This morning’s Post-Intelligencer includes a valentine [p-i] from Joel Connely to David Brewster & co.’s new online-only daily, Crosscut.

On its first day of electronic publication, Crosscut leads with a lengthy story about potential Joint Operating Agreement violations by the Seattle Times. Digging through millions of pages of depositions, they highlight former Seattle Times Stephen Sparks’s allegations that his company plotted to sink the J.O.A. through an elaborate scheme to get into the morning paper market:

… [Sparks] claims that Times officials in the mid-1990s secretly violated their joint operating agreement (JOA) with Hearst Corp., owner of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, using unfairly lopsided circulation spending to keep the Seattle Times’ circulation lead over the P-I. Times executives then tricked Hearst into giving up their paper’s exclusivity in the morning, the former executive claims. Since the joint operation began 1983, the P-I had been the morning paper and the bigger Times had the less-desirable afternoon publishing cycle. Today, of course, both are morning papers and the P-I is in a circulation death spiral. [crosscut]

The inaugural issue also features Chuck Taylor’s commentary on the how the daily papers are covering themselves in the J.O.A. showdown [cc], which is also a criticism of how the Times discontinued its contract with an independent reporter who they’d hired write about the dispute. That writer, Bill Richards, wrote the lead story, quoted above. Lest you suspect that Crosscut is unaware of conflicted nature of writing about potential conflicts at other newspapers, Taylor concludes his editorial with a bulleted list of his own “numerous and complicated” conflicts, feelings, and biases.

With the insanely complicated J.O.A. arbitration heating up, and possibly dooming (or blessing?) the P-I to online-publication, it’s a very interesting and relevant way for an new online daily to begin its chronicle of “news of the great nearby”.