(JTA) — Seattle’s JTNews, a weekly Jewish newspaper that debuted more than 90 years ago, will close and be replaced by a bimonthly magazine.
The Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle paper will shut down in March.
“The decision to close the JTNews was not easy,” Keith Dvorchik, the federation’s president, said in a statement Wednesday. “The JTNews has served our community well, but having a bimonthly, glossy magazine will be an exciting and fresh opportunity with incredible potential. Unfortunately, there is not enough room for two competing publications within our community, so a choice had to be made.”
The full-color print and online magazine “highlighting the people, trends and lifestyles that make Seattle an exciting center of Jewish life,” according to the statement, will debut at the end of the summer.
The Jewish Transcript of the Pacific Northwest, now known as the JTNews, was first published on March 6, 1924 and now has a readership of some 16,000. Its founder, Herman Horowitz, said he felt it was his duty to his Jewish brethren to provide “the vehicle to represent their ideas, aspirations and principles,” according to the Seattle federation.
Earlier this month, the newly released Greater Seattle Jewish Community Study, which was conducted by a research team from Brandeis University’s Cohen Center for Jewish Studies, tallied the region’s Jewish population at 63,400, an increase of 70 percent since 2001.
