Loss of power stops presses for Times, P-I

You had to look long and hard for a printed copy of The Seattle Times today.

Finding a Seattle Post-Intelligencer was impossible.

Thursday night's windstorm knocked out power to the Times plant where both daily newspapers are printed, forcing cancellation of the press run for the Friday morning editions after just 13,000 copies of The Times and no copies of the P-I had been printed.

The Times' average weekday circulation is about 213,000, the P-I's about 126,000.

Power still had not been restored to the Bothell plant by late this afternoon. Plans for Saturday's print editions were still unclear late into the day.

The last time The Times didn't publish was in 1953. The P-I last missed a day in 1936. In both instances, strikes were responsible.

Both papers' electronic versions were available to readers as usual on the Internet for no charge. Representatives of both papers also reported significant increases in traffic to their Web sites.

The Times, controlled by the Seattle-based Blethen family, handles the business and production side for both papers under a federally approved joint operating agreement (JOA). The newspapers maintain separate news and editorial operations.

The Times and The Hearst Corp., the P-I's owner, have been involved for more than three years in a nasty legal dispute over the JOA's future. But P-I Publisher Roger Oglesby wasn't critical of The Times' preparations and handling of the windstorm.

"I don't have any particular complaints to lodge against The Seattle Times about this," he said this morning.

Times Vice President Alan Fisco said in an e-mail to Times managers that electricity at the Bothell plant went off for good shortly after 11 p.m. Thursday. The official decision to cancel the press runs wasn't made until 6:15 a.m., he wrote.

While there is an emergency generator at the plant, Times spokeswoman Jill Mackie said, it only keeps the computers and lights on, and isn't powerful enough to run the big presses.

"We don't have the capacity to run the presses without Puget Sound Energy," she said. A generator that size isn't feasible, she added.

Tom Croteau, senior vice president for technology at the Newspaper Association of America, an industry group, said many newspapers in areas that experience severe weather have invested in diesel generators capable of powering their presses.

During California's energy crisis several years ago, some papers there bought generators, and now sell the electricity they produce back to utilities, he added.

But Croteau said such generators can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Getting permits from air-pollution-control agencies also can be problematic, he said.

As for The Seattle Times, "it probably was hard to justify it [a diesel generator] up until last night," Croteau said. "It's really a matter of insurance."

John Karafotias, assistant production manager of The Oregonian in Portland, said that paper doesn't have a generator big enough to power all five of its presses. But the production plant is linked to three transformers, he said, and can still keep operating even if two go out.

Mackie said in an e-mail that The Times has "sophisticated contingency plans" that "have served us well over many years with no prior occurrence such as this one." She also said the Bothell plant is fed by electricity from two Puget Sound Energy sources, but both went out Thursday night, a circumstance she called unprecedented.

As of early afternoon, The Times had made plans to print parts of the Saturday Times and P-I at The News-Tribune in Tacoma and at Rotary Offset Press, a Times subsidiary in Tukwila. The advance edition of the Sunday newspaper, also known as the "Bulldog," would not be printed, Fisco said in an e-mail.

Mackie said it was too soon to speculate on the economic impact of the power outage on the Times and P-I. She did say subscribers would receive credit for papers that aren't delivered.

She also said the emergence of the Internet had enabled The Times to continue to serve many readers despite the printing problems.

Major metropolitan newspapers rarely fail to print. The New Orleans Times-Picayune didn't print for three days in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. But Croteau said the San Francisco Chronicle continued to publish — albeit in truncated form — after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.