I thought the Blethens published Pravda?

Teehee.

Fucking hell, that was great, Joe!

He sounds like a teenager. Then I looked at his picture. Apparently he IS a teenager.

Why didn't you post a picture of Joe so we could swoon for awhile?

All that this exercise has demonstrated is that the Times is apparently hemorrhaging readership and value as an advertiser. Why else would you throw away what remains of 100~ years of integrity for a valueless advertising gamble? You don't go all in unless you've got nothing else left to lose.

If you guys have access to their subscription numbers, post them. I notice this site:

http://www.seattletimescompany.com/adver…

Just apparently lists market size and their online impressions. How many papers do they actually sell per day?

Betch. Slap.

So The Seattle Times Company gave away free advertising to a Republican candidate and a conservative referendum campaign, and is now essentially extorting money from Democratic and progressive campaigns in order for them to attain equal exposure for their messages.

Is this really legal?

Overlooking (for a moment) that fact that The Stranger and Joe are in a "political marriage" this is a good take down of Blethen-Land.

@7, you're an asshole, Joe is totally fucking right. That letter is a piece of shit first draft, and sending it to a legislative office? unfuckingbelievable.

This is probably the tipping point in my household to stop delivery of the Sunday Seattle Times (having given up daily local news delivery years ago.)

I think my wife would find just as much to read in the Sunday New York Times...and I'll be able to read more than just ten free NYT articles a month that way.

@9, your comment worries me, because if you think R-74 is a conservative bill, that means you might mistakenly vote against it, and so might a lot of other supporters of marriage equality.

YES on R-74 = YES to allow same-sex marriage.

It's not a conservative referendum. Quite the opposite.

@13: it's APPRVOVE R-74

If they wanted to prove the power of advertising, they should have given free ad space to support accused child molesters. Now if Inslee wins, it means that advertising doesn't work.

Joe, you fucking rock! This is the difference between Republicans and Democrats. When Democrats smell rotten corruption, they speak up. When Republicans get wind of it, they jump in as fast as they can and wonder if why they didn't think of it first. Case it point: another awesome Democrat Adam Kline exposes right-wing Tea Party organization Freedom Foundation, who has been working with our Republican Secretary of State and the Republican candidate Kim Wyman behind the scenes to suppress our votes this election:

"Over its three or four years of existence, members of the press—proponents of transparency—have come to dominate the Sunshine Committee. The Committee voted 8 to 1 to place on its agenda a suggestion from a right-wing corporate advocacy group, the Freedom Foundation, that will, if it is acted upon, make the Committee complicit in a campaign to suppress many citizens’ right to vote. The Freedom Foundation has a long and sordid history of joining in campaigns funded by the Koch brothers on the national level, the modus operandi of which is to create public fear and anger at a supposed effort by large numbers of non-citizen immigrants to vote in American elections, which is hijacking the votes of true Americans. Freedom Foundation’s ulterior purpose is blatantly partisan: to suppress the votes of likely Democratic voters, namely three classes of people who, though US citizens, are less likely for various reasons to have a drivers license or other photo-identification. These are the elderly, of whom many no longer drive; the very young, particularly urban, voters who have no need to drive; and racial minorities, particularly immigrants. By running campaigns in many states, especially “swing” states where narrow elections are expected, to pass laws that would keep these three classes of citizens from the polls, the Koch brothers and their network of right-wing organizations are determined to throw national and state elections to the Republicans, and to foster a helpful campaign against immigrants generally."

http://blog.senatedemocrats.wa.gov/kline…

@16 - No need to quote a wall o' text. Just link to the article, and I'll be more likely to read it. When I see a wall o' text, I assume it's a Sgt. Doom-ish rant, and skip to the next comment. . .

@13: Maybe my phrasing wasn't clear, but what I meant is that the campaign against R-74 is a "conservative campaign".

And now The Seattle Times Company is extorting money from marriage equality proponents to attain equal exposure for their message.

Ah fuck, my error. The Seattle Times ran an "Approve R-74" ad? As in "approve marriage equality"?

And they ran a "vote McKenna" ad?

I'm mixed up now.

@18 - Then you are confused. The Times is giving advertising to the Approve R-74 campaign, not Reject.

As a non-Washingtonian I don't know much about Mckenna (though spend enough time on the slog to have a distinctly unfavorable impression of him.) That said, there's plenty of Republicans out there in favor of marriage equality. No doubt more in opposition, but the paper's endorsing these two entities simultaneously would hardly be groundbreaking (though the advertising for any candidate is obviously appalling.)

Would love to know how many subscribers the Times has lost so far. The phone call to drop my subscription turned into a ten minute argument with the woman at the Times. She kept insisting that I opt for a temporary suspension of service until after the election. She was sure that that was the best route for me to make a statement about the whole affair.

Golly, just last year The Seattle Times was doing well enough to reject paid advertisements for School Board candidates who did not share editorial's zeal for education reform and charter schools. Revenues must be plummeting.

It's even more ridiculous that they're trying to convince local politicians, whose districts cover a tiny fraction of the Times' circulation area, to use newspaper advertising as a "cost-effective" alternative to direct mailers.

I'm sure all of the Times' subscribers in Bellevue and Snohomish care a whole lot about Joe's race.

Which option is worse:

A. The Times has made itself into a partisan paper (at least for the year), or

B. The Times is tinkering with the machinery of self-government for commercial gain?

In the letter they tout option B, but it is unclear to me why I should despise them less for it.

So here we have the Stranger, which makes no bones about being in the tank for the lefties of its choice, whining about a lack of objectivity at the Seattle Times. It's so nice to see the blatant hypocrisy of "progressive" Seattle on display.

@26 most people realize that The Stranger is right of center in Seattle.

But, hey, thanks. Nice try.

@26 There's a big difference between a paper that claims to be objective & unbiased and a paper that is up front about it's political slant. One is dishonest & hypocritical when it's stories, editorials & advertising is highly partisan. The other is simply living up to it's character.

Besides the fact that there are two very different business models at work here.

Before you accuse folks of hypocrisy, you might want to use things like logic & reason. It makes you look far less stupid.

@26, That is entirely the point. The Stranger is open and honest about its bias. They make no claim of being neutral or unbiased, and never have. You can agree or disagree with their views, but they are not hiding anything.

The Seattle Times, like Faux News, claims to be objective and unbiased. And like Faux News, they are lying weasels. I don't care if they want to shill for conservative causes. I only care that they claim to be unbiased when they shill for conservative candidates. They just took a giant shit all over their claim to be an objective neutral news source.

#29 This is the Seattle Times Co. that is doing this -- the publisher. Not the newsroom. Now I realize that a lot of people who think they're smart but actually know nothing think that the publisher is in the newsroom calling all the shots. Think that if you want. But if you are claiming that the publisher claims to be neutral and unbiased, how do you explain year after year of political endorsements? How do people not understand the first thing about newspapers??

#30: Many members of the ST newsroom staff have gone to the dark side along with their bloodless boss Blethen. I chuckled when I read their oh-so self-righteous letter and saw some of the hypocrites who actually had the balls to sign it with those who are honestly sincere, ethical journalists.

Joe: You rock!

#31 Were you trying to convey information in that post? Cause you don't.

@30: In some cases, that might still be true. But the newspapers have gone through cycles over the years of catering to their owners' political beliefs (and outright whims), and with the rise of people like Rupert Murdoch that cycle has been trending upward for years.

Go have a look at Harold Evans' Good Times, Bad Times regarding Murdoch's attempts to control the London Times' editorial content once he bought it. Better still, go find a copy of Tim Crouse's The Boys on the Bus (not too hard, since it's still in print as a frequently-required text for journalism courses), see what the situation was circa 1972 in accurate reporting vs. publishers' agendas...and then reflect on how little has changed in four decades.

#28, until you learn how to use an apostrophe I see no reason to respond to your idiotic drivel.

@34 Yeah, sure. So I screw up sometimes. That doesn't change the fact that your use of "hypocrisy" is flat out wrong. You shouldn't use words that you don't understand. It makes your ideas look like... well, idiotic drivel.

That "1.8 million readers" claim seems like bullshit. Their daily circulation is 250K, and their Sunday is 350K. This is subscribers plus purchasers.

A one-day ad will reach at most 350K people, so this 1.8 million is what? Some multi-day figure, assuming different people buy it day to day?

It's paper! It doesn't report back on who bought it. There is no possible reliable way to determine, say, yearly unique readers. This is one of the reasons print advertising is so inferior.

And even if they do reach 1.8 million uniques in a year, saying the number without specifying the time interval seems pretty slimy.

Am I missing something?

@34, a whole truckload of apostrophes wouldn't make your drivel any more comprehensible. You can talk all the smack you want but you lack any kind of sense or interest; just straight medulla oblongata reactionary bullcrap. Get it? You are a BAD WRITER. Maybe you should work on that instead of attacking others for trivial errors of grammar or spelling.

@36, I think the idea in newspaper circles is that every copy is read by three or four people, which inflates the numbers.

The newsroom should be separate from the publisher, but no one can or should split those hairs. A paper placing a free ad for one candidate completely obliterates any sense of fair reporting the Seattle Times may have still enjoyed.

@37 - Ah, that makes sense. Still, looks like the Times is assuming 7 readers per paper.

I do love this story. It'll be embarrassing to be a city with no daily newspaper, but not nearly as embarrassing as being a city with this one.

The NYT managed to get Iraq wrong and the syndicate the Tacoma News Tribune is part of got it right.

I'm not sure NYT is as good as their reputation and you won't see much Washington State news there.

Just a suggestion.

The NYT is a New York paper, David. It should come as no surprise that they don't have a lot of Washington news. I'll bet the Tacoma News Tribune doesn't have much New York news either.

#37, I do hope for your sake that your avatar isn't your real picture.