The final days of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
The bottle of Wild Turkey appeared in the newsroom around 10 a.m. Monday.
By 6 p.m., a pack of several dogs roamed the cubicles, and a photo of one—a pup named Smithers—graced the proud “Employee of the Month” placard in the P-I’s main lobby.
Staffers from the P-I and The Seattle Times had hugged and cried at a spontaneous rally outside an hour earlier, with old friends and competitors honoring the journalism and the hard work that P-I staff have performed for this community for the past 146 years.
P-I employees learned today that the newspaper’s last print edition will be sold Tuesday. The Times, which prints the P-I, planned to run extra copies for what will likely be a huge day of street sales, as readers snap up the funeral edition of one of America’s great metro newspapers.
The Times alone may profit from those sales. The P-I severed its online connection with its crosstown competitor sometime Sunday night, unhitching seattlepi.com from nwsource.com, the advertising web site maintained by the Times that served both newspapers. The Joint Operating Agreement between the two companies is over. In the past year, the two protagonists, who once battled in court over the JOA’s survival, seemed more like exhausted prizefighters, clutching each other in the ring to stay upright and avoid another punch to the head.
For our union, everything began with the P-I. Local 37082 got its start in 1936, when P-I workers went on strike to win union representation, decent wages and better treatment on the job. The bound volume of the 1936 strike newspaper in our office is yellowed, fragile and a damn good read.
P-I staffers will return to work today for exit interviews with suits flown in from Texas by the Hearst Corp., and to sign the paperwork for their severance checks.
Under an agreement negotiated with the Guild, severance payments will provide two weeks of pay per year of service, with a minimum of four weeks and a maximum of 62 weeks of pay, along with three months of employer-paid COBRA coverage.
As part of that agreement, Hearst agreed to recognize the Guild as the collective bargaining agent for those people hired from our bargaining unit. What we develop there may become a ground-breaking labor contract, one anchored solely in the digital age.
We hope seattlepi.com succeeds. But on Wednesday, we doubt a bottle of Wild Turkey will appear in its newsroom.
“I think it was a tribute to the traditions of our past,” News Researcher Marsha Milroy, who’s worked at the P-I for 39 years, said of the Wild Turkey passed around today. There was a time when reporters, editors and shooters were mostly male, hard working, hard drinking and hardly standing at the end of the day.
Some laid-off employees will launch an immediate job search, if they haven’t already. Others, like Milroy, are using their severance payments as an opportunity to take stock, return to school and pursue new interests.
After hanging on for the past two months, wondering when their last day on the job would occur, one P-I employee on Monday summed up his emotions with one word: Relief.
“It’s over,” he said. “We’re done.”
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Sigh.
My heart goes out the the newsroom staff at the PI, which dies today. I worked almost 40 years for The Oregonian before retiring so I know the heartbreak you folks are suffering. I wish I could say things will be better for all of you, but I’d be lying. My brother-in-law came close to losing his job last week as a photo editor at the Sacramento Bee in yet another McClatchy round of throat-cutting.
All I can say to you folks is that I hope your futures brighten. Im thinking of all of you.