So many restaurants and bars and clubs and arts organizations already live right on the edge of survivability. This has been a hurricane for them. We're really concerned about this going forward, of what the arts and small business scene in Seattle -- which gives Seattle its flavor, its life, its soul -- will look like after the virus has gone.
I understand that you started a fundraising campaign. How much support has The Stranger received so far? It's been amazing. The Stranger doesn't have a paywall on its website. We have a pay-if-you care-to kind of model, which we've never really pushed that much. It hasn't been a big part of our life. When the virus started affecting us so drastically, we sent out an SOS asking people if they like what we're doing to contribute.
That revenue was really the difference between life and death for us. It gave us a moment to be able to collect ourselves, to be able to start figuring out how to survive in this new environment, not only just on an economic level, but on an emotional level as well. When we put up the ask, we didn't know what we'd get. We were just astonished. It was so wonderful that our readers came to our rescue that way.
We're just so grateful. It really gave everybody in the organization, a real desire to do a great job. We're doing some interesting things, as well. We picked different organizations, some small businesses, or groups of small businesses, that we want to support with advertising. For every dollar that reader puts in, every week, we have three new organizations that will give free advertising in that same amount.
Every week, we'll be doing that. Keck himself gave a rare political donation. McGinn barely knows Keck, but is an admirer. After a few too many drinks and a check-in back at The Stranger, Keck heads out to his Capitol Hill home, his longtime girlfriend, Dr. Abigail Gross, and their two preschool-aged kids. A thought occurs to him. It was such a success that he and a fellow student, Chris Johnson, thought up a new idea: a weekly newspaper; something funny, irreverent, even subversive.
The Onion was born. Keck sold ads and wrote. He mimicked a photo of his father, a former Indiana state legislator, shaking hands with Richard Nixon to illustrate a story of a local man winning a cheese-eating competition. Why not another two months? It was The music scene was magnetic. Keck saw a niche. He recruited Onion writers to live and work on the second floor of a house in Wallingford.
The first edition, Sept. He slept in the hallway. There were plenty of video games and a house band, Blammo the Surly Drunk Clown.
Hygiene was sporadic. He would dress in a white jumpsuit and beat a Weber grill to pieces with a baseball bat to the blaring of a metal band. None of us had trust funds. Tim has always run it profitably to survive. The Moon endorsement became a notorious public squabble for Stranger staffers. The endorsement board split among factions favoring Jessyn Farrell and Nikkita Oliver, so the Moon choice advocated by her friend Mudede was a fallback compromise that fizzled.
This year, with Oliver safely lateraled over to a city council race, The Stranger could speak in one clear if predictable voice on the important mayoral endorsement. Nicely done and fairly presented. Useful information on how an iconic publication has managed to survive in Seattle. The spinoff of talented writers from the Stranger to other publications is another worthy topic to be covered in the future.
The clock has run out on this publication as without a free print copy they have no market and are just dated. They had a great run as did the Weekly. The Stranger all but determines the left lane candidate in mayoral races.
By endorsing Gonzalez they have all but cemented her lock on the left lane ticket out of the primary though the Echohawk camp believes Colleen is not as far behind Gonzalez as people think and could still pull a surprise upset.
Like McGinn in , Gonzalez is running a semi-incumbency campaign, in her case built around defending the performance and policies of the City Council. Thanks for sharing your perspective. The Stranger claims virtue, but can be pure as the driven slush. Dan Savage picked up its talking points for a long anti-Jayapal article in The Stranger. It did not run. Unable to access his own publication, Herz put his article up on Facebook. It was far more effective than the hit piece to which it was responding.
Herz was let go by The Stranger soon thereafter. He went on to work for Jayapal, and later Sen. Bernie Sanders. There is not one person on the skeleton staff of The Stranger whose opinion I would respect. Since their senior staffers left, the quality of the reporting has plummeted. That the publication still has power shows the gullibility of their demographic. Maybe some of this change is due to their median reader age of 40, aging hipsters still wanting to feel cool, but not quite as outre as they were in the 20s…hence Gonzalez rather than AGH being the choice.
They are really concerned about viability, and wanted to pick a left lane mayoral candidate who would have good chance of winning which AGH does not. But as I wrote in comment above, I think their political viability handicapping is flawed.
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