Blethen's Choice

Decisions made to pull the family together have weakened the Seattle Times.

By Bill Richards | June 2009 | FROM THE PRINT EDITION

Credit: Illustration by Darren Gygi

In the spring of 2001, as the Seattle Times Co. board
settled in for its quarterly meeting, its chairman, Frank Blethen, offered an
overview of the company’s previous 12 months. The year had been “both the most
exhilarating and the most disappointing of my career,” Blethen told the nine
board members gathered in a second-floor conference room in the company’s South
Lake Union headquarters. Along the vertigo-inducing ride, Blethen had brushed
off an offer from minority owner Knight Ridder of about $750 million, including
assumption of the Seattle Times Co. debt, for the Blethens’ 50.5 percent stake
in the Times Co. But the high point was the shift of the flagship Seattle
Times newspaper from the afternoon to the
morning market, a move that saved the paper from the fate of most other
afternoon dailies, but doomed its smaller and weaker joint operating agreement
partner (JOA), The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. For Blethen, who is also the Times’ publisher, gaining the morning slot and
head-to-head competition with the P-I was a celebratory victory. On the day of the Times’ first morning press run, he paraded through the
newsroom wearing a T-shirt showing the paper’s eagle mascot savaging the P-I’s trademark globe.

But then, with prospects for a bountiful holiday ad season
in sight, things turned sour. A walkout at the Times and P-I
by the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild (and supported by the Teamsters) ended
four months of contentious negotiations. The strike was costly for the Times, including $13 million in lost ad revenue that would
never return. The union hadn’t struck the paper in half a century, but when the
confrontation came, Blethen took it personally. He ordered a cyclone fence and
surveillance cameras installed to keep picketers at bay and adopted a combative
bargaining stance. “To me,” he wrote in a note to a striker, “it is a clear
choice between supporting what the Blethen family has created … or choosing to
support a cause led by people who don’t care about The Seattle Times.”

When the strike ended 49 days later, Blethen continued to
rail against the unions. During the April board meeting, he accused them of
having a “targeted and destructive” agenda to ruin the Times Co. and the
Times. With his cousins John, Bob and Will
Blethen in the boardroom, Frank Blethen announced a new policy. The old
“entitlement mentality” was out, he declared. In its place,