'Seattle Times' JOA Freelancer in Limbo About Contract Renewal

By: Joe Strupp With less than three weeks until his unusual freelance contract with The Seattle Times is set to expire, JOA reporter Bill Richards still does not know if it will be renewed. Richards, a former staffer for The Wall Street Journal and Newsweek, signed on three years ago to cover the Times' ongoing JOA battle with The Seattle Post-Intelligencer with a clear freedom to write as he chooses.

The deal ends on Dec. 31. Richards says he has not been told if the paper will re-sign him to cover the ongoing saga, and related court battles. But he is ready to continue. "It would seem strange that they would stop in the middle," said Richards. "They seemed to have liked what they have gotten so far."

Times editors remain mum on Richards' future. Executive Editor Mike Fancher did not return calls seeking comment and Managing Editor David Boardman said Tuesday, "I don't have anything to tell you today."

When the contract was forged in late 2002 and took effect Jan. 1, 2003, the agreement was considered notable because it allowed Richards to cover the story -- in which the Times is seeking to end the 22-year-old JOA and the P-I is suing to stop them -- with virtually no limitations. The deal pays Richards a monthly stipend, without a required minimum or maximum number of stories each month. He is allowed to cover any aspects of the story and the Times must publish his coverage, unless there is a valid reason to deny it.

If a dispute arises, either side can go to a designated mediator, former Poynter Institute President James M. Naughton, to resolve the dispute. Neither side has had to take advantage of the mediation.

The Times has sought to end the JOA, which divides advertising and circulation profits through a 60-40 split, based on a provision in the agreement that allows either paper to pull out if it loses money for three consecutive years. The Times, which receives the higher profit portion, claims to have lost money annually from 2001 to 2004.

Some of Richards' stories have sparked disagreements with editors, such as a 2003 article that revealed a $10 million side deal between the Times and P-I owners at Hearst Newspapers giving Hearst the right of first refusal to buy the Seattle Times Co.'s majority ownership in the Times. Richards said that appeared to have violated anti-trust laws at the time, 1999.

Richards has written other articles questioning the Times' accounting practices, such as one story that reported the paper improperly included losses from other Seattle Times Co. properties on the Seattle Times' balance sheet and another report that Times had not included a $30 million real estate sale in its 2004 calculations.

But Times editors apparently thought enough of Richards' work to nominate him for a Pulitzer Prize in 2003. Last spring, Boardman hinted in an interview with E&P that an extension of Richards' contract might be needed, noting, "when we started off with a three-year deal, I don't think we had the notion that [the story] would go beyond three years. But it appears it will."

Richards believes the JOA battle is entering "its most complicated, complex stage." He says the ongoing court battle has moved beyond earlier disputes over contract language in the JOA and on to the serious questions of whether the Times was genuinely a money-losing paper from 2001 to 2004. Richards said the upcoming court activities will address Hearst's contention that the Times might have purposely "spent itself into a loss," he said. "That raises some interesting questions.

Richards stresses that he has never felt the paper tried to muzzle his work, and praised editors for making a number of stories better. "They have essentially edited stories hard and well," he said. "But not to the point of killing the story. People who have edited stories have made them better."