Seattle Weekly, City's First Alt Newspaper, Halts Print Edition

SEATTLE, WA - Seattle Weekly, the city's oldest alternative weekly newspaper, will stop publishing a print product and go online-only beginning March 1, the paper's owner said Monday. Four staff positions will be eliminated as part of the change, according to a source.

Sound Publishing chief Josh O'Connor said Monday that a recent re-launch of Seattle Weekly did "not attract enough of an audience and advertising base" for the paper to remain in print. Sound Publishing owns 14 community newspapers in King County, plus the daily Everett Herald.

"Seattle Weekly will move forward as a digital-only product featuring news from Sound Publishing’s titles across the region and state as well as a healthy archive featuring stories from past editions," O'Connor said in a statement. "Thank you to all the readers, advertisers and journalists who have shared this journey with us."

Sound Publishing bought Seattle Weekly in 2013 after the paper changed hands several times. Between 1997 and 2012, the paper was owned by different versions of the parent company of the Village Voice (known during that period as Stern Publishing, then Village Voice Media after the New Times publishing group took over, and finally Voice Media Group). The Village Voice, the first alternative weekly and a prototype for the Weekly, ceased publishing a print edition in 2017.

In fall 2017, Sound Publishing remade Seattle Weekly. The paper took on a new look, similar to Sound Publishing's suburban newspapers like the Kent Reporter and Federal Way Mirror. But the paper kept up its tradition of hard news. Just two weeks ago, the paper published an expose of conditions at local drug rehab clinics operated by Seadrunar.

Journalists from Puget Sound and farther away mourned the loss of the paper after the news broke Monday.

"Poured one out for [Seattle Weekly] a while ago, but still - this sucks," Tacoma News-Tribune columnist and former Weekly staffer Matt Driscoll wrote on Twitter.

"The [Seattle Weekly] is where I had my very first journalism internship, plus an intro to covering Seattle tech/ politics. This is a very sad development for Seattle media," Tech Crunch reporter Kate Clark said.

Seattle Weekly was founded in 1976 by local journalist David Brewster. Brewster went on to start the news website Crosscut, which was the first outlet on Monday to report Seattle Weekly's print demise. Past Seattle Weekly editors-in-chief include Crosscut Managing Editor Mark Baumgarten and Crosscut columnist Knute Berger.

The Seattle Weekly joins the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and City Arts, and older publications like the Bellevue Journal-American and King County Journal, in ceasing to produce a print product. The Seattle Times-owned Sammamish Review and Issaquah Press weekly papers, competitors to Sound Publishing's Sammamish-Issaquah Reporter, were closed in January 2017.

Without Seattle Weekly, Real Change will be the only city-wide weekly newspaper in Seattle. The Stranger publishes twice monthly, and papers like the Queen Anne and Magnolia News and The Facts have a narrower focus.