Redevelopment almost booted them. Now a seismic retrofit will send The Stranger off Capitol Hill.
The media company that has grown into a Seattle legend in its 28 years on Capitol Hill at 11th and Pine announced the news Tuesday afternoon that it will be moving to the International District at South Dearborn Street and Maynard Avenue South: Continue reading
After this week’s edition, Seattle will no longer have a printed alt-weekly. The Seattle Weekly, already stripped down by new owners in 2017, will move “digital only” with a much-reduced staff.
Crosscut, powered by grants, corporate sponsorships, and its KCTS public television boosted “supporting members,” broke the news Monday on the end of the Weekly and the further downsizing of Seattle media.
“A series of ownership changes – including Village Voice Media and Voice Media Group – left Seattle Weekly on shaky financial footing by the time Sound Publishing acquired it in 2013,” a message sent to Seattle Weekly freelancers explaining the change reads. Continue reading
After the briefest of residencies in Capitol Hill’s “independent media two-block radius,” Seattle’s City Arts magazine is folding.
The sad news was announced Thursday morning:
For now, we take heart in the beautiful prism of countless people who’ve been with us on this ride and we trust that our legacy lives somewhere in those beams of light. Whether you’re a reader, an artist, a contributor, a fan or a supporter, thank you for being a part of this experience. We’ll never forget it.
The news follows the magazine’s summer move to Capitol Hill where it took up residence in the The Cloud Room coworking space above Liz Dunn’s 11th Ave preservation-friendly Chophouse Row office and retail development. “City Arts Magazine tells stories of the people and places we call home, and by doing so helps the Seattle-area community get to know each other better – our ideas, our beliefs and our passions,” Dunn said at the time. Continue reading
Like weedy little flowers, pockets of culture continue to somehow find places to thrive on Capitol Hill. Like a cockroach you can’t smash, media lives on here, too.
City Arts, recently independent after splitting from glossy arts program publisher Encore Media Group, will now call Capitol Hill home.
The “independent local arts media company” and Capitol Hill “shared workspace, lounge and bar” the The Cloud Room announced the move Monday morning. Continue reading
After a relatively robust three years, these are quiet days at the Capitol Hill Times.
“Serving Capitol Hill since 1926,” the paper has been part of a small chain with a dedicated California-based owner for the past three years after vertically integrated foreclosure company Northwest Trustee Service exited the journalism business a few years back.
But this spring, things slowed down. Content on the Capitol Hill Times site has been sparsely updated since March. The main story on the page as of earlier Monday remained a March 13th report on the task force that led to today’s City Council vote. The usual flow of two or three Capitol Hill-focused articles a week has stopped. The site received its first update in a week — a post of a press release about this upcoming community crime meeting we posted about here — after we called the Capitol Hill Times Monday morning asking about the situation after watching the site stay mostly quiet for over a month. Continue reading
Sheehan (Image: NWFF)
What would Capitol Hill’s Northwest Film Forum be without film?
“It’s one that we discuss all the time,” executive director Courtney Sheehan tells CHS about one of the key questions on the future of the 12th Ave film-focused community center as she prepares to leave the organization she’s helped to grow over the past five years.
Sheehan has given her six months’ notice, she says, to give NWFF time to find a new leader and solidify its new foundation as a community hub that Sheehan has been helping to build since stepping into the director role in 2016.
“We’re really excited that for the first time the forum is really becoming a hub in the center of city,” Sheehan said. Continue reading
Seattle politics and government have offered plenty for Sol Villarreal to fill his two-year-old weekly newsletter Sol’s Civic Minute. And then Donald Trump got elected.
Capitol Hill resident Villarreal had sprinkled some Trump news into Civic Minute, but decided to test out a second newsletter focused on the president-elect. In early December he published a post on Medium about Trump with a survey asking readers if they would like the info in an email. The answer was “yes” so Last Week in Trump was born.
Since then, he has been refining the newsletter with the help of subscribers. The most popular part of the first post on Medium was the inclusion of the conservative side, providing most Seattleites with views differing from their own. He has continued to do that in his beta test of the letter.
“It’s important, I think, for the political conversations that we have (to consider the other side) because we can address each other more effectively if we are talking to each other instead of over each other,” Villarreal said. Continue reading
This post has been updated with information from Top Tree’s management
A new media venture powered by Seattle’s burgeoning legal cannabis culture is hard at work on Capitol Hill in a space that was once home to an upstart campaign headquarters and an equally rebellious drag queen-inspired cosmetics company.
Top Tree, a marijuana-focused culture magazine and digital advertising agency, has quietly moved into the overhauled retail space at Pike and Boylston formerly home to the Bernie Sanders campaign’s Seattle headquarters and, before that, Jen’s House of Beauty. Glimpses of the now-bustling office can be seen through the art wrap-coated windows. A new keyless security panel guards the front door that had become a favorite camping spot for people on the street in the months since the campaign workers departed earlier this year.
“It’s definitely changed,” Top Tree director of operations Benito Ybarra tells CHS of the neighborhood he grew up hanging out in. “But to be represented on Capitol Hill and on Pike Street specifically, we’re very proud of that.”
While its office space is secreted away, Top Tree’s presence on Capitol Hill is unmissable. The company has been responsible for the series of large murals on the E Pike wall of Neumos since summer — including a recent edition featuring Mariner great and Seattle icon Ken Griffey Jr. Meanwhile, stacks of the free zine-sized publication with day glo colors, a healthy selection of local advertising, and trippy cover imagery can be found in cafes and shops across the neighborhood and beyond.
“I always believed in being physically real for people,” Ybarra said.
A Vancouver, Washington woman is suing 11th and Pine-headquartered The Stranger after she says the alt-weekly included her bare-breasted photograph in its “Drunk of the Week” feature when she was actually celebrating her grandma’s 90th birthday in Pittsburgh.
Ex-Stranger photographer Kelly O’Neil is also named in the defamation suit brought last week on behalf of Tamar Hage against Stranger parent company, Index Newspapers: Continue reading
Those $54 bottles of award ceremony wine aren’t going to buy themselves
Wednesday, District 3 representative Kshama Sawant will present a resolution to a committee of the Seattle City Council recognizing that the local media landscape is all hosed up and confusing:
Public broadcasters have a legal – and moral – responsibility to inform the public in times of emergencies. It is in those times of need that the local community relies on professionals at local news stations like KING 5 and others. Tegna, the company that recently took over operations at several stations such as KING 5, is replacing those professionals with amateur citizen reporting. Local leaders believe that would jeopardize the public safety at a time when professionalism and experience are most critical in maintaining the public trust.
At the heart of this — out of all the things to worry about in the death spiral of legitimate local news — is an app and crowdsourcing effort being rolled out to turn “citizen journalists” into cheap freelancers that has sprawling broadcasting conglomerates salivating. The app and the direction it represents are summed up as the “Uberization” of local news in the announcement of a Wednesday morning press conference featuring Sawant, various Council members, and union representatives.
We’re not expecting a resolution but CHS certainly plays a (puny) role in the changes underway. Continue reading
