Seattle Weekly editor-in-chief Mark Baumgarten said in an interview that there are major changes on the horizon for the 41-year-old alt-weekly:
The newspaper is not folding. But the changes will be dramatic, transforming it from an alt-weekly into what Baumgarten describes as a “community news weekly” — a product that will look less like what currently sits in the red boxes across town and more like the small papers in Kent, Bellevue and Renton. Come this Wednesday, gone will be the magazine-style covers, replaced instead by a broadsheet paper, with stories that begin beneath the masthead and continue inside.
Coverage will change as well. The Weekly’s publisher, Sound Publishing, owns a network of 49 newspapers around the region, 17 of which are in King County (including Seattle Weekly). Under Baumgarten’s leadership, the company will establish a “King County News Desk,” based out of Bellevue where the 17 King County papers will share “production support, product development and [will] facilitate knowledge and content sharing.”
“For that work, we need to bring Seattle Weekly into the fold of those other community weeklies,” Baumgarten says.
