Seattle Times journalist and longtime Capitol Hill resident Tricia Romano will soon take over as editor of major Capitol Hill media conglomerate The Stranger. Romano talked with CHS about the culture of Capitol Hill, her experience as a journalist, and her plans for the alt-weekly.

“My challenge is to make The Stranger a thing you can read and learn about the city as a whole, not just Capitol Hill,” said Romano. “To be better, it needs to be a city paper.”

Romano started her career at The Stranger, a weekly alternative paper that has become a fixture of Capitol Hill, and will officially take the helm on June 29. In addition to working at The Stranger, Romano has been on the staff The Village Voice and The Seattle Times, and freelanced for The New York Times and The Daily Beast, among others. For the past few years, Romano has written for The Seattle Times.

“I’ve had such a broad career,” Romano said, adding that she will benefit from being able to draw on both her experience working for more mainstream, “buttoned-down” publications like The New York Times and The Seattle Times and more alternative places like The Village Voice and The Stranger.

Romano says that while she plans to broaden the scope of The Stranger’s coverage, she wants to preserve its tone, voice, and passion. “It’s a writer’s paper, like The Village Voice. They have their own voice, and a place like that attracts a certain kind of attitude. It’s still pretty punk-rock in attitude — it’s not the buttoned down Seattle Times.”

“It’s almost like there are two different Capitol Hills existing alongside each other.”

While the attitudes of The Seattle Times and The Stranger may be different, Romano says that the goals of both publications and the tools they use overlap, and the journalistic tenets remain the same: tell the truth, and back up your assertions with solid facts.

Romano has lived on Capitol Hill for about a decade all told — for four years in the ’90s, and then for the past five. She has seen the area go through changes. She highlighted some of those shifts in her 2015 article about the friction between artists and members of LGBTQ communities who have sought refuge in Capitol Hill for years and the tech workers and wealthier residents who have moved in more recently.

While Romano says she thinks that tension was at a peak in 2015, it is still very much present today.

“It’s almost like there are two different Capitol Hills existing alongside each other,” she said. “I think they are learning to work together, to work next to each other — I don’t know that that gay flavor will ever be replaced.”

Romano doesn’t believe this change is avoidable or even unique to Capitol Hill. “Every neighborhood is evolving always,” she said. “Nothing is ever exactly the same.”

However, she believes that Seattle could do more to ameliorate the negative effects of those changes on lower income communities, such as instate more stringent rent-control.

As for the Stranger, it’s a business and a media outlet emerging from a period of transition marked by several longtime writers and editors leaving and a new generation of journalists stepping into the fold. Thanks in part to a landmarks decision, of all things, the paper will move into its new era maintaining its longtime Pike/Pine home across the street from Cal Anderson.

Ultimately, while Romano says she is sad to be leaving The Seattle Times, she is excited to get started working on 11th Ave at The Stranger. “It’s a huge challenge for me. I’ve just been writing for a long time, and I’m excited to use the editor/vision muscle.”

She says she will be sad to leave her friends and colleagues at the Times. “They’re really hardworking people who are trying to stay afloat in this crazy time,” she said, adding that in our increasingly connected and tech-heavy era journalists have to do even more work to “feed the monster.”

“What The Seattle Times does is a public service,” she said. “If it goes away, what is The Stranger going to be in opposition to?”

UPDATE: Tuesday night, @jseattle was inspired by @hillaryclinton…

For the first time in our history, a woman will be a major party’s nominee for President of the United States. pic.twitter.com/4iLojpuPj8 — Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) June 8, 2016

And riffed on her tweet knowing there was probably an editor he was forgetting about:

For the first time in our history, a woman will be… editor of Capitol Hill's only alt weekly https://t.co/zDdlZSHSce — jseattle (@jseattle) June 8, 2016

Sure, enough, Romano isn’t the first Stranger EIC ever…

If you don't count the two women editors it's had before. https://t.co/uJwYrlli4a — Clark Humphrey (@clarkhumphrey) June 8, 2016

But, there more than two have assumed the mantle…

@jseattle Christine Wenc, S.P. Miskowski, Emily White, Jennifer Vogel, Tricia Romano — Sean Nelson (@seantroversy) June 8, 2016

Meanwhile, here are the boys:

@jseattle Matt Cook, Dan Savage, Christopher Frizzelle are the lads. — Sean Nelson (@seantroversy) June 8, 2016

Sorry for the goofy tweet. Thanks for the information!