Why Seattle Loved the P-I

A memoir of working at the city’s scrappy, brave daily back when newspapers seemed like eternal objects

A few days after the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s owners announced its imminent demise, an old newspaperman expressed surprise about the city’s emotional reaction to the news. The Seattle Times was generally considered the better paper, he said, but the P-I was by far the more beloved. “Why is that?” he asked. “Why do people read the Times but love the P-I?”

The answer lies in history, personality, corporate culture and the peculiarly human scale of the P-I. The Times has always been the city’s paper of corporate ambition, the student body president or eager-to-please perfect son. The P-I was the college dropout, the quietly creative, quirky one. Some P-I subscribers have a vague sense of this, but I didn’t gain a full understanding of the paper’s rich character until the summer of 1987, when I joined the paper for a brief stint as a summer intern.

The P-I was down on its luck, still reeling from its brush with death in the early eighties. The 1983 joint operating agreement with the Times kept the P-I wounded but alive, pumping out product six days a week but prohibited from showcasing its best stories in a Sunday edition. Hilarious as it may seem now, journalism was then on a big professionalization kick. The Times, lover of all things corporate, led the charge. Its interns came from the nation’s most prestigious graduate schools. The P-I cared less about credentials. It hired UW undergrads like me. When P-I editors looked at interns they didn’t see inexperienced kids. They saw warm bodies with notebooks, labor on the hoof.

Interns covered fires, fatalities and Mayor Charlie Royer’s weekly press conferences. We swung from desk to desk filling in for vacationing reporters. Sometimes we knew what we were doing. Mostly we faked it enough to get by.

One night I filed a story about city engineers doing some seismic testing on a downtown building. The piece was full of abstruse terms like cycles, periods and damping. Out of the corner of my eye I watched the copyeditor wrestle with it for a while. He was a wiry fellow with the bearing of an ex-Marine. After a sufficient pause, he marched over to my cubicle. “Listen, kid,” he said, “you gotta make this a little clearer. I don’t know whether this goddamn building’s gonna fall down, fuck me or go on the rag.”

This man came from a proud lineage. The copy desk is the keeper of every newspaper’s soul, and the P-I’s was the stuff of legend. Back in the sixties the copy staff included the poet David Wagoner, future Dune author Frank Herbert, gonzo journalist Darrell Bob Houston and a budding novelist named Tom Robbins. The P-I abided free spirits and eccentrics. The Times, by contrast, made its most lasting contribution to American letters in 1923 by firing a young reporter named E. B. White, thus propelling him to a glorious destiny at The New Yorker.

"The copy desk is the keeper of every newspaper’s soul, and the P-I’s was the stuff of legend."

No chair was off-limits to the interns. During a two-week stint on the editorial page, I poured sober thoughts into the left-hand column and pitched questions to Al Gore and Jesse Jackson, who were thumping for their ’88 presidential candidacies. For a couple of weeks I shared a cubicle with Jean Godden and witnessed the gossip goddess working at the height of her powers. She’d breeze into the office, can two or three heard-about-town columns in under forty-seven minutes, charm juicy bits out of a few phoned sources, lay down one more column and head out for a long lunch.

We get our papers like our politics — handed down by our parents. My grandparents took the P-I, the liberal workingman’s rag, and even as a teenager I sensed that the P-I was somehow woven more tightly into the fabric of local culture than the Times. Its neon globe-and-eagle sat somewhere between the Space Needle and the Pink Elephant Car Wash in the pantheon of local kitsch. Sonic wins and Mariners losses were tallied in “The Sporting Green,” the paper’s seventies-era sports section. When longtime sports editor Royal Brougham died in 1978, he went out with near-mythical drama, keeling over at his typewriter in the Kingdome press box during a Seahawks game. The Times covered the city. The P-I was the city.

Did the Times have more reporting talent? Absolutely. Whenever Times and P-I reporters bumped into each other, a pattern revealed itself. The Times staffer seemed to be merely alighting on a rung of the success ladder. The P-I reporter had the look of a man waiting for death to relieve him. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the cops and courts bureaus. These were cluttered, windowless offices in City Hall and the King County Courthouse that were as welcoming as a border guard shack in Azerbaijan. Cop shop duty consisted of rifling through the day’s case sheets and calling the State Patrol, County Sheriff and other law-enforcement agencies to see what was going on. A few days into the beat, I made a routine State Patrol call.

“Anything happening?” I asked, trying to make my voice drip with the nonchalant timbre of experience.

“Nothing much,” said the woman on the other end of the line, “except for that body they found down off Highway 18.”

“What body?” I said, thinking, Please don’t let this be a Green River Killer victim.

“Young woman, from what I hear.”

It was, in fact, Green River Killer victim number forty, Cindy Anne Smith. In a few hours I’d read all about the discovery of her remains in the Times front pager by Carlton Smith, whose book on the Green River case would later launch his career as a successful true-crime author. Smith had shipped his story hours before I’d picked up the phone. My hackwork all but carried the subhead Clueless Intern Blows Story for P-I.

After I took my lumps from the city desk, an old reporter tossed me a bone. “Tough luck,” he said. “Don’t let it get you down. It’s a newspaper. We print another one tomorrow.” It was his way of letting me in on a little P-I secret: Reporting ain’t brain surgery. It’s legwork, fast typing and a little bit of luck. If the whiz kids at the Times looked upon lawyers and doctors as peers, the old dogs at the P-I were more comfortable alongside teachers and cops. They plied a trade, not a profession.

At summer’s end I moved on, secure in the knowledge that daily newspapers weren’t my medium. But I stayed with the P-I as a loyal reader who loved the paper beyond its data-delivering utility. My brief time under the globe had confirmed what the rest of the city intuitively knew: The P-I wasn’t Seattle’s best paper, but it was the most human institution in town. It was a paper with lumpy personalities: Emmett Watson, Shelby Scates and Jean Godden in the seventies and eighties; Dave Horsey, Art Thiel and Joel Connelly in the nineties and oughts. Seattle loved the P-I for the same reason the world loves Paris: for its old-world feel and fit, the way its warm street life and low-slung architecture lend a flesh-and-blood feel to the place. You walk the city and think this is how people were meant to live. The P-I was that kind of paper: alive, warm, unpretentious, a place where faults were forgiven and maybe even cherished. Real people wrote it, real people read it, and Seattle will become a little colder with its departure.