My wife and I cancelled our subscription to the Seattle Times a couple of years ago when we realized we were only buying it for the Wednesday food ads. What little reading was left outside of the QFC and Safeway pages was rehash of news we had already read online or in our subscriptions to the NY Times and the Economist. Even Seattle news usually appeared there long before it was in the Seattle Times.
The editorial page, under family heir Ryan Blethen, had become so bad we began playing a game of high school English class ,, marking up the grammatical and logical errors. Columnists had become cooks for a sort of indigestible urban pap .. like the recent Danny Westneat column complaining that President Obama is doing bad things to the school Westneat’s kids attend. I wondered reading this pap whether Mr. Westneat was doing any research or just checking Word to be sure he had enough text to get paid.
For news about Seattle, I read (and read) the websites for Publicola or HorsesAss.
Congratulations, Brian, I guess. But how bad must it be to work at the Seattle Times to make moving to Texas a better option? (I know—Austin. But still, it’s fucking hot, and filled with Texans.)
As for Garber, I believe his departure may leave the Olympian’s Brad Shannon as the last man standing from the Olympia press corps I met when I first started going down to the state capitol a decade ago. So I’ll make the same joke I made when David Postman left the paper: If many more reporters leave the profession to take media relations positions, pretty soon there won’t be any media left to relate to. (Oh wait. That’s pretty much what’s already happened.)
As far as I know, neither Garber or Rosenthal have been replaced yet.”