The Seattle newspaper that failed last March after a 146-year run is the subject of a play, titled “It’s Not In the PI: A Living Newspaper About A Dying Newspaper“. (Ticket info here.)
It’s not in this play, either. Plenty of former staffers at the Friday night opening slipped out at intermission.
(Photo, Josh Trujillo)
The play is structured as a newspaper, with stories jumping inside. (Unlike a newspaper, they jump back out to the front again.) I can’t imagine how anybody who didn’t work there could make sense of it.
That story about a feature writer and photographer sent to Detroit to produce a sports-related color story prior to a Seattle-Detroit big game? PI ace writer M. L. Lyke had the assignment in real life, with grizzled, always game photographer Grant Haller. They wound up in a strip joint. Lyke and Haller also went to Iraq as the embedded odd couple, but that story didn’t make the theatrical cut. If you didn’t know the origin of the stripper saga, you won’t learn it from the stage. That version is just a muddle.
More from the stage: History stomps by as a procession in the rear. Some reporter is trying to cover it, and an editor tells him not to upset the advertisers. Never did I ever heard any PI editor telling any PI reporter not to upset advertisers.
Why did the PI fail? The play suggests it was bad management, the cold-hearted Hearst Corp. as well as the diminishing fortunes of the industry. The last factor is undeniable, but the other two are wrong.
The team at the top, publisher Roger Oglesby and managing editor David McCumber, were by far the best in my two decades at the paper. Class acts, they broke with the PI tradition of eccentric, even bizarre top managers. As for Hearst, it fought fiercely to save the PI when the Seattle Times tried to bury it through a court action in 2003. Instead, the PI triumphed in 2007. Justice was on our side, but that wouldn’t have mattered if we didn’t have Hearst’s deep pockets to pay for it.
At that point, smart money was on the PI to survive and the Seattle Times to fail. What happened?
Dan Richman’s story in the PI is as good as any.
Here’s my version:
Hearst hired a new team to manage its newspaper division. Those people
don’t care about newspapers. They didn’t want to buy the Seattle Times
or even wait for it to fold. They wanted out.
Helping them
make that decision was PI staff, led by its ruinous Northwest Newspaper
Guild, the folks who brought us the 2000 newspaper strike. After Hearst
hired top legal talent to save the PI from the Times, what did the
Guild do? It sued the company on a technicality. Not only was the PI a
money drain, its staff proved unable to make concessions.
Hearst
declined to continue that struggle. During what proved to be the last
round of contract talks, the Guild sent an email to staff asking what
they wanted. I ignored the form and wrote back: “Glad you asked. Please
try not to make the situation worse.”
Another thing the play
gets wrong: The PI’s attempts to engage the staff in discussions about
changing the paper to keep it alive (a process known internally as
Tornado) might well have been too little, too late, but they were not
ridiculous. Staffers who insisted on fighting it every inch of the way
were ridiculous, and they appear to be the people who gave the
six-person playwright team its information.
Plays are entitled
to be wrong. They can’t afford to be what this play is: a baggy
monster. It’s not funny enough, smart enough or coherent enough to
matter. And talk about lack of proportion: The only PI staffer
mentioned by first and last name is theater critic Joe Adcock, who
retired shortly before the end. He’s not only mentioned, he’s
thoroughly examined. (I love the actor playing him. He got Joe’s
disconnected, genial modesty exactly right.)
Speaking of the
actors, they’re a charming lot. What else? The props by Patrick
Skinner are inspired. But I don’t like the undertones of misplaced
resentment perpetrated by the text. Under McCumber, with management and
staff working together, we were fabulous, even as the space in which to
be fabulous continued to shrink. Small as it was, the paper that folded
is a paper to be proud of.
(Brendan Kiley wrote an excessively kind preview of the play here. It’s an unusual misstep for him, as he is the best theater critic in town. Sorry Brendan, but a nuanced eulogy this ain’t.)
Regina, I also never heard an editor (or any other PI employee) suggest that reporters should worry about advertisers. The line between news and advertising was clear-cut. I’m proud to have worked there for many reasons, and I’ll always be proud of having worked with you.
I couldn’t disagree more, though, with your take on the Guild lawsuit. That was not about a technicality, but whether Hearst could arbitrarily create a new category of “online-only reporter” that would not be covered under the union contract. The writing on the wall was pretty clear even then, I think, that most if not all of the staff would eventually be online-only reporters, and that such a move was an easy swing at killing off the guild. Which would have meant, I guess, that when they shut us down, they wouldn’t have had to worry about pesky niceties like negotiations or severance pay. I was glad to think there was someone on my side there at the end.
Hi Rebekah! Such a graceful disagreement. I’m planning to study it in hopes of being able to do likewise. We still disagree, however. I find it a huge leap to say that if the Guild hadn’t refused to consider the company’s plan to exempt online-only reporters from Guild membership, we would have failed anyway, minus severance. The old rules of running a newspaper weren’t working. They still aren’t. If we wanted to keep working, we had to acknowledge that. By suing the company over a single online-only reporter-blog position immediately after Hearst spend four years fighting for us in court, we proved we had no gratitude, trust, flexibility or concern for those who paid our salaries. We were, in short, a drag and got cut loose. I loved working there, and I loved working with you.
Just for the record, the Guild did NOT sue Hearst over creation of a new online-only reporter. The suit was over the company’s refusal to take the matter to arbitration. That is a HUGE difference. The purpose of going to arbitration is to AVOID a lawsuit and it was a central foundation of the contract. Had the Guild not sued, it would have effectively neutered the entire contract because the company could then have done whatever it wanted at any time and our only response would have been an endless string of lawsuit against a company that has endless monetary resources (as Frank Blethen found out).
Hi Gene! I don’t see a huge difference. In any case, it wasn’t worth fighting, and it led to the loss of our jobs. Yes, we were on thin ice anyway, but the Guild brought a hatchet instead of a solution.
Hi Regina:
This reminds me of a discussion we once had over Michael Spafford’s “12 Labors of Hercules.” I contended he was just being provocative and you assured me that his motives were much more complex. Same applies here: You may not see the complexity of the position the Guild was in, but the lawyers could and besides, there was the matter of exposure. Had the Guild not have moved to protect the contract, any one of our OWN members could have sued the GUILD for negligence in failing to police the contract.
There were a lot of things going on during those last months, and I don’t think the on-line reporter issue played that big a role. The real reason was that Frank was preparing (or threatening) to declare bankruptcy which would have enabled him to nullify the JOA. He reportedly demanded that Hearst buy him out and when the suits looked at what that would mean (Hearst having to crawl in bed with McClatchy and still have essentially the same problems Frank had) and they simply said: “Its not worth it.”
Although we know we put up a valiant fight to be the better newspaper in Seattle, the shear complexity of Frank’s business problems threatened everybody and – much as it was distasteful to us pawns (oops, I mean workers) – Hearst probably made the correct business decision.
It sucked for us (and I’m sure for Roger, David, et al) but the suits in New York didn’t give a fig about that. We were numbers on a spread sheet.
Hope all is going well for you otherwise. Miss you.
Gene
I guess it’s not surprising that some former PI journalists like you might not enjoy a theatrical rendering of their life and times. That’s too bad. The rest of us in the audience had a great time, judging by the laughs and applause. The role of the union in the PI’s demise wasn’t even part of the play. Is this a review of the play or just another self-obsessed blogger’s rant? What does “baggy monster” mean anyway? Duh.
Dear Spastic colon: Finally, a comment on the play. You might not have been paying attention when one of the characters bemoaned the loss of the Guild. What does baggy monster mean? It means coherence is a good thing. It means the birds ate the bread crumbs leading out of the forest.
I will not watch the play. For one thing, I see no need to recall a time that was too recent not to be painful and not long ago to be nostalgic.
And second, even though I knew it was a work of fiction, I also knew that I couldn’t sit through it without yelling “Bullshit!”
Scott,
Though much of the play is fiction, it is hardly a work of nostalgia. (Though you would only know this by coming, and not taking someone else’s word for it.)
If you think we in the theatre are at all concerned about someone coming to our house and yelling “bullshit”, you really don’t understand how theatre works. So instead of ranting on a message board, why DON’T you come and by all means yell?
While working on this I was deeply struck by the integrity, courage and humor of the all the journalists I interviewed for this piece. So I’m a bit surprised to hear that one is so thin-skinned that he’s afraid to sit in an audience.
I believe most journalists to be made of sterner stuff. For in the theatre, while directive one is “stand and deliver,” we can also stand and take it. You name the night. If I can be there, I’ll be there. And you can say bullshit straight to my face.
Sincerely,
Paul Mullin
Hi Regina, Scott, Paul, Gene and Rebekah. I love it when everyone on a blog is someone I know. I just wanted to say that I think the play is quite good (and I think it’s okay for me to say that, since I didn’t write any of it, direct anything or act). Anyone who knows what it takes to write, produce and perform a play should be absolutely stunned at how this came together so rapidly without any money or support from the local theater community. I’m sorry some like Scott (who still has a job, I might note, at the online PI) feel it would be painful to attend. I think Regina missed the point of the play: It isn’t an essay or documentary on what did the PI in; it’s a theatrical portrayal of what made the PI different and it contains the personal perspectives of both the playwrights and former PI staffers who they interviewed. I’m not that comfortable seeing my own words up on stage, but the play isn’t for me. It’s for the Seattle community — to try to help the public get a feel for what we did and who we were. I think it does that, with all the frustrating, stupid and sometimes heroic episodes that made up our history. Most non-journalists I know who saw it said it made them feel really good about the PI (and even about poor old maligned Joe). People feel they got a real glimpse inside. The play makes a personal connection.
You could be right, Tom.
Regina! Don’t back down. The play stinks. I don’t care about the ins and outs of what happened, which you do, but I know this play is awful.
Regina, you are a victim of revisionist memory. I have before me the Guild survey form you sent back on the issue about the online reporter. Your answer to the question “Do you have any specific concerns about the work you perform for the P-I Web site?” reads as follows: “No concerns about my work, but big concerns about management moving in and writing online, and people taking photos instead of the photo staff taking them. (I say this as somebody who has shot a few photos for my blog.) Essentially, I’m quite concerned that new media is not in the union, and that management hired a reporter to be only online and beyond the union.I see where this is going. If the print product dies, so does our union representation? This is happening at a time that newspapers are increasingly using work from people they don’t pay at all. Readers’ blogs. Readers commentary. It’s a short hop to readers’ news reports. If Hearst is willing to promote, say Bus Chick, and pay her nothing, what happens when we’re all online and competing against free labor?
“First, I think we need to establish that management cannot write online. Get them out of the big blog business. Second, new media can’t have special non-union status within a union shop. We might have to compromise a bit (I hope not), but let’s hold the line here. And get that online-only reporter into the union. Online or in print, it shouldn’t matter. A union shop is just that.”
Gosh, Regina, those were your exact directives to the Guild at the time. I can understand you feel differently now that you are unemployed, but it is dishonest to pretend the course of action at the P-I was driven by an out-of-control union bent on a suicide mission that was completely divorced from the wishes of the members. Hearst’s decision to shut down the print P-I had more to do with the usefulness of a similar threat in San Francisco. Dial back and look at the big picture.
Regina, you are absolutely graceful. I miss you! I tried to see the play tonight, but it was sold out.
Regina,
I just wrote a column that quoted your evisceration of the “It’s Not in the P-I” production. Read it at:
http://blog.seattlepi.com/davidhorsey/archives/185207.asp
While you were tougher on the playwrights than I was, I do agree with your criticism of the way editors were portrayed and the way the “Tornado” process was misrepresented. However, having taken part in two media panels after the performances this weekend, I think the play, even with its flaws, was not without redeeming value. As I said at the end of my column, in reference to the people who stuck around to engage with the media panels:
“The questions from the audience showed real concern about the state of journalism. And, most gratifying, it was clear that the loss of the print P-I mattered a great deal to many people in this town, perhaps as much as it did to those of us who were on the inside the day the presses went silent.”
David
Brendan Kiley the best theatre critic in town? What are you smoking? Brendan is a pissy little whiner who tears people down for the sake of tearing them down. I suspect he does because he’s a wanna-be who doesn’t have the talent or cajones to put himself out there and produce theatre.
Hi Allen. If you think about it for a moment, you’ll realize what a limited compliment I paid him, so let me go further. Brendan is a fine writer, not just a fine writer in Seattle.
Dear Liz. Your memory is not so hot either. You’re referring to an earlier answer to one of your surveys. I cited my last answer, to the question of what we want in contract talks. Change hit us like a bus. While we were all talking through issues from the old world, the new was already there. Guild members were paying you, not me, to see ahead. And you didn’t. That I saw before you that it was a mistake to sue the company over a small issue is remarkable. You’re the expert. I’m just an art critic.
Both those who work for free and those on salary need to establish a personal brand. That’s the road to being paid in the journalism of the future. (Go, Bus Chick.) If I implied handling change was easy, I take that back. It has never been tougher in our particular industry.
I felt the play was more than just about the P-I, but about the newspaper industry as a whole. It’s kind of like those lines before a movie cautioning on how everything you’re about to see is just based on a real story but isn’t necessarily the real story? I attended the play with three different journalists (one recently laid off) from different newspapers, who had all never worked at the P-I, and we laughed a lot. The part about the Green River Killer was great. The part about the politician vs. the reporter was spot on (I just encountered something similar to that plot not that long ago). The play captured great elements about what it is we do. I’m sorry you hate it so much. I honestly don’t know the truth of what happened beyond what Dan Richman wrote and the amazing reporting of Bill Richards (now with Crosscut). Would it have been different for you had the play removed the specific P-I references and become more generic?
Steven. I didn’t hate it. Quite apart from specific PI issues, I thought it was piss-poor as a play, with a few bright spots. Too few. That’s not hate. Regina
I haven’t seen the play, but even from a thousand miles away, the buzzing hornets’ nest makes it obvious that the play is good theater – whether you liked it or not.
Finally got a chance to see the play on the final day, and I must say I liked it — with reservations. I agree with Regina that if you weren’t on the inside, you might find it confusing and disjointed. But I thought it captured the quirky character of the P-I quite well (kind of like the Adcock review that’s quoted). And it works as metafiction — the play as newspaper story, reported and written well or poorly, depending on your viewpoint, whether you were skewered. I would like to see the play refined and leaned-out, because there are some fantastic moments. The reporter-politician exchanges were just perfect. The Green River segment was poignant. The comment by the victim’s mom who is grateful to the reporter for not describing her daughter by job or crime — it’s the same care that this play shows to the P-I.