One small step for The Seattle Times, one big kick in the craw for metropolitan Seattle.
Regardless of the legal validity of the state Supreme Court's June 30 ruling stating the Times can include financial losses from 2000 and 2001 in exercising an escape clause in the Times/Seattle Post-Intelligencer Joint Operating Agreement (JOA), the real story is that Seattle has just inched closer to becoming a one-daily-newspaper city.
The cultural and political ramifications of Seattle becoming a one-paper town are immense, and for reasons little understood in today's cathode-and-mouseclick-driven culture.
Were Seattle's print media to be reduced by one daily, the benefits to the Herald-Outlook and its brethren at Pacific Publishing Co. Inc. would be agreeable. There would be slack - in community coverage, in neighborhood focus, in variety and color of voices and opinion - and we could pick some of that up. Perhaps circulation, revenue and advertising base would go up.
Newspapers are the couriers of civic dialogue; at their best, they at once create and reflect and reiterate the debate that drives the life of the city they are meant to represent.
Newspapers also stand as an important check on the powers of government, whether they are communicating facts, voicing opinions or serving as a conduit for the concerns of their readership.
Although neither The Seattle Times nor the Seattle Post-Intelligencer represents the pinnacle of achievement for metropolitan dailies, they are significantly different papers. In the most general sense, the P-I is our liberal newspaper, the Times our conservative one.
So one daily does not negate the other; rather they complement and augment each other - by challenging choices in coverage, compelling debate, competing for readership. Analogous to the multi-party political system, there is little to be gained by subtracting one of these voices, and much to lose.
The free-market argument that democracy is tantamount to consumer choice is more often than not a facetious one, but here, in the trenches of ink and information, diversity is crucial. The more papers the better.
Seattle - already suffering the growing pains of metropolitan adulthood - would be ill-served by a single daily newspaper, no matter how good it was. That day should never come.
Never, but especially not now.
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