forced negotiators back to the table last week under the watch of a federal mediator. After management improved its offers for benefits and the timetable for raising pay for suburban reporters, both sides were optimistic that a contract could be voted on by midweek, though final agreement hinged on job protection for striking workers at the Times.

Times management said it was crucial to protect the jobs of workers who crossed the picket lines and to begin rebuilding a permanent staff.

“It’s a business necessity at this point,” spokeswoman Kerry Coughlin said. “We’re faced with rebuilding this newspaper or perhaps the reality of having to sell this newspaper, which is not something the Blethen family ever will want to do.”