25 Years of the Seattle Weekly.
. . . with that logo? Or you may be thinking, “This is a redesign?” Or, “Forget the redesign, where’s the horoscope?” Whether you love the redesign, hate it, or haven’t even noticed, this issue marks a new day at Seattle Weekly. Day nine thousand, one hundred and eighty-five, give or take a few—but a new day nonetheless.
Nearly six months ago, we set out to redesign the paper. After many meetings, e-mails, and discussions, and even a few rest stops to overcome altitude sickness, a local design firm called Cyclone took our ideas about the kind of paper we wanted to produce and transformed them into the visual product you’re now holding, spilling coffee on, or peering at over someone’s shoulder on the bus. Nearly everything about the paper has been rethought: New features include a navigation bar to help direct readers through the various sections, new columns to open the music section, a column about the arts adjoining The List, our picks for the week’s events.
As Andrew Bonazelli points out in his opening essay to this week’s enormous feature, turning 25 isn’t generally momentous. Sure, it’s kind of cool to say you’re halfway to 50, but aside from being able to rent a car without using your mother’s credit card, it’s not much of a milestone. Usually.
For an alternative newsweekly like this one, it provides an opportunity, however contrived and manufactured, to take out all the heavy, dusty, bound volumes of back issues and leave them under your desk for months until the editor refuses to let you leave the building unless you finish your anniversary story. But when you turn to reminiscing and revisiting papers past, it’s nearly overwhelming to consider the hundreds of employees, thousands of stories, and hundreds of thousands of pages that have gone into making this paper over 25 years.
It’s a serious task to condense all those experiences into one issue, and we’ll naturally miss a thing or two (or 25). But we’ve picked out significant moments, both bad and good, that have shaped the culture of Seattle, and taken particular notice of stories that the paper exposed and nailed—as well as those that we overlooked or blew out of proportion.
Looking forward to the next nine thousand days is an entertaining if murky task. What key decisions and decision makers will alter this city? Is Boeing’s departure really a big deal? What if Bill Gates moves? Or Amazon folds (or becomes the next Nordstrom)? Can the Mariners really win the World Series? Would it matter? Is there any new music out there? Will Mt. Rainier blow? Who knows? What we do know is that something will happen, and Seattle Weekly will be there to write about it.
Audrey Van Buskirk
3 Mountains that proved molehills
4 Good calls by Seattle Weekly
5 Easy steps that made Seattle Weekly
6 Things Seattle gave the world
7 Things you can get in Seattle for $25
8 Stories from 1976 that won’t go away
9 Excerpts from the 50th Anniversary issue
11 Seattle movies of the last 25 years
14 Former staffers: Where are they now?
15 Remarkable characters from Seattle’s streets
16 Best architectural additions to the city
17 Seattleites who will be big in the next 25 years
21 Best-selling records by Seattle artists
23 Most encouraging things about Seattle
