PICKING OVER THE CORPSE OF THE SEATTLE PI!

When I first read Everett Herald’s publisher Allen Funk’s death notice about the demise of the Seattle Post Intelligencer, I came away with the impression that this was a thinly disguised effort to try and woo the readership of the PI in Snohomish County to the Herald. The EXACT number of readers/subscribers the PI had in Snohomish County is not known for sure. The readers of greatest interest were those in the county’s south end in cities of Bothell, Lynnwood, Edmonds, Everett and the other metro areas around Paine Field. No matter how they add up in this newspaper environment they turned out to be vitally important to both the Seattle Times and the Everett Herald who wanted to jack up their circulation numbers on the corpse of the Seattle PI even before it went into post mortem lividity.

Newspapers make their money on the advertising they sell, not the subscribers revenue that just helps defer the costs of reporting, printing and distribution. The profits the newspapers make depend on their circulation and that circulation is determined by the Audit Bureau of Circulation.

The early numbers concerning the circulation of the Everett Herald are not very good. Daily subscriptions went from 50,272 to 49,016 and the Sunday paper from 53,947 to 52,543 for the year to year data, end of March 08 to 2009. Now if one takes into account that newspapers in general are losing circulation and then look at the Seattle Times subscriber numbers during the same period, it APPEARS as if the Seattle Times got some 60% of the Snohomish County PI readers, the Herald got 30% and 10% stopped reading newspapers or went on-line!

A simple analysis indicates that these events are bad news for the Everett Herald because it indicates that they had a net loss of readership during the same period, buoyed up by picking the bones on the carcass of the Seattle PI. In other words their numbers show a modest decline, when in fact it was actually much larger than they would want to talk about in public if you take out the PI readers they picked up. We will all know the exact ramifications in October when the ABC releases its next 6 month report.

However, there was a bright ray of sunshine on the economic horizon for the Everett Herald and all the other newspapers in the state: A BIG FAT BAILOUT ON THE BACKS OF THE WASHINGTON STATE TAXPAYER! Some are saying that this was done in return for virtual editorial control of those papers and their political endorsements. In any event the Washington State Democratic Party presented them with a gift: A 40% CUT IN STATE TAXES. In other words while your average “Joe public” in the state has to struggle to pay his bills the Everett Herald is getting a big bailout with a 40% cut in taxes; REAL CASH FOLKS! Believe me, the FAT CAT owners of the Everett Herald in the Washington DC suburbs are eternally grateful (The Herald is owned by the Washington Post!). They were having problems making THEIR payments on their Mercedes SUV’s and their multi-million dollar mansions.

That BAILOUT FOR THE HERALD has been signed into law by Governor Quagmire just last week. Now that the deed is done, what do you think that Everett Herald publisher Allen Funk and editors Bob Bolarjack, Robert Frank and Neil Pattison will do in return? You don’t have to be a Snohomish County rocket scientist to figure that one out!  Honest reporting and newspaper Journalism is DEAD in Washington State folks AND SO IS THE SEATTLE POST INTELLIGENCER! Who’s next?