Seattle Gay News to stay open: LGBTQ+ paper won’t close after all

Seattle’s longtime LGBTQ+ newspaper will not close after all.

Seattle Gay News, or SGN as it is known, was looking for a buyer earlier this summer. The longtime owner, George Bakan, had died, and his daughter Angela Cragin had taken over running the publishing business through the pandemic. Cragin, who lives in the Tricities, was able to keep things from sinking but said she needed to sell.

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Enter longtime accounting, management and administrative executive Mike Schultz.

“I became keenly aware of the value of staying connected as a community through a medium we trusted, one that understood, informed, and uplifted our nuanced humanness,” wrote Schultz in an op-ed published in SGN. “To me, preserving the SGN’s 49-year legacy as a continuing entity is paramount to that end.”

Schultz announced he would be taking over the business.

“I am grateful to George Bakan for his relentless activism while weathering decades of storms to keep the SGN afloat,” Schultz wrote. “I am grateful to his daughter, Angela Cragin, who inherited the paper in 2020 following her father’s death. She kept the ship from capsizing in a tsunami of personal grief and turmoil. She delivered the SGN to its new captain intact and with an eye to its future.”

Schultz said he had already shifted the physical paper’s publishing schedule from a weekly to a bi-weekly print run but also expanding distribution.

“In recent weeks, the physical distribution points for our print issues have expanded beyond our core Puget Sound region,” Schultz wrote in his piece. “We now encompass Ocean Shores to the west, Spokane to the east, and Bellingham to the north.

Schultz also said that he is also shifting the focus of SGN to covering more local and regional queer communities and also expanding its social media and podcast offerings.