Four out of nine editorial staffers are being laid off.
Four out of nine editorial staffers are being laid off.

Brendan Kiley broke the news over at the Seattle Times:

The Seattle Weekly told six of its 21 employees this week that their jobs would be terminated at the end of the year. According to Seattle Weekly publisher Bob Baranski, the cuts largely hit the editorial and production departments.

“We’re shifting to a variable-cost model,” Baranski said. “Which is another way of saying freelance versus (full-time) staff.”

The staffers being laid off are staff writer Ellis Conklin, arts editor Brian Miller, food editor Nicole Sprinkle, editorial operations manager Gavin Borchert, graphic designer Brennan Moring, and one other unidentified person, according to sources close to the Weekly.

While the cuts will hit the editorial department and the paper will switch to a freelance model, Seattle Weekly publisher Bob Baranski somehow still claims "these adjustments will not affect the tone or range of the Weekly’s coverage," Kiley reports.

Sound Publishing bought the paper from Village Voice Media Holdings in 2013, which is apparently part of the reason for the layoffs:

Baranski described the layoffs as a signal of the Weekly’s “further integration into the company. There are many resources we can share.”

Seattle Weekly readers, he said, can expect to see stories from other Sound papers in its pages, and offered the Peninsula Daily News’ coverage of the arrival of the Shell oil rig earlier this year as an example.

Baranski emphasized that these adjustments will not affect the tone or range of the Weekly’s coverage.

“There’s nothing diminished here,” he said, adding that, in the newsroom, “there’s a lot of excitement about what we’ve got coming up,” including the launch of a redesigned website. “But, as you can imagine, there’s some somberness among the staffers and an awful lot of gratitude for what everyone has contributed.”

We have calls in to the paper's publisher and editor in chief, but haven't heard back.

We'll update this post as we learn more.

Ansel Herz, Sydney Brownstone, and Kathleen Richards contributed reporting.

This post has been updated.