From the Dec 16 – Dec 22, 2004 issue

News

Weekly Porn

Highbrow 'Seattle Weekly' Pushes Free Porn on Website

by Sandeep Kaushik

The Seattle Weekly touts itself as the "smart alternative." You want to read an old hippie's musings on the soul of Seattle? The Weekly. If, in the days after George W. Bush's reelection, you ached to read about women empowering themselves through DIY remodeling projects? The Weekly. Fashion advice from people who can barely dress themselves? The Weekly.

The Weekly, you see, is not The Stranger, a tawdry rag put out by perverts. Yes, the Weekly makes money off of escort ads, just like The Stranger, but it ensures those ads are tasteful. Since a policy change last year, instigated under publisher Terry Coe, it allows only headshots in its back-of-the-book escort advertising.

So if you were looking for a free porn gallery--a young lady empowering herself with a vibrator, say--you would probably assume that the down-and-dirty Stranger, not the no-sex-please-we're-hippies Weekly, would be the place to go. You would be wrong.

For porn, you have to go to the Weekly. Specifically, a new website the paper recently launched. The site, which uses the free porn to entice viewers to its escort listings, is owned by Village Voice Media LLC, the parent company of the Weekly. You wouldn't know that, though, unless you conducted a domain-name search.

Weekly publisher Coe won't comment about the site. A call to the site's advertising number connects to Kyle Broderson, a classified ad rep at the Weekly. "We own the site, but it's run independently," he explains. Why is the Weekly pushing porn? Perhaps desperation. Data tracked by The Stranger indicates that the classified ad pages in the Weekly have dropped since 2000, from an average of 21 pages to 13 pages last year.

Of course, The Stranger does not object to porn or online escorts listings. The Stranger's own NaughtyNW.com offers escort listings. Our site, however, doesn't include porn (although maybe it should), and The Stranger has never attempted to conceal our connection to it.