{"id":1258,"date":"2009-11-08T01:23:24","date_gmt":"2009-11-08T09:23:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp\/2009\/11\/its_not_in_the_pi\/"},"modified":"2009-11-08T01:23:24","modified_gmt":"2009-11-08T09:23:24","slug":"its_not_in_the_pi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/2009\/11\/its_not_in_the_pi.html","title":{"rendered":"It’s Not In The PI"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/i>“. (Ticket info here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

It’s not in this play, either. Plenty of former staffers at the Friday night opening slipped out at intermission. <\/p>\n

(Photo, Josh Trujillo<\/a>)<\/p>\n

\"joshtrujillopi.jpg\"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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

The team at the top, publisher Roger Oglesby and managing editor David McCumber,<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

At that point, smart money was on the PI to survive and the Seattle Times to fail. What happened? <\/p>\n

Dan Richman’s story<\/a> in the PI is as good as any. <\/p>\n

Here’s my version:<\/p>\n


\nHearst hired a new team to manage its newspaper division. Those people
\ndon’t care about newspapers. They didn’t want to buy the Seattle Times
\nor even wait for it to fold. They wanted out. <\/p>\n

Helping them
\nmake that decision was PI staff, led by its ruinous Northwest Newspaper
\nGuild, the folks who brought us the 2000 newspaper strike. After Hearst
\nhired top legal talent to save the PI from the Times, what did the
\nGuild do? It sued the company on a technicality. Not only was the PI a
\nmoney drain, its staff proved unable to make concessions.<\/p>\n

Hearst
\ndeclined to continue that struggle. During what proved to be the last
\nround of contract talks, the Guild sent an email to staff asking what
\nthey wanted. I ignored the form and wrote back: “Glad you asked. Please
\ntry not to make the situation worse.”<\/p>\n

Another thing the play
\ngets wrong: The PI’s attempts to engage the staff in discussions about
\nchanging the paper to keep it alive (a process known internally as
\nTornado) might well have been too little, too late, but they were not
\nridiculous. Staffers who insisted on fighting it every inch of the way
\nwere ridiculous, and they appear to be the people who gave the
\nsix-person playwright team its information. <\/p>\n

Plays are entitled
\nto be wrong. They can’t afford to be what this play is: a baggy
\nmonster. It’s not funny enough, smart enough or coherent enough to
\nmatter. And talk about lack of proportion: The only PI staffer
\nmentioned by first and last name is theater critic Joe Adcock, who
\nretired shortly before the end. He’s not only mentioned, he’s
\nthoroughly examined. (I love the actor playing him. He got Joe’s
\ndisconnected, genial modesty exactly right.) <\/p>\n

Speaking of the
\nactors, they’re a charming lot. What else?  The props by Patrick
\nSkinner are inspired. But I don’t like the undertones of misplaced
\nresentment perpetrated by the text. Under McCumber, with management and
\nstaff working together, we were fabulous, even as the space in which to
\nbe fabulous continued to shrink. Small as it was, the paper that folded
\nis a paper to be proud of. <\/p>\n

(Brendan Kiley wrote an excessively kind preview of the play here<\/a>. 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.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1258","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1258\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}