Blethen's Choice

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,

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