Noisy Creek, a new media company, has bought The Stranger and The Portland Mercury, two of the country’s best known alternative weeklies.
For decades, many American cities had at least one thriving alternative-weekly newspaper chronicling the local art and music scene and reporting on the community.
Many of those publications withered in recent years, but two of the country’s best known alt-weeklies, The Stranger in Seattle and The Portland Mercury, now have plans for expansion.
Noisy Creek, a new company put together by Brady Walkinshaw, a former chief executive of the nonprofit climate news website Grist and a former Democratic legislator in Washington State, said on Tuesday that it had purchased The Stranger and The Portland Mercury, as well as the events site EverOut and the ticketing business Bold Type Tickets, from Index Newspapers.
Mr. Walkinshaw declined to disclose the financial details of the purchase, but he said that he was the majority shareholder. Index will keep a 20 percent stake in the company. A group of about 20 individual investors helped finance the deal, Mr. Walkinshaw said.
Mr. Walkinshaw said he planned to hire more people and grow the editorial budgets at the publications. He also said that all of the current employees had been offered jobs at the new company. Hannah Murphy Winter, a former Rolling Stone editor, will become the editor in chief of The Stranger.
“Alternative weeklies at their best can really, in an edgy, provocative way, be the gateway to what people do culturally in a community, whether it’s music, art, performance,” Mr. Walkinshaw said.
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
