In an announcement last Friday that left the newsroom in stunned silence, Seattle Post-Intelligencer owner, Hearst Corporation, told employees it was starting a 60-day process to find a buyer for the P-I. If a buyer is not found by the appointed date, the paper will either cease all publication or become a Web-only production.

Amy Rolph, a UW graduate and former Daily editor who now works the higher education beat at the P-I, first heard the news on the KING 5 television report the night before Hearst made the official announcement.

“There was this feeling of shock, of indignation — that KING 5 had this all wrong,” she said. “I thought,‘they’re going to feel so bad tomorrow when they have to issue a correction.’”

But when her editor called her after the meeting the next day, Rolph said she had to pull her car over to the side of the road to deal with the shock.

“We tried to do everything right, to give people the news the way they want to read it,” she said. “We all knew how bad things are, but none of us expected something of this magnitude.”

Doug Underwood, an associate professor in the communication department, feels that the loss of one of the city’s two daily newspapers — also the longest-publishing newspaper in the state — will indeed be a blow to the community.

“We’ve been blessed with being one of the last big cities to have two major newspapers,” Underwood said, adding that in his opinion, the Seattle Times and the P-I are two of the best regional newspapers in the nation. “I’ve argued for years that there was the capability to support two newspapers [in the region]. I don’t think it would’ve happened were it not for the recession.”

Others are concerned that the loss of one of the city’s daily newspapers may affect the quality of information that’s available to the public.

“It reduces the range of viewpoints about the state in the community and the region,” said Roger Simpson, another communication professor at the UW. “The two papers provide a wider range of opinions about the things that affect us than either paper would, surviving by itself.”

The Joint Operating Agreement (JOA) under which the Times and the P-I coexist is such that all advertising, production, marketing and circulation operations, as well as most business functions for both papers, are managed by the Seattle Times Company. The one stipulation of the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970, which made JOAs possible as an exception to anti-trust laws, is that each paper retains its own newsroom, so the news-gathering and editorial operations of the Times and P-I are still independent and competitive.

“I came to Seattle to find real newspaper competition,” Underwood said. “I was at the Times for six-and-a-half years, and knowing the P-I was down the street kept me on my toes.”

While the JOA has helped keep the P-I alive for much longer than it would have survived on its own, it’s not the final answer, Underwood added.

He mentioned speculation that Hearst might now try to buy a TV channel, namely KING 5, which broke the story. Under current federal law, a single company or individual cannot own more than a certain share of a given media market. As it stands, Hearst cannot own both a newspaper and a television news channel in the Seattle area. If the company sold the P-I, however, it could then buy a news channel and still be within the limits of the market share laws.

Rolph had also heard the rumors.

“It’s logical,” she said. “Though I’d hate to venture a guess.”

Rolph said that what she’s feeling now is a mixture of sadness and wondering about the future, both what she’s going to do personally and how the P-I, the newspaper into which she and others put so much of their lives, is going to fare.

Reach reporter Molly Rosbach at news@dailyuw.com.