Two Times executives moving into new roles

Two top newsroom executives at The Seattle Times are being promoted in moves Publisher Frank Blethen said are part of a broad plan to cement leadership for the transition into the next generation of family ownership.

Michael Fancher, who has held the role of executive editor for 20 years, will move into a newly created position of editor-at-large. Managing Editor David Boardman will become executive editor.

The executives said they have not decided whether to fill the managing-editor position.

Blethen announced the promotions Wednesday in a meeting of the newsroom staff. The changes take effect Aug. 1.

Fancher, 60, said he began talking with Blethen at the start of the year about the future of the newsroom and his place in it.

"Frank put the question to me: What do you want to do?" he said. "I've done this job for 20 years and I thought, 'Well, I don't want to do the same thing for the years ahead.' I'd like to take this opportunity to really try to do something dramatically different."

Fancher's new role will include some of the content and community-outreach duties he has taken on in the past. But he will devote more time to readership and audience research, he said, and to developing long-term strategy.

The position is important as The Times, like other papers, plots its future in a time of tumultuous change for the industry, Fancher said. "In some ways, I have the opportunity to be a one-person think tank," he said.

He will retain his role as senior vice president of The Seattle Times Co.

Boardman, 49, has been the newspaper's managing editor since 2003 and will oversee the news content of The Times and its Web site.

At Wednesday's staff meeting, Boardman said the newspaper will look for new ways to connect with the region's communities, while developing a business model for the future.

He said that it will take some time to develop his own approach to the executive-editor role, particularly in the ways it will differ from his predecessor.

In an interview, Blethen, 61, said the changes were key to building a bridge from the newsroom to the next generation of his family, which owns The Seattle Times Co.

"We are truly now well into a succession into the next generation of family owners," he said. "A generational transition done right in a family is not done overnight. It's done over a period of time."

Some members of the family are already in leadership positions at the company or are being groomed for the future, he said.

Blethen also said his family has no intention of selling the newspaper, even after years of what he described as "relentless financial and legal blows."

Over the past year, Blethen said, family members began to ask themselves whether they believed The Times could survive. As painful as that exploration was, he said, it was probably one of the best things the group could have done.

"It was very clear by the time we came out of that that this family still had not lost its passion," he said. "That there was no way that the family was going to agree to sell the newspaper and that we're all pretty excited about the emergence of this core group in the next generation."

The Seattle Times Co. and The Hearst Corp., owner of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, have been in a long-running court dispute related to a joint-operating agreement between the companies.

The two sides recently agreed to submit to binding arbitration.

Blethen said the newsroom changes announced Wednesday were not related to the dispute or the arbitration.

Kim Peterson: 206-464-2360 or kpeterson@seattletimes.com