On Monday I reported that the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild, the union representing Seattle Times newsroom employees, fears that the Seattle Times Company may file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy soon in an effort to void current contracts with its unions. Yesterday and today, Erica Barnett and Eli Sanders at the Slog have reported on fresh developments at the Times that indicated that senior Times managers and editors have admitted to Times employees that a bankruptcy filing is a possibility, although Executive Editor David Boardman, at a Wednesday staff meeting, told his staff that the paper’s owners were reluctant to pursue a bankruptcy filing and that significant concessions from the Guild could forestall such an outcome.

To be honest, I think there are so many rumors and it seems to be a great deal of speculation. The Times does not anticipate the end to a print newspaper in the foreseeable future. The current environment is very challenging for us, as it is for newspapers nationally, and for the broader economy.  The near term challenge is to get through this deep recession so that we can continue for the long term to serve the community with the quality of journalism they deserve whether in print, online, or via new, not yet imagined, technologies.

  Last November, when the Seattle Times announced its third round of layoffs in a year, Times executives strongly hinted that there would be more to come. “As the 2009 budgeting process continues, there will be additional expense reductions, which may include additional layoffs,” Times Publisher Frank Blethen and President Carolyn Kelly wrote in a memo to Times staff at the time. Word out of the Times then was that a new round of cutbacks could come as early as February. Rumors are swirling that the next round of layoffs could be coming soon. 

            Since the last round of cuts, the economy has only gotten worse. And the Times’ two-track effort to raise cash by selling off its Maine newspapers has stalled. In December, 500 non-union Times managers were instructed to take a week off without pay by Feb. 28. Last week, some sources in the local media world were telling me they were hearing a new round of cuts was coming in the next couple of weeks.

            Elizabeth Brown, administrative officer of the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild, which represents newsroom employees at the Times and P-I, says that the union has heard the same thing and is bracing for a new round of layoffs at the Times. While the union has received no official word from the Times, Brown says last Wednesday a Guild member was told by a senior person at the paper that another round of layoffs is probable in the very near future. Others in the Times newsroom told me they have not heard anything recently about more layoffs, but would not be surprised given how bad things are at the paper these days.

            I e-mailed Times Executive Editor David Boardman to ask about the layoff rumors on Thursday. Boardman declined comment, and passed my inquiry to Times corporate spokesperson Jill Mackie. “We have no announcements to make at this time regarding further layoffs,” Mackie wrote back. “Generally speaking, we try not to comment on rumors, and, out of respect to our employees, were we to have an announcement to make, we would certainly want to discuss it first with employees before commenting in the media.”

            The Guild also remains very concerned that the Times may be forced to declare bankruptcy soon. “We don’t have anything official, but we’ve been preparing ourselves for a possible Chapter 11 filing from the Times,” Brown says, adding that the Times’ unions fear that the paper could use such a filing to try to void its union contracts.

   Another widespread rumor – that the Times has been negotiating with the Guild and its other unions to implement a mandatory one week furlough for unionized employees, similar to the December announcement for non-union employees – is “flat out untrue,” according to Brown. “We haven’t heard a peep from them. They have not contacted us about that, nor have they contacted any of the unions,” she said, In fact, Brown says the Guild has been frustrated by the fact that official lines of communication between the paper and the Guild have been almost non-existent. “To date we have had absolutely no communications from the Seattle Times. It’s been damn hard to get them to even return a phone call,” she says. That lack of communication has been heightening the Guild’s anxiety about what may be coming.

            And the state of the local media landscape with the P-I heading for oblivion and the Times in serious trouble? “It’s chaos,” Brown says.  

Microsoft joins Detroit, print newspapers, real estate, and banks, announces big layoffs and falling net income.

The news today is that Obama’s first order of business was calling on West Bank Fatah Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas. This is encouraging. The reason I voted for Obama was because I believe he’s the man who can forge peace in the Middle East.

No one believes Israel’s blitzkrieg on Gaza is going to vanquish Hamas, but the coordination between O’s inauguration, Israel’s withdrawal, and O’s call to Fatah certainly seems to justify the Israeli strategy of putting the squeeze on Hamas.

Portland’s new mayor, Sam Adams, admitted yesterday that he had a brief affair with an 18 year old named Beau Breedlove in the summer of 2005 (he was 42 at the time, and supposedly “mentoring” Breedlove). Adams had repeatedly and forcefully denied that his relationship with Breedlove was anything more than platonic after rumors of the affair first surfaced in the Portland media in 2007, but made his admission after Willamette Week, one of Portland’s alt-weeklies, published fresh accounts from several people who said Breedlove had confessed the affair to them.

The story is another score for Willamette Week, and something of a scoop for reporter Nigel Jaquiss, who won a Pulitzer for the paper a few years back for revealing that former Portland Mayor and Oregon governor Neil Goldschmidt, one of the most powerful men in the state, had committed statutory rape with an underage girl during his first term as mayor over a period of three years (she was 14 when it began; Goldschmidt was in his mid-30s).  The current revelations about Adams seem less significant. Adams insists that while he met Breedlove when the young man was 17, they did not have sex until Breedlove was 18, and so far there are no indications that their relationship was anything but completely consensual.

If true, that makes the contact unseemly, but not illegal. The story may be interesting, in a gossipy sort of way, but to my mind hardly a disqualifier for elected office—Adams says he does not intend to resign—particularly in a tolerant town like Portland (Adams is the only openly gay mayor among those of the 40 largest cities in the country). On the other hand, the paper has caught the mayor in a sensational and repeated lie, one that likely had a major impact in preserving Adams’ ultimately successful bid for mayor.  And that is a big deal.

What really caught my eye, though was WW’s inclusion of Amy Ruiz (nee Jenniges) as a major player in the story. In 2003 and 2004 I worked with Ruiz at the Stranger, where she covered neighborhoods (Josh was our editor). She went on to become the news editor at the Mercury, the Stranger’s sister paper in Portland. And just before Christmas Adams hired Ruiz, who had covered city hall at the Mercury, as an advisor on sustainability and planning.

WW strongly implies that Ruiz was unqualified for the job, and insinuates that Adams may have hired her to keep her quiet about what she knew about his relationship with Breedlove—along with another Mercury reporter, Ruiz has investigated the allegations in 2007, but the paper never published its findings. This seems like a real stretch. Ruiz (to whom I have not spoken in a couple of years) had long ago abandoned her work on the story—she says, plausibly enough, that she chose not to publish the allegations at the time because she could not confirm them: Adams insisted his relationship with Breedlove was platonic and Breedlove, while he consented to an off-the-record conversation with the Mercury, never admitted having sex with Adams.

As for Ruiz’s qualificatrions for the advisory position—essentially a mid-level political appointment—I can vouch for the fact that Amy is smart, has a passion for and deep knowledge about local politics, and genuinely imbued with a civic spirit and a communitarian idealism. In short, when I heard she had left the Merc for a position in Portland city government, my first reaction was that she would be great hire for Adams, and would strengthen his governing team. I recall that when King County Executive Ron Sims hired me away from the Stranger for a senior level position on his staff in 2005, a lot of chattering class types around town were saying the same things about my lack of government experience and qualifications for the job. And, moreover, that Ron was crazy to hire someone from a semi-outlaw tabloid like the Stranger, which had often been critical of his performance in office (besides, there were so many nice boys and girls at the Times and P-I who would have jumped to get that gig). While I don’t want to put words in Ron’s mouth (I don’t work at the County any more), Ron has never given me any indication that he wasn’t pleased with how that decision turned out.

“Amy was hired because of her smarts,” Adams told WW, and in the absence of any contrary evidence I see no reason to disbelieve him. Let’s face it, it’s not at all unusual, especially these days, for journalists to crossover to the dark side and get jobs in government. Just last week PI Olympia reporter Chris McGann went to work for the incoming state Treasurer following in the wake of longtime AP reporter Dave Ammons’ jump to the Secretary of State’s office. I think WW jumped the shark a bit in making Ruiz such a significant part of their story (the Oregonian, in their coverage, make no mention of Ruiz), and it feels to me that WW decision to make Ruiz’s hire an issue was colored more by the chilly competitive relationship between WW and the Merc (similar to the bad blood that exists here between the Stranger and the Weekly), than by any credible evidence that it was part of a cover up of a story that Adams believed (wrongly, as it turns out) he had put behind him. 

Inauguration Mania Continues: Is it just me, or is anyone else already tired of the Inauguration hype? I had my moment of unadulterated Obama joy on election night, when the polls closed on the West Coast at 8 pm and minutes thereafter the networks declared Obama the winner. The inauguration frou frah is icing on the cake, I suppose, but these days, with the economy sinking, I’m feeling more anxiety than hope.

Still, bloat yourself on inauguration coverage, see our coverage at OMG!Obama, or visit SLOG, where both Eli Sanders and Stranger editor Christopher Frizzelle are on the scene.

For a national perspective, I suggest here and here.

Oh yeah, and it’s MLK Day today, though I am going to be spending it down to Olympia trying to figure out how to keep the state from eliminating an adult day health program that keeps 1,900 seniors out of nursing homes.

It’s not just the P-I that’s in trouble: Attention has naturally focused on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer since the surprise announcement from Hearst that they are moving towards shutting down the paper (or replacing it with a radically downsized web-only publication).  But these days it seems like everyone in local journalism is worried they may not have a job in a few months.

         And they may be right. The Seattle Weekly just laid off two people recently, including Aimee Curl, their political reporter. They recently put out a shockingly thin 44-page issue; just a few years ago, a paper 30 pages larger would have been considered a horrible week. Their parent company, Village Voice Media (formerly New Times), has been laying people off across its chain of papers, and at the end of the year announced across-the-board 10 and 14 percent pay cuts for editors and senior managers. There has been speculation about the Weekly possibly going under ever since I moved to Seattle in 2002, and I never took it too seriously. Now, though, I’m beginning to wonder if the Weekly makes it through the end of the year.

Moreover, I hear there are layoff fears at King 5, and, from all indications, the Times’ financial situation remains dire. Rumors are flying that Times executives are considering drastic actions to keep the paper afloat. Around the time of the P-I announcement, a friend with knowledge of the Times’ internal discussions told me that Times executives were seriously contemplating filing for bankruptcy reorganization – and soon. With the P-I now seemingly in its last days, at least as a full-scale printed daily, that is less certain, though a Times bankruptcy filing in the next few months is still possible, my source said.

         Then on Saturday a friend in the local media passed on a rumor that the Times is exploring the idea of going non-profit. My first reaction was to scoff, thinking this talk could not possibly be true. But then I opened the Sunday paper to find a long op-ed by a University of Pennsylvania law professor calling for the federal government to prop up newspapers by subsidizing the costs of journalists’ salaries through massive tax breaks. Leave aside the obvious contradiction between the fact that the Times has been enthusiastically advocating for sharp cutbacks of state government, while now raising the idea of a billion-plus dollar federal government bailout of daily newspapers. The timing of this piece makes me suspicious that there is something going on behind the scenes. It’s just rumor and speculation at this point, but this situation bears watching.

Meanwhile, Seattle Congressman Jim McDermott (writing on the P-I’s editorial page, about his desire to see the P-I survive) announced that he is studying possible changes to the tax code that would make it easier to allow newspapers to become non-profits. Seems like given the parlous state of our local media, anything is possible at this point, and big changes to even those media entities that survive the current shakeout appear more likely than not.

 The Times’ Opinions, They Are a Changin’: On Sunday, the Times editorial page officially came out in support of the $4.25 billion tunnel to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct. That wouldn’t be much of a surprise – the new tunnel proposal has the support of political leaders, business powers and most stakeholders – except for the fact that it represents a jarring shift in the paper’s position. Two years ago, the paper could not proclaim often enough that a tunnel replacement for the Viaduct was bad idea: they said it wasunaffordable (even a slimmed-down $3.4 billion version), wouldcannibalize money from the even more critical (if you live in or commute to the suburbs) 520 bridge replacement, and would obviously be inferior to a rebuild of the existing structure.

         So what changed? In Sunday’s editorial, the Times offers a smorgasbord of small-bore reasons for its new-found appreciation for a costly deep-bore tunnel under downtown. If you take what they say ar face value (hint: you shouldn’t), the paper was bowled over by the “exhaustive public process” that went into the latest Viaduct decision, likes the fact that this plan will cause less disruption for waterfront businesses, and believes that a big dig would serve as a “jobs package and economic stimulus” in a down economy.

         All these explanations have some validity, but hardly seem significant enough to provoke such a major shift in the paper’s position. No, what has really happened is that the parameters of political debate around the Viaduct shifted. While a rebuild was politically viable, the paper saw Nickels’ tunnel proposal as a threat. Now, hopping aboard he tunnel bandwagon seems like the best bet to stop the dreaded  (from the Times’ perspective) surface option.

         Think back a couple of years. In 2006 the surface-transit option championed by Cary Moon and her dedicated cadres of younger New Urbanists was seen at the Times as an outsiders’ pipe dream without the political juice to constitute a real political threat. If the tunnel was torpedoed, conventional wisdom held that the Viaduct would be rebuilt – and so the Times set out to do what it could to crush Nickels and his dream of opening up the waterfront.

That all changed after the 2007 no-and-hell-no Viaduct advisory vote, in which both a tunnel and a rebuild were decisively rejected by Seattle voters. With both King County Executive Ron Sims (my former boss) and the Stranger (also my former employer) openly championing the surface-transit idea prior to the advisory vote, and Nickels moving rapidly in that direction immediately after, the Times suddenly figured out that a rebuild of the Viaduct was a political non-starter. And with their preferred solution fading, a surface-transit solution was the most likely outcome of the “exhaustive public process” that followed the vote.

         The Times has always been reflexively suspicious of progressive ideas that emerge outside of the narrow confines of the region’s civic class (think monorail), and they staked their flag on the far-right of recent local transpo debates, with Eastside anti-transit developer Kemper Freeman and former Republican State Sen. Jim Horn capturing the paper’s ear. They opposed the 2007 Roads and Transit package, a regional compromise that no one was fully happy with (disclosure: I worked on that campaign), assuming that failure at the polls would result in the roads portion of the package getting built anyway while the expansion of light rail would be stopped in its tracks. Instead, the opposite happened: a major regional transit-only measure swept to victory with 58 percent of the vote last November. A Times editorial writer recently conceded to me that things hadn’t worked out as they would have hoped on this front. So dropping a rebuild for a tunnel looks like a more pragmatic approach to transportation compromises than the paper has taken in the recent past.

         And none of this means that there is anything wrong with the paper changing its position. The new tunnel plan does appear to have strong momentum behind it, and may actually lead to a final resolution to the vexing Viaduct question. Even surface-transit advocates don’t appear to be complaining too loudly at present about the tunnel plan. I do wish, however, that the Times editorial page was more honest about its motives. The paper remains secretive and vague about its internal thinking at a time when other papers have been striving to be more transparent. They hate surface-transit, and they feel burned by November’s successful transit-only ballot measure. Why can’t they just come out and say that? Honesty is the best policy.