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:
- The vibe every time I’ve accidentally stayed past 11:45 pm at a queer party and didn’t notice the ketamine coming out.
- 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.
- 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 had 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.
