It's crazy, but we're still here

Bullhorn in hand, I looked out at the small crowd milling in the rain. A feeling came over me: I've been here before.

I've heard this plaintive song.

One time was back in 1991, at the old federal courthouse in Seattle. I was getting my start as a reporter and was sent to cover a rally of laid-off timber workers. Unexpectedly, a logger stood up and broke into song.

It was about how cutting down trees was more than what he did for a living. It was who he was.

"I don't know what to do, I can't believe I'm finally through," he sang. Inside, a judge was shutting down logging across much of our federal forests.

Another time was about 1995, at Ballard's Fishermen's Terminal. A few hundred gill-netters and purse seiners had gathered to lament how fishing for salmon was Seattle's lost art.

"We're the new endangered species," a fisherman said.

That about sums up the rally we had on Monday, when 50 Seattle Post-Intelligencer and Seattle Times reporters, editors and photographers came out to mark the death of the P-I, at least in printed form.

Seattle Times reporter Hal Bernton organized it as a memorial of sorts, to say thanks to the P-I's reporters for helping tell the city's stories. He said he wanted it to be like when a firefighter dies and all the other firefighters come to the funeral.

It was. We gathered in a little park near the P-I offices. Some spoke wistfully, others ruefully. When it was my turn I said that while everyone is focused, understandably, on the corporate side of newspapering — on the making of profits — it's worth remembering that that's not why anyone goes into journalism. Reporting is what matters. Asking questions, prying things open, telling stories.

I said: Keep doing that. A living will follow. I think.

When I was speaking, I choked up because I thought of my grandfather, editor of a newspaper in West Virginia. And my uncle, a longtime reporter in Ohio. It dawned on me for the first time: Ink is in the blood.

That's what that logger was saying, too. At some point it isn't a job anymore. It becomes an irrational pursuit.

Which is why what we do won't die out. I could see that at the event Monday. The people born to do it are crazy. We won't let it.

Take the loggers. Years after I heard that logger sing his eulogy, I was out in Forks covering a story about old loggers learning new, environmentally friendly tree-harvesting techniques.

They mocked the puny chain saws they were given. Groused it wasn't like the old days. Still, they adapted. For a time, timber boomed again. It's hurting badly now with the housing collapse, but the point is: It lives on.

Or consider the fishermen. Fishing remains a $3 billion-a-year industry in Washington state. Yes, our fishermen steam all the way up to Alaska now to catch the fish. But that's OK. Their view is: Get busy fishing or get busy dying.

So Seattle wakes up today a one-newspaper town for the first time. But The Seattle Times is hardly alone. It's also a multiple-Web-site-town. And a dozens- or hundreds-of-blogs town.

Someone at the rally compared today to the frontier days — an unruly but inventive era when some of today's news businesses first formed.

Loggers or fishermen will tell you living through sea change like that isn't easy.

I take comfort that they also say this: We're still here.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.