first 'weekly' cover, 1976, from historylink.org

The late investor and arts patron Bagley Wright lived just long enough to see one of the local institutions he jump-started, Seattle Weekly, descend from troubled to pathetic.

First, the paper got caught up, through no fault of its own, in the PR campaign against its parent company Village Voice Media and VVM’s online escort-ad site Backpage.com. Mayor McGinn has ordered the city to not advertise in the Weekly until VVM closes Backpage.

Second, and this is something local management’s responsible for, was a cover story about an S&M practitioner accused of turning a consensual encounter with a streetwalker into a non-consensual violent assault. Feminist blogger Cara Kulwicki has called the story’s writer and SW’s editors “rape apologists,” citing the author’s speculating that the event might have simply been “a bondage session gone haywire.”

Now, they’ve put out a cover piece about local true-crime author Ann Rule. The article’s writer (who’d never written for the Weekly before) claimed Rule had written lies and/or conducted sloppy research about an Oregon woman convicted of murder, in Rule’s 2003 book Heart Full of Lies. The issue was published before SW editors figured out the article had been written by the convicted woman’s boyfriend.

Setting aside the matter of Backpage, over which the SW staff has no power, the once solidly establishment Weekly is drowning in sensationalism. Maybe it should swim back toward safer areas like politics (oops, VVM cut way back on the Weekly’s formerly formidable news staff) or arts coverage (oops, ditto).