SEATTLE –- The city’s newest newspaper, the Union Record, will cease publishing with a final edition on Wednesday.
"The website will become a museum of sorts and (an) archive," said U-R managing editor Chuck Taylor.
Both the website and the final print edition will promote the city’s two established dailies, the Post-Intelligencer and the Seattle Times.
Neither the paper's sudden demise nor its endorsement of the city's other newspapers came as a surprise to anyone. The Union Record was staffed by the reporters and editors who walked off their jobs at the dailies Nov. 22. It was published by their union, the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild, as a strike paper.
Unlike strike papers in the past, the Union Record began as an online newspaper, appearing on the Web the first day of the strike and adding a less frequent print edition about a week later.
From the beginning, the strike paper bested the regular newspapers, breaking news stories and offering regular features and columns by some of the city's most popular writers.
Over the next two months the Union Record continued to expand its coverage to include full sports and living sections along with local and national news pages.
It also developed strong online features -- including a multimedia photo gallery that combined text and pictures with sound files, and an index of political cartoons by Pulitzer Prize-winning artist David Horsey.
By early December, the online Union Record was logging more than 35,000 pageviews daily.
The Union Record was challenged by the loss of several staff members when the Post-Intelligencer reached a separate settlement with its workers shortly after the new year. But it was able to reorganize and continue operating with striking Times staff only.
Under the final settlement with the Seattle Times Company, approximately 20 percent of the more than 600 strikers will not be going back to work immediately. The company began hiring permanent replacement workers during the strike, and company President H. Mason Sizemore said they also learned how to run a leaner operation. He said they expect to permanently reduce staff by 10 percent as a result of the strike.
Asked if there had been any thought of continuing the Union Record by the laid off workers and members of WashTech, a union of temporary workers that has been lending its support, Taylor said that under U.S. labor laws the Guild could not operate a competing newspaper once the strike was over.
"A strike paper like the Union Record is permitted to exist only as a weapon of the strike. Otherwise, unions are prohibited from competing in a given business with an employer," Taylor said.
"The only scenario I can see for something like this continuing beyond the strike is if someone with really, really, really deep pockets wanted to start up a local news outlet that is primarily on the Web," Taylor said. "Covering the news properly is expensive, but combined with, say, a free five-day tabloid, which would appeal more to advertisers, it might be viable."
John Morton, a newspaper industry analyst and president of a media consulting firm in Silver Springs, Maryland, pointed to the Citizen's Voice in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, as one instance where a strike paper succeeded.
"The strike never did come to an end, so the unions were not barred from publishing it," he said. Eventually the unions sold the newspaper to its management, who recently sold it to the Scranton Times.
"It's very difficult to create a new daily newspaper in a market that's already being well served by a newspaper," he said, adding that in Seattle, where there are two competing papers already, it would be even harder to succeed.
"I would be amazed if you could find somebody rich enough or willing to lose enough money to try something like that," Morton said.
"It would be great if they could pull it off. However, the track record of union newspapers surviving even when strikes don't get settled is not great," said T.M. Sell, a professor of journalism and political economy at Highline College, near Seattle, who formerly worked as a business reporter for the P-I. "While the Web gives them a great distribution tool, it's still not clear how anybody makes money on the Web. Even with the addition of the print product, it's a dicey proposition."
