Where Are They Now: Seattle Weekly Edition

The Seattle Weekly government in exile launched its website today and has promised to continue posting to it until the people rise up and give them their paper back. Anyone pining for the city's other weekly and its lovable cast of characters circa the Bronze Age through about a year ago should head over to Crosscut immediately. We'll see you back here when you've had your fill.

:::Seattlest fumbles with getting our new cell phone to display the current time:::

Okay, you're back! You probably read that thing on the Joint Operating Agreement between the Seattle Times and the Post Intelligencer. (Haha, April Fools, we know reading stories about the JOA is like reading Moby Dick: You know you should, but you never have.) Seattlest's crush Bill Richards continues where he left off at the Times and the Weekly by outing ex-Seattle Times Co. Vice President Stephen Sparks's claims that Frank Blethen directed a vast majority of jointly-held advertising funds towards maintaining the Seattle Times's circulation rather than dividing it more evenly between the two papers as dictated under the JOA. Whether Seattle will continue to be a two-daily town rests almost entirely on the arbitration that is currently taking place between the two papers, and since both dailies have a vested interest in keeping the proceedings as quiet as possible there aren't many good sources for information. Even the Committee For a Two-Newspaper Town lawyer brigade is unwilling to talk to the public, despite ostensibly representing the public interest. The current regime at the Weekly took a stab at it recently, but no one has the background that Bill Richards has. Welcome back, Bill.