The soon-to-be-unemployed folks at Seattle Weekly are trying to spin their upcoming sale as somehow a bad thing for The Stranger. In a story in today’s Weekly, they claim that being soldalong with the rest of the Village Voice Media chainto New Times is bad for us. Stranger publisher Tim Keck sent this email to his staff yesterday…

Hey Gang,

First off, congratulations on the Bumbershoot issuepeople put in heroic efforts and it turned out great. Thank you.

A few people have asked me about a possible merger/acquisition deal between Village Voice Media (VVM), which owns the Seattle Weekly, the Village Voice, and a handful of other alternative papers, and Phoenix-based New Times Inc., which owns a dozen or so other alt papers. (You can read about the sloppy negotiations and leaked documents at sfbg.com. So far, the merger has been a mess.)

A little trip down memory lane:

In 1997, Seattle Weekly was purchased by real estate magnate Leonard Stern, who also owned the Village Voice and the other papers VVM has right now (plus three newspapers that have since gone out of business, including Seattle Weekly’s sister paper, Eastside Week). At that time, The Stranger was putting out 64-page papers and Seattle Weekly was regularly twice our size. The Weekly crowed that, with the backing of the Village Voice, it was going to become a giant paper, and that The Stranger was in deep trouble. Well, what happened was they lost advertisers, staff, and readers. And their new owners closed their sister paper, Eastside Week. We on the other hand had the biggest surge in both circulation and page count in the paper’s history.

In 2000, Village Voice Media was sold to a giant group of investment bankers, including Goldman Sachs, who have billions of dollars in holdings. Again folks at the Weekly claimed they were going to use their huge new resources to crush us. What happened? We surpassed them in advertisers and page count. Take this week: Both papers had Bumbershoot issues—ours was 156 pages, theirs 112. Or last week: We were 108 and they were 96.

There’s a pretty good chance Seattle Weekly will once again be purchased by a new “powerful entity.” They’ll make big claims about crushing The Stranger, most of their staff will be fired, and they will probably do another redesign. We’ll take the threat seriously, do an even better job, and be a better paper because of it. And we’ll beat `em again.

That’s the scoop and way to go on Bumbershoot.
Tim