Type | Alternative weekly |
---|---|
Format | Tabloid |
Owner(s) | Index Newspapers, LLC |
Publisher | Tim Keck |
Editor | Christopher Frizzelle |
Founded | September 23, 1991 |
Headquarters | 1535 11th Ave., Third Floor Seattle, Washington 98122 U.S. |
Circulation | 87,874 |
ISSN | 1935-9004 |
Website | TheStranger.com |
The Stranger is an alternative weekly newspaper in Seattle, Washington, U.S. It runs a blog known as Slog.
The Stranger was founded by Tim Keck, who had previously co-founded the satirical newspaper The Onion, and cartoonist James Sturm. Its first issue came out on September 23, 1991. The paper is distributed to local businesses, newsstands, and newspaper boxes free of charge every Wednesday. It calls itself "Seattle's Only Newspaper," an expression of its disdain for Seattle's two dailies (the Seattle Times and the now-defunct print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer) and The Stranger's main rival, the Seattle Weekly. The paper regularly covers Seattle City Council politics.
In its early days, The Stranger had a print run of 20,000, and was focused in Seattle's University District. The paper was a single sheet wrapped around a wad of coupons for local businesses.
On April 16, 2012, The Stranger won its first Pulitzer Prize. Eli Sanders won in the Feature Writing category for "The Bravest Woman In Seattle," which the citation describes as "a haunting story of a woman who survived a brutal attack that took the life of her partner, using the woman’s brave courtroom testimony and the details of the crime to construct a moving narrative." The feature appeared in the June 15, 2011 edition.
Its principal competitor is The Seattle Weekly, a weekly newspaper in Seattle, owned by Sound Publishing, Inc., a subsidiary of Black Press.
From April 4, 2001 to September 2007, the paper's editor-in-chief was Dan Savage, an associate editor since its founding who made his name writing the paper's sarcastic and sometimes inflammatory sex advice column, Savage Love, which has appeared in every issue of The Stranger. In September 2007, Savage became the paper's editorial director and was replaced as editor-in-chief by then-27-year-old Christopher Frizzelle, formerly the Books Editor (in 2003) and Arts Editor (from 2004 to 2007). The newspaper's managing editor is Kathleen Richards. The previous managing editor was Bethany Jean Clement, who was formerly the managing editor of Seattle Weekly. Clement's essays in the restaurant section of the newspaper have been anthologized in Best Food Writing 2008 and Best Food Writing 2009.