For some time now, the Seattle Times has allowed freelancer Bill Richards to cover its ongoing battle with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer regarding the joint operating agreement (JOA) that the papers are stuck in. This week, the Times has named its own Eric Pryne as the staffer who would continue the coverage of this story, the P-I’s Todd Bishop reports.
It should be noted that the P-I has been covering the story on its own, while the Times was given a lot of kudos for bringing in an outsider to do the job. Will that change, especially in this time of super-critical media followers, or is the fact that the P-I has been able to do it all along proof positive that while we all hope and think that newspaper reporters can be perfectly objective, that a reporter covering the economics of his or her publication can do so legitimately? I don’t have an issue with the paper’s decision to make this move, but think they might be criticized for doing so, purely because of the “objective” move it took for the last three years.
