Hello dear friends, enemies, and frenemies! This week brought some very welcome and very exciting news: we’ve been acquired. 

A new company called Noisy Creek has swooped in and bought us up, along with EverOut, our siblings down at the Portland Mercury, and Bold Type Tickets. 

As we’ve written, former Democratic Washington State House Representative and Grist CEO Brady Piñero Walkinshaw runs the new venture alongside former Washington Bus Executive Director Toby Crittenden, video guy Dae Shik Kim, and author/journalist Hannah Murphy Winter, who will take over as Stranger editor. (Current Stranger Editor Rich Smith will return to his old role as news editor.) 

I’m sure you all have some itchy, scratchy, burning questions. So do we! To help answer some of those Qs, we turn to our new fearless leader, Hannah Murphy Winter. 

Hello, are you going to fire all of us? 

Yep. These questions were written by AI. Welcome to the future. 

Honestly though, I’m so excited to work with the entire existing team here at The Stranger. 

Give us the speed-dating history of your entire life and career. 

[Starts timer] Born in New Jersey, but moved to Seattle when I was a toddler, and I graduated from Ingraham (Go Rams? I didn’t do sports). I’m one of five half-siblings, and our ages range from 13 to 38, so that probably tells you everything you need to know about my family. 

I moved to New York to study journalism, worked at The Nation and at the New York Times for a while, then realized I was gay, had an existential crisis, and literally fled the country for six months. When I came back to the US, I got a job offer from Rolling Stone, and I stayed there for a really long time! 

I always said the only job I’d ever move back to Seattle for was at The Stranger, but I ended up moving back here for family reasons. I’ve been working with ProPublica for the last couple years, coaching journalists in local newsrooms. And now I’m here! 

Was that two minutes? 

Okay, so you worked at Rolling Stone for years. We demand to hear your best (worst) Jann Wenner story. 

By the 2010s, Jann wasn’t in the office much. We mostly knew he was there because we had to hide all the clutter on our desk when he came in (he didn’t believe running a media company required excess paper), and he’d send his youngest kids around for donations for whatever prep school fundraiser they were doing. 

But one thing we all knew about him was that in 1985, he’d wormed his way into a role in the Jamie Lee Curtis/John Travolta vehicle, Perfect (presumably for allowing Travolta to do his best impersonation of a Rolling Stone reporter). The film was nominated for three Golden Raspberries, one Stinkers Bad Movie Award, and it boasts an 18% on Rotten Tomatoes. After we got bought by Penske media, a bunch of us on the edit team had a viewing party of the movie. Even when we were watching it to mock our former coke-bloated boss, most of us couldn’t finish it. 

You have a book called Queer Power Couples: On Love and Possibility. Do you have any plans to write a sequel about queer couples who have used their powers for evil? 

I do now.

You’re coming on board along with our new benevolent overlord and publisher, Brady Piñero Walkinshaw. How did you all meet? And more importantly, how much can we make fun of him without getting fired? 

We actually met at a bar. My wife and I were celebrating because I’d just published a feature that I’d been working on forever, and Brady was sitting a few seats down, eavesdropping. He introduced himself—he was running Grist at the time, so it wasn’t totally weird—and then we didn’t talk for more than a year. When he got back in touch, he was working on an “unnamed project,” and he started picking my brain about editorial philosophy and local reporting. And the rest, it seems, is history. 

He might be a benevolent overlord, but he’s still a Local Business Leader, so it’s our responsibility to mock him. We’ll be installing the garbage bin outside the conference room later this week. 

What exciting new plans do you have in store for The Stranger? 

We’re getting more stuff! Resources, mostly. Which means we get to do more of what we’re really good at. 

We’re just getting started, and I think the finer details are going to change as I get to spend more time with the edit team, but I know a few things for sure: I’m excited to add more consistent in-depth, feature-style reporting into our pages—it’s such an amazing complement to the type of accountability journalism that The Stranger has always done. We also have the chance to expand our culture reporting, and actually go to every show and opening and restaurant that we think deserves our attention. And columns! Next month, we’ll announce a new roster of monthly columnists—including Marcus Harrison Green—to help build on the ideas that we’re exploring.

Everyone hates The Stranger for one reason or another. What’s yours? 

Took the paper too long to put Charles in front of a camera with an overfilled glass of wine. 

What is your favorite piece written by Stranger Senior Writer Charles Mudede? 

I loved Police Beat growing up. For me, I think it was his cop reporting that first drove home the idea that news writing doesn’t have to be straight news. 

When was your favorite Stranger era? 

I’ll always be sentimental about The Stranger in the aughts, mainly because that’s when I first started reading it. I was in high school, and it was right around the time that I started realizing “journalist” was a real job, and it sounded pretty cool. That era of The Stranger taught me that you could mock the everloving shit out of a city and still keep it informed. 

Who did you vote for in the 2016 and 2020 Democratic presidential primaries? 

Bernie and, well, Bernie. 

Who is your favorite Seattle musician of all time? 

Perfume Genius. But that said, Ben Gibbard Fest 2023 reminded me how much The Postal Service soundtracked my 20s. 

But my favorite thing about living outside of Seattle was telling people that Sir Mix-A-Lot is from here. 

Fuck, Marry, Kill: Honeycrisp, Cosmic Crisp, Rockit.

Fuck Honeycrisp, Marry Cosmic Crisp, Kill Rockit. 

What’s the biggest thing you’ve ever killed? 

Ranked by size:

  1. The vibe every time I’ve accidentally stayed past 11:45 pm at a queer party and didn’t notice the ketamine coming out. 
  2. A cockroach in my apartment in Brooklyn, which I tried to kill with a men’s dress shoe. It was so big the heel couldn’t crush it in one swing. I can still hear it. 
  3. Special mention: I have accidentally killed two monarch butterflies while hiking. I stepped on both of them. 

Finally, please attach the best photo you have of your dog, your cats, your plants, or all of the above. 

I have an 11-year-old rescue dog named Pippin, who I’ve had since he was one. And then in 2021, right before we moved to Seattle, we found three newborn kittens in our shed in Queens. They are now 17, 19, and 23 pounds. Please enjoy. 

Rich Smith is The Stranger's former News Editor. He writes about politics, books, and performance. You can read his poems at www.richsmithpoetry.com

Megan Seling is The Stranger's managing editor. She mostly writes about hockey, snacks, and music. And sometimes her dog, Johnny Waffles.

15 replies on “Meet The Stranger’s New Editor, Hannah Murphy Winter”

  1. I think the big question is, will she be making folks follow journalistic standards from now on? NOTE: NOT “objectivity”, but actual standards of presenting all the facts and not spiking the ones that damage your advocacy. Can’t even count the number of times everyone, including editor Pissy Rich, spiked facts. Public policy/court decisions that literally had information that countered the slant of the article one paragraph down from the quoted part. Or the “Hannah”art collective’s deep dive about that twagic homeless guy and his encampment being harrassed by the city (Seattle being portrayed as Simon LaGree, with twisty mustache) while spiking the on record long list of crime spike in the neighborhood in the area where much of the stolen property was found in said camp. And the many drug problems there. And the violent incident and arrests. All spiked.

    You don;t have to remove the slant, but you do have to publish the pertinent facts even if they hurt your slant a bit. Otherwise it’s not journalism, it’s just propaganda.

    Also, you have to publicly own your mistakes. Pissy Rich and gang went on the record, hell on video laughing at the threat of school closures as ” fear mongering” to advocate for their equityhead slate of school board candidates. Said slate promptly rubber stamped school closings. You can go ahead and advocate for any slate you want. But you can’t “neener neener” legitimate concerns as an editorial board, then memory hole what you did.

    Hopefully she will make the kids here actually follow some ethical standards going forward.

  2. I wish Hannah Murphy the best and welcome her talents.

    I must say, however, that “accountability journalism” has been sorely lacking in the past few years as Slog commenters have been continuously filling in the gaps and adding clarifications on articles. But I anticipate that will improve given the passions of the new team coming in.

  6. Welcome! It sounds like some needed new energy is coming on board. How about updating online commenting engine (speaking of nostalgia for the aughts)?

  10. My hope / wish is a return of humor (I love she called out Police Beat – I too miss humorous Charles). I also miss the pieces on the arts, music, movies (Everout is okay but doesn’t replace the need for article length arts coverage).

    Fingers crossed we get less scolding from the progressive writers and more actual entertainment.

  13. (damn near) Any

    Friend of Bernie’s’s a

    Friend of Mine. Welcome Aboard!

    & always Remember: it’s

    Don-OLD Felonious

    fucking trumpfster.

  14. Bring back A. Birch Steen, Public Editor and Ombudsman. If he (she) is dead, hire another. It was the best part of the paper.

  15. Aramis really captures a core problem for the Stranger – it probably predates this a bit, but the Chase Burns editorship really put a near complete stop to actual journalism. The breathy enthusiastic calls to arms from the streets of CHOP/CHAZ coming right from Chase’s pen in 2020 were a sign: we are not even going to pretend.

    Existence of Hamas? Spiked

    *Murder and kidnapping of Israelis? Spiked

    *Eina Kwon’s murder by a homeless man just in town from Chicago? Spiked *completely

    *Corey Bellet’s murder by Shawn Moore at Cap Hill Light Rail? Delegated to Cap Hill Blog

    *Judge Ed McKenna: When then-City Attorney Holmes asked for a judge to resign, and then the King County public defenders took action to effectively remove the judge without an election or impeachment vote, the Stranger was all for it. When its Judge Vadaddi, the Stranger is outraged at the affront to democracy. (Thank you Tensorna for the succinct summary)

    Those are not just “ideological” differences or the Stranger’s favorite straw man: “conservatives”. Those are deliberate choices to spike news stories, facts, stories that are otherwise being covered by actual news outlets- there’s little difference between that choice and the shit that Fox or Breitbart pulls. Its not better because the Stranger is progressive. Its shitty, lazy, and its not journalism.

    It matters that the Stranger has gotten so shitty because 1 horse news towns are generally a bad thing. There should be a credible legitimate news outlet in print other than Seattle Times- but there isn’t.

    Killing the print edition might have been cost effective but it was a terrible decision in terms of public reach and credibility.

    Now the only folks who come to the Stranger are coming:

    1. To see how batshit y’all are going to be (answer: nearly always, VERY).

    2. To agree with you (which is from a persuasion standpoint, useless).

    While its clear the Stranger is wildly out of step with where Seattle voters are at the moment, its a pendulum and swings around a lot, but being THIS out of step is a problem. If everyone who disagrees with you is a “pearl clutching Madison Valley conservative”, thats not a great strategy to persuade. They’re not “conservatives”, Rich, Hannah, Ashley, Charles. And quite frankly, its super privilegey and gross to refer to Seattleites as conservatives. Try being queer or trans or female or BIPOC in Dallas or Oklahoma City or Wichita or Provo….somewhere that is ACTUALLY conservative and where that does REAL damage, intentionally.

    This is a time for real journalism–not, for example, endorsements based on “he says fuck a lot and we love that” or telling us again how much you all love weed. Or telling people whose car windows get smashed on Cap Hill to stop being so whiny (I’m guessing if all the car windows at the Stranger in SoDo were smashed, you’d all be rightly pissed- its expensive..and more to the point, its not what you need to spend $200-500 on). That is also true of downtown businesses and the explosion of shoplifting. It’s not whiners. It’s real and its a problem.

    Hopefully the Stranger returns to the city we actually live in…and starts to do the kind of journalism they previously did. (Erica Barnett writes frequently batshit stuff too but she sources it and does interviews and it’s actually journalism–so it can be done).

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