After 33 years of feisty, 4-letter coverage, Seattle’s Stranger is sold

Almost 33 years after The Stranger first shocked Seattle’s staid establishment with its irreverent, expletive-laced brand of progressive journalism, the groundbreaking newspaper has new owners.

Noisy Creek, a new Seattle-based venture, has acquired The Stranger and its sibling, the Portland Mercury, from Index Newspapers, the companies said Tuesday.

Terms weren’t disclosed for the deal, which includes Index’s lucrative ticketing business, Bold Type Tickets, and its EverOut events calendar.

The new owners insist the sale won’t mean job cuts — welcome news when many local media outlets are shrinking or shutting down, and only a few years after The Stranger itself was nearly throttled by the pandemic.

Instead, Noisy Creek said it will offer roles to all current staff, including four writers and two editors, and is adding talent — notably, former Seattle Times columnist Marcus Green and Rolling Stone magazine alum Hannah Murphy Winter, who will serve as The Stranger’s editor.

“It’s going to be a really good thing for the papers and the staff and for Seattle and Portland,” said Tim Keck, Stranger co-founder and president of Index, who joins the Noisy Creek board. Index will retain 20% stake in the venture.

Dan Savage, an early Stranger mainstay, will still appear in both papers, though his internationally syndicated sex advice column, Savage Love, which he owns, will continue to be managed by Index, said Noisy Creek publisher Brady Walkinshaw, a former state representative who ran the Seattle-based environmental news site Grist from 2017 to 2022.

Also staying put: The Stranger’s famously irreverent style, which has spared few Seattle institutions since 1991, when a small band of outsiders “armed mostly with hubris, a few thousand dollars, and three slow-as-[expletive] computers” began their mission of “making people uncomfortable,” as the paper noted in its 25th anniversary edition in 2016.

“Alternative weeklies are provocative. … They are willing to tackle any topic. They’re willing to say what’s unsaid,” said Walkinshaw, 40. “And I think it’s really important that that continue to be the … brand of the publications.”

Interim editor Rich Smith has accepted a role under Noisy Creek, which will also honor the recently formed Index Media Union.

“Our workers still have many questions, as the vast majority of Index Newspapers employees have not yet had a chance to hear Brady Walkinshaw’s plans in his own words,” a union representative said in an email Monday.

Political commentator Charles Mudede and other staff will be offered roles with Noisy Creek, and “it’s our intention that they all join the organization,” Walkinshaw said. As of Monday night, it wasn’t clear how many would accept, he added.

The sale is the latest reinvention of a newspaper that started as an experiment: a free weekly newspaper by Seattle outsiders — strangers, as it were — that took on the city’s establishment with an abrasive, entertaining brew of reporting, criticism and irreverence.

Keck brought the irreverence: He’d co-founded the satirical newspaper, The Onion, as a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

And early-’90s Seattle offered plenty of targets, along with a ripe-for-disruption “alternative” media ecosystem, then dominated by the staid Seattle Weekly, which charged 75 cents, and the music-focused monthly, The Rocket.

With money from the sale of The Onion, plus a $7,000 loan from his mom, Keck and a few fellow outsiders, including former Onion staffers and Savage, set up in a duplex in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood. The first issue, on Sept. 23, 1991, was 12 pages, and, in Keck’s recollection, looked so bad “I just cried.”

It got better. Though initially focused on college students in the University District, the Stranger hit its stride after finding its “real audience among the queers and weirdos who (used to) populate Capitol Hill,” as the Stranger noted.

Here was a larger, more engaged audience who appreciated the paper’s attitude, epitomized by the hilariously foul-mouthed Savage, but also its utility: The newspaper’s events calendar quickly became the guide to cool happenings. By 1992, the paper had relocated to Capitol Hill.

Over the next two decades, Keck and his crew oversaw a phenomenal growth story. By around 2011, The Stranger and the Mercury, launched in 2000, had a combined circulation of around 200,000, and more than 80 employees across all Index operations, Keck said. Revenues from print operations alone topped $8 million, according to a 2011 profile of Keck in The Seattle Times.

Though still as snarky as ever, The Stranger was also doing serious, high-impact journalism. That included staffer Eli Sanders’ Pulitzer for feature writing in 2012.

And, critically, The Stranger became a player in Seattle-area politics, especially after Savage helped create its widely read Voting Guide, where “even the most backhanded endorsement … is arguably a major win for a campaign, especially one challenging the status quo,” as Crosscut put it in 2015.

In 2009, The Stranger threw its weight behind outsider Seattle mayoral candidate Mike McGinn, who narrowly defeated a better-funded opponent endorsed by then-Gov. Chris Gregoire.

The Stranger’s success came amid a wave of disruption and corporate buyouts that was decimating the alternative weekly landscape.

In 2000, the Rocket closed after several years of questionable management, and by 2006, a much-diminished Seattle Weekly had been sold twice and was losing key staff.

Part of that success reflected Keck’s tight, cost-conscious management. But he was also immensely strategic, ready to partner (around 20% of the company has been sold to the Chicago Reader) or diversify.

That has included getting into the lucrative ticketing business, in 2009, and an events calendar, which became a stand-alone business in 2020, which was designed to easily expand to other markets.

But even The Stranger couldn’t escape the digital disruption of the media landscape or the loss of advertisers to social media. In 2017, The Stranger switched from printing once a week to a larger edition every two weeks, as they adjusted to readers who wanted their news online but still preferred events information in printed form.

Although the paper was still profitable — readers and advertisers still liked numerous special supplements the Stranger published — overall operations shrank as ad revenues fell. By early 2020, overall print circulation was down to around 85,000 and print revenues were down to $5 million, Keck said.

The pandemic temporarily shuttered many of The Stranger’s biggest advertisers and silenced the live performances fueling its ticketing business. Without subscribers, revenues briefly went negative — The Stranger had to refund $400,000 in ticket sales. Keck laid off staffers and spent six months uncertain he could keep the business. “Dark days,” he recalled.

What rescued the paper, he said, was getting the ticketing business stabilized, and getting help from loyal readers, who responded generously to an emergency fundraising campaign. “Readers putting money in to keep it alive — that’s what saved us,” Keck said.

The Stranger has returned to profitability — the deal with Noisy Creek wasn’t a fire sale, Keck insists, adding that it Walkinshaw who first broached the sale, last year.

Still, the new venture will rely in part on membership as a revenue generator, Walkinshaw said.

Walkinshaw said investment in the new venture — he is the largest of around 20 partners in the deal — will allow for additional staff and expanded coverage of local and state politics, culture and arts, with an emphasis on longer, in-depth articles.

“Growing up in Seattle, you realize how important a vibrant media ecosystem is to the health of our city,” Green, who founded the South Seattle Emerald before coming to The Times, said in a statement. “Having a well-resourced Stranger is going to be a game-changer for Seattle.”

“I’ve never felt more hopeful about the future of The Stranger and of local journalism,” added Smith, who will move to a news editor role under Murphy Winter.

Smith said he looks forward to “holding power to account, making fun of our political enemies, and telling everyone how to think and feel.”

The papers will also offer fellowships for aspiring journalists, and an expanded stable of monthly contributors.

That deeper bench is critical to Noisy Creek’s broader objective: advancing progressive political causes and candidates that “alt-weeklies” like The Stranger have long championed.

For papers like The Stranger, “first and foremost, it was our job to hold both the progressive left accountable to be its best self and to combat the really dangerous ideology that’s coming from the right right now,” said Murphy Winter.

And while all parties insist that the paper’s new mission doesn’t mean a tempering of The Stranger’s snark, Keck thinks the paper could probably cool it on certain alt-weekly tropes, not least the Stranger’s fondness for profanity.

“I think we should stop using the ‘f word,’ “ said Keck, adding that the term has become “shorthand for your irreverence and honesty.”

These days, he adds, “it has lost its power.”