There is more to the sale of The Stranger, and it could end up affecting Seattle taxpayers.

The sassy, alternative weekly and a sister outlet in Portland were acquired last month by a group of 20 investors who plan to grow the operation.

The lead investor and CEO, Brady Walkinshaw, is a former state representative, environmental advocate and prominent member of Seattle’s progressive political establishment.

I hope they succeed. Walkinshaw is saying the right things about the importance of local journalism and finding viable business models.

Competition is needed, especially in a place like Seattle.

The Stranger also needs an infusion. It’s not as fun as it used to be, when it was more transgressive and satirical and less dogmatic.

Every local newspaper suffered as revenue and newsroom jobs evaporated in recent years. That’s why this one is advocating for ways to stop the bleeding and find solutions to preserve and grow newsrooms and readership.

Walkinshaw told me he’s motivated to solve that puzzle for alternative weeklies, which he sees playing three necessary roles.

One is to cover culture and the arts, including performances, supporting “the creative economy.”

Another is to provide more local reporting, for which “there’s so much hunger.”

Walkinshaw also sees alternative weeklies as a political platform, surfacing and discussing “thinking around the political left.”

“I think that The Stranger, you know, when these publications have been more staffed, when they’ve had more resources, they play really important roles in helping push thinking around ideas that have come out of the left,” he said.

I’m glad he’s transparent about the latter, though I’m not sure more political papers are what’s needed to restore local journalism.

Partisan news sites, including more than 1,200 pseudo journalistic outlets advancing political agendas, are proliferating across the U.S., filling voids created by the loss of newspapers that tried to be objective in their news coverage.

As of June, fake local news sites online outnumbered daily newspapers, according to NewsGuard, a company that rates news sites’ trustworthiness.

The Stranger is not one of those sketchy “pink slime” sites. But NewsGuard docks the paper for not handling the difference between news and opinion “responsibly” and for not clearly disclosing ownership.

Indeed, Walkinshaw needs to disclose other investors in the new parent company, Noisy Creek. Especially since he expects The Stranger to influence politics and may seek public support.

Asked if they’ll be disclosed, he said “I’m not sure.”

“Not at the moment,” he said. “Right now, our investor group is private.”

The previous owners, led by founder Tim Keck, retain a 20% share and Walkinshaw is majority owner.

Another owner, that I found through public records, may surprise readers of The Stranger: Lynn Hubbard, a Seattle attorney and environmental advocate. She is married to David Zapolsky, senior vice president and general counsel at Amazon.com.

Walkinshaw had another transparency issue in 2022, when he was personally fined, along with other members of the state redistricting commission, after it was sued for violating Washington’s Open Public Meetings Act.

That settlement also required Walkinshaw to undergo training in open-meetings law, which should be useful to the new publisher.

Walkinshaw was candid about Noisy Creek’s business plans. He’s bullish on print editions, both to sell ads and raise publications’ impact and profile. Advertising and revenue from events and ticket sales are a cornerstone, and he’s mulling a membership model.

Walkinshaw is also pursuing an approach The Seattle Times took to receive community support. Noisy Creek created an affiliate nonprofit to receive donations and aims to have philanthropy provide 20% to 25% of its budget.

For more than a year, Walkinshaw has also been involved with an effort to get Seattle and possibly King County taxpayers to fund “news vouchers.”

Walkinshaw downplayed this in our conversation and said Noisy Creek’s business model doesn’t currently count on voucher revenue.

But The Stranger’s sale coincides with a renewed push for news vouchers and is likely to boost the campaign.

Modeled on Seattle’s democracy vouchers, the idea is to raise taxes to fund vouchers that residents could then donate to certain news outlets.

Proponent Katie Wilson, a progressive political organizer, told me last year they were considering a property tax to collect up to $10 million for the program.

While pitched as a response to the local news crisis, I’ve wondered if the goal is mostly to boost a small group of progressive and niche news sites.

Whether vouchers could support the for-profit outlets doing most local journalism in Seattle, and read and watched by most area residents, is unclear.

Wilson didn’t return my call, perhaps because I wrote a column critical of the vouchers last year.

Another organizer, South Seattle Emerald founder Marcus Green, sees vouchers supporting both for-profit and nonprofit outlets, including conservative ones, but probably not broadcasters.

“This is not a partisan thing,” he said.

Their effort perked up and began raising money, just before The Stranger sale was disclosed.

A political committee called Save Seattle News! was registered in March by Wilson and Green. Green wrote columns for The Seattle Times until July and now writes for The Stranger.

The political committee received $1,000 from a Google engineer, Sam McVeety, in April and hired a law firm that drafts initiatives and represents progressive clients, such as labor and environmental groups.

In June the committee received $10,000 from Bill Donnelly, a retired Merrill Lynch executive who supports environmental and progressive political causes. Walkinshaw talked to him about donating.

Donnelly also supports Grist.org, an environmental news site. Walkinshaw was Grist CEO for five years ending in 2022, when the nonprofit paid him total yearly compensation of $390,503, and remains on its board.

I found Donnelly gardening at his Queen Anne home.

Donnelly said he supports the voucher proposal because he’s been “a bit frustrated over the years with the way the election process runs and information isn’t available equally to people.”

“If I can contribute in some small way to improving people’s ability to get good information and make wise choices and that balances out the process a little bit, I’m happy,” he said.

Donnelly expects the voucher proposal to be on the ballot in 2025, alongside a request to renew taxes funding democracy vouchers.

He declined to invest in Noisy Creek, partly because of appearance concerns. He didn’t want to add questions about someone donating “just for the benefit of their own organization.”

Asked what he’d like to see vouchers accomplish, Donnelly said he’d like them to benefit nonprofits like Grist, the Emerald and Cascade Public Media, and The Stranger.

Should the program support a newspaper like The Times?

“I think from a PR perspective it would be better if it didn’t,” he said. “But I’m not sure how you thread that needle. If you, say, show us the books and you know, you only make $1 a year profit, well, maybe you need the help too.”

The devil is in the details of experiments like vouchers, which can sound promising but deliver something else.

But that’s another reason to celebrate when a local news outlet gets a lifeline. Agree or disagree with its approach, the public always needs more reporting to better understand what’s happening.

This is excerpted from the free, weekly Voices for a Free Press newsletter. Sign up to receive it at the Save the Free Press website, st.news/SavetheFreePress. Seattle Times’ Brier Dudley is the editor of the Free Press Initiative, which aims to inform the public about issues facing newspapers, local news coverage, and a free press. You can learn more about the Free Press Initiative, or sign up for a newsletter, at https://company.seattletimes.com/save-the-free-press/.