Seattle's alternative papers get into tiff over Web site

Thursday, August 18, 2005

Seattle's alternative papers get into tiff over Web site
The cause? Case of spam -- or a dig over skis for sale

By MIKE LEWIS
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Seattle's snippy, spastic alternative newspaper war took a turn for the weird Wednesday when managers of the Seattle Weekly confirmed they blocked the paper's Web site from staffers of their bitter rival, The Stranger.

Why? Spam and skis, or maybe a case of too much Elan or misplaced élan, an exhaustive, 30-minute P-I investigation revealed.

To hear the Weekly's publisher, Terry Coe, tell it, the paper's business managers began to receive complaints -- "several, at least four," he offered -- from classified advertisers that they had begun to receive solicitations from The Stranger's advertising sales representatives.

The spam solicitations violate the Web site's terms of use for people trolling the classifieds. Those terms are an industry standard designed to limit ad queries to potential customers, Coe said, and any business that catches spammers harvesting e-mail addresses blocks them.

"When we got wind of (the spam), we talked about what we could do," said Coe, who has published the Pioneer Square-based paper for three years. "We decided to do this."

At The Stranger's Capitol Hill digs, publisher Tim Keck said it wasn't a spam fight at all but instead a tiny, semi-funny practical joke. The Stranger, Keck explained, recently discovered that Coe had placed a long-running classified ad to sell his own Elan skis.

"Someone told me he's been trying to sell those skis a long time," Keck said with a laugh. "So we decided to post the same ad on our Web site to see if we could sell the skis for him since he was having no luck on (the Weekly's) site.

"We got responses and forwarded them along to him."

The humorless reaction, Keck claims: The Weekly blocked all Internet Protocol addresses, called IPs, originating from The Stranger. "We got our access yanked," he said, adding that he called the Weekly to find out why his staff was blocked.

No response.

This isn't the first dustup between the papers and it almost certainly won't be the last. The competing alternative papers have traded barbs, staffers and scoops for years. Often it's The Stranger, like a kid brother, trying to provoke the Weekly into a reaction.

And in the end, the papers don't simply see (reading-glassed) eye to (pierced-brow) eye. Stranger staffers consider Weekly writers boring, conventional, out-of-touch and -- bringing out the sharp knives -- suburban. Weekly staffers see The Stranger's oeuvre as half-baked, half-cocked, half-assed provocation.

Coe, who did confirm he was trying to sell his skis and that The Stranger seems to have an endless capacity to irritate him -- "But that's not why we blocked them," he maintained -- said he might just offer Keck an olive branch. "I'll mail (the skis) over to Tim -- he doesn't have enough to do."

Responded Keck: "They can put a picture of my skis up. I don't mind."

P-I reporter Mike Lewis can be reached at 206-448-8140 or mikelewis@seattlepi.com.

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