Seattle Weekly

Seattle Weekly
Category: Print Media
Neighborhood: Downtown
12/12/2007
A "fixture" in Seattle now, the Seattle Weekly is a more grown-up version of The Stranger, less out to stick-it-to-you-in-your-face and yet still essentially cover the same terrain.

Used to pay for it to arrive in my mailbox years ago. Now that has expanded its distribution, for some reason, the articles don't seem to have the punch they used to.

Still, it's useful to read, if only to keep abreast of what is going on locally and for an analysis of longer-term trends than a reader would get by reading the Seattle Times or P.I., with their "X,Y, and Z happened today."

That said, I don't really recall many of their cover stories or other articles after I have read them.

The "shopping cover stories" (e.g., "fall fashion") and related inserts are pretty boring, for obvious reasons.

The weekly listings of events is useful and allows me one an advance preview, as opposed to having to check daily the Times or P.I. And one can flip through the pages and pages of advertising to read the reviews of new films, plays, art exhibitions, etc.

I do usually find the column written by the "resident Hispanic in Seattle" offensive. Without the profanity-laced put-downs one would find in The Stranger, it still has a patronizing tone (to Anglos, first and foremost).

And as one born and raised in Seattle--and still living here--it is deeply insulting to hear that if one is alarmed by the number of Spanish-speaking persons living here legally--or illegally--one is stupid, racist, ignorant, etc.

The number of Hispanics has probably quadrupled in the past 10-15 years. One is not necessarily "anti-immigrant" or anti-Hispanic just because one feels uncomfortable about the unpredictable, rapid increase in this demographic group, admitting at the same time that local employers are taking advantage of this pool of cheap labor.

A massive influx of ANY demographic group is cause for concern in a city that has a hard time keeping up with basic public services and (including transportation).

Similary, the "Ask an Uptight Seattleite" column again attempts, with humor, to provide a liberal catecism to the do's and don'ts of Seattle, to provoke liberal guilt, as though being liberal meant adhering to dogma of any kind.

That kind of clearly biased polemic is something I thought The Seattle Weekly would have eschewed even if it made the paper seemly more "relevant."

WE DON'T HERE IN SEATTLE ALL THINK ALIKE, NOR SHOULD WE (though it would be nice if we could all be civil and respectful of others).
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