The Stranger, the weekly free tabloid with which I have an off-and-on stormy relationship, celebrated its tenth anniversary this week. The actual ten-year mark came last September, but obviously a lot of folks weren’t in the mood for celebrating anything back then.

I was asked to write something for it. It didn’t run in that issue (they promise it’ll run next week).

It’s a remembrance of local publications that have come and gone during the Stranger’s lifetime:

• The Rocket: The bible of Northwest rock had already been going for 12 years when the Stranger started. Shortly after that, publisher Charles Cross sold out to some Californians who drove it into the ground. Its demise in October 2000 is still mourned by many.
• Kutie: Sometime Stranger art director Hank Trotter’s moonlighting venture was a skin mag in the classic early-’60s style, full of the tease and style missing from today’s formula porn. Sometimes, the only way you knew the pictures were new was from the models’ tattoos. Five issues came out between 1997 and 2000; content from the unpublished issue #6 can be seen at www.kutie.com.
• Seattle Union Record: During the big newspaper strike of November 2000-January 2001, Newspaper Guild members put out their own thrice-weekly free tabloid. Freed from the dumbing-down demands of management, the newsies created a model for some future alternative urban daily.
• Metropolitan Living: The former publisher of The Employment Paper had what seemed in 1999 to be a smash idea: A slick, oversize monthly about local celebrities and upscale lifestyles; given away free to all at vending boxes, but intended strictly for the platinum-card elites. It lasted about a year and a half.
• Arts Journal: Another vehicle for luxury-goods ads, this one was mailed free to people who’d given money to Seattle’s bigtime arts groups. Its content was often outstanding; too bad most folks who’d really care about it (artists, actors, playwrights, etc.) seldom got to see it.
• Redheaded Stepchild: A visual-arts zine that was almost all text, this photocopied monthly newsletter chiefly covered professional and personal survival issues for contemporary art-makers. It started in mid-1999 and ran a little over a year, before its volunteer staff found better things to do.
• Seattle Gay Standard: An ambitious effort at a real competitor to the long-established Seattle Gay News. The Standard had ambitious stories, gorgeous color photos, and a relative paucity of boys-arguing-about-the-wallpaper cartoons. But it got caught up in the same 2001 ad slump that befell Metropolitan Living and Arts Journal.
• Perv: The Stranger’s own Dan Savage was one of the masterminds behind this 1996 gay-print alternative, a monthly four-page broadsheet focusing on the Capitol Hill queer club scene.
• Rock Paper Scissors: Ex-musician Thomas Marchese’s attempt to fill the Rocket’s void. The defiantly un-slick weekly free tabloid ran weekly from June to August 2001, and gave particular emphasis to the neo-metal community.
• The Seattle Scroll: Matt Asher’s fortnightly essay-and-opinion paper started in the fall of 1996 with a novel format–a single oversize sheet of book-stock paper, rolled up instead of folded. By its end one year later, it had become a regular tabloid. Asher was last heard from writing a novel in Vermont. The Scroll’s “media editor,” Jesse Walker, later worked in LA for a libertarian-leaning think tank.