first 'weekly' cover, 1976; via historylink.org

In today’s second most important local business story, Seattle Weekly isn’t being sold to the Seattle Times.

It’s being sold to Sound Publishing.

That’s the outfit that bought the weekly Eastside papers founded in the wake of the daily King County Journal’s collapse almost a decade ago. It also owns a bunch of small-town papers around the area, plus the Little Nickel classifieds (yes, that’s still being published in print!).

It’s owned by Canadian newspaper baron David Black (who’s not related to disgraced former Canadian newspaper baron Conrad Black). David Black is also buying another Village Voice Media property, SF Weekly, adding that to a cluster of papers he’s got there.

The Weekly‘s content has withered, in quantity and quality, even more than most newsprint products these days. Village Voice Media (the renamed New Times Publishing from Arizona) has been an incompetent owner.

At the very least, the Black regime could stem the Weekly‘s slide toward irrelevance. But could it really bring the paper back to the civic-kingmaker role to which it once aspired?