No P-I, mostly no Times, for the first time in decades

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

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 Friday evening. Today's Seattle Times and P-I were printed at the News-Tribune in Tacoma and at Rotary Offset Press, a Times subsidiary in Tukwila.

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 made electronic editions — facsimiles of each printed page that normally are available only for a fee — available on their Web sites for no charge Friday.

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' preparation for or response to the windstorm.

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. Friday, he wrote.

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

Times spokeswoman Mackie said subscribers would receive credit for papers that aren't delivered.

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 the San Francisco Chronicle continued to publish — albeit in truncated form — after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

Eric Pryne: 206-464-2231 or epryne@seattletimes.com