Blethen's Choice

What the minutes of the meeting do not mention is another event that foretold the Times Co.’s mounting financial problems. Just a month earlier, the company had defaulted on the Maine loan, forcing a loan restructuring that added additional debt. According to Ridder, Blethen tried to put The Seattle Times up as collateral, but Ridder blocked the effort by invoking a clause in the original 1929 deal that had given his grandfather the minority stake in the Times Co. The agreement, brought about by earlier unwise financial decisions by Blethen ancestors, prohibited encumbering the newspaper with debt.

“Frank was very upset we wouldn’t go along with handing over The Seattle Times to the bankers,” Ridder says.

To understand how the Seattle Times Co. went from a cocky newspaper chain with a street value of $1 billion or more to a troubled company whose worth may now be in negative territory, it helps to understand the Blethen family’s complex relationship to the business their great grandfather Alden started 113 years ago.

The Seattle Times declined to comment for this story. But board meeting minutes, court documents and other materials show the extent of the company’s financial and personal troubles. The relationship of the Blethens to their business, for example, is spelled out in a 2001 Harvard Business School case study entitled “The Blethen Family and the Seattle Times Company.” The 24-page report is an unusually detailed discussion of the internal workings of the usually secretive Times Co. and, more remarkable still, of the Blethens themselves. John Davis, a small-business expert and senior lecturer at the business school who wrote the case study, says that Blethen family members, including Frank Blethen, provided most of the case study’s information. 

“I thought they were extraordinarily forthcoming,” Davis says, “especially given the sad family history they’ve had.”

According to Davis and Cathy Quinn, a clinical psychologist based in Beverly Hills, Calif., who did most of the interviewing for the study, the fourth generation of Blethens currently managing the Times Co.—Frank and his cousins—set out to use the company as the vehicle to rebuild their own families from what Davis and Quinn call “the toxic Blethen family atmosphere” of the past. Previous generations of Blethens “were physically absent and emotionally remote,” they wrote. Frank Blethen complained that his father, Frank Sr., who had divorced five times, never sent him a birthday card or letter, and never called, throughout Frank Jr.’s adolescence.

Blethen took a summer job at The Seattle Times when he was 21, living with his father in a hotel in Seattle.

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