The Seattle Times

• 1. Introduction

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  The Seattle Times first reached readers on the 3rd of May, 1886 - a single edition carrying the hopes of two men named Thomas H. Dempsey and Jud R. Andrews. The city of Seattle was barely a generation old. Today, that same paper holds the largest circulation of any newspaper in the state of Washington and the entire Pacific Northwest. One family has controlled it for five generations. It has won eleven Pulitzer Prizes. And it has also sparked heated controversies that forced its own staff to sign letters of protest against its publishers. How did a small frontier paper grow into the region's dominant voice? And what does it mean for a newspaper to be owned by the same family for over a century - for better and for worse?

• 2. The Blethen Era Begins

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  In August 1896, a man named Alden J. Blethen paid for a struggling newspaper and immediately changed its name to the Seattle Daily Times. The paper had already changed hands several times. Dempsey's original co-founder, Andrews, had left early. George G. Lyon had come and gone as co-owner. William E. Bailey had merged it with another publication, The Press, to create a hybrid called the Seattle Press-Times. Blethen inherited that uncertain legacy and turned it around with striking speed. Within half a year, circulation doubled to 7,000 copies. By the time Blethen died in 1915, that figure had grown to 70,000. His family would not let go of what he built. The McClatchy Company at one point held a 49.5% stake in the paper's voting common stock, inherited from Knight Ridder in 2006. The Blethens bought even that stake back in 2024, restoring full family control after nearly two decades of partial outside ownership.

• 3. Bricks, Blocks, and Buildings

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  Circulation was not the only thing growing. In 1915 - the same year Alden Blethen died - the newspaper moved into the Times Square Building at 5th Avenue and Olive Way. Fifteen years later, it built a dedicated headquarters north of Denny Way. In 2011, the paper shifted again to 1000 Denny Way. A further move to the Cascade neighborhood is scheduled for 2026. Each relocation tracks a different chapter of Seattle's physical expansion, with the paper threading itself through the city's changing geography. The name itself settled into its final form in 1966, when the publication dropped "Daily" and became The Seattle Times. Before that date, multiple mergers and renamings had left the masthead in flux for eighty years.

• 4. The Morning War

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  On the 6th of March, 2000, The Seattle Times switched from afternoon to morning delivery. The stated reason was blunt: afternoon newspapers were dying, and the Times intended to survive. The shift put it in direct competition with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, owned by Hearst, which had been the morning paper in the city. The two papers had operated since 1983 under a Joint Operating Agreement, a legal arrangement in which the Times controlled advertising, production, marketing, and circulation for both papers, while each kept its own independent newsroom and editorial voice. That arrangement began to fracture in 2003, when the Times announced it was pulling out of the JOA, citing three consecutive years of losses. Hearst sued, arguing a force majeure clause blocked the Times from counting losses caused by a seven-week Newspaper Guild strike. A district judge sided with Hearst. The Times appealed, and on the 30th of June, 2005, the Washington State Supreme Court handed down a unanimous ruling in the Times's favor. Hearst pressed on, claiming the Times had fabricated its 2002 loss figures. The dispute between the two companies formally ended on the 16th of April, 2007. The JOA itself ended on the 17th of March, 2009, when the Post-Intelligencer printed its final edition and moved entirely online.

• 5. Pulitzer After Pulitzer

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  Jerry Gay won the Times its first Pulitzer in 1975, a Spot News Photography prize for an image called "Lull in the Battle," showing firefighters resting after a house fire. Seven years later, reporter Paul Henderson won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for his coverage of Steve Titus, a man wrongfully convicted of rape. Henderson's series challenged the circumstantial evidence piece by piece, persuading the judge to overturn the conviction. In April 2010, the full Times staff shared the Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Reporting for covering the shooting deaths of four police officers at a Lakewood coffee house, and the forty-hour manhunt that followed. Two years after that, Michael Berens and Ken Armstrong won the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting in April 2012, for a series that documented more than 2,000 deaths tied to Washington State's use of methadone as a recommended painkiller in state-supported care. A tenth prize came in 2015 for breaking news coverage of the Oso mudslide. The paper's most recent Pulitzer, in 2020, went to reporters Dominic Gates, Mike Baker, Steve Miletich, and Lewis Kamb for national reporting on the Boeing 737 MAX crashes. Eleven prizes in total, spread across decades and covering subjects from a single photograph to a global aviation crisis.

• 6. Controversies From Within

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  In February 2002, the Times ran a subheadline reading "American outshines Kwan, Slutskaya in skating surprise" after Sarah Hughes won the gold medal at the Winter Olympics. Michelle Kwan is also American, and Asian American community leaders called the phrasing an act of perpetuating the stereotype that people of color cannot be considered truly American. The paper's Executive Editor at the time, Mike Fancher, issued a public apology. A decade later, a different controversy came not from a headline but from the publisher's own actions. On the 17th of October, 2012, the Times's publishers ran advertising campaigns supporting Republican gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna and a state referendum to legalize same-sex marriage. Management described the ads as a demonstration of the paper's advertising effectiveness. The expenditure backing McKenna totaled $80,000, ranking the newspaper as the third largest contributor to his campaign. More than 100 staff members signed a letter of protest to publisher Frank Blethen, calling it an unprecedented act. The family that had built the paper's independent reputation had, in the view of over a hundred of its own journalists, crossed a line the newsroom was not prepared to accept.