The Stranger was founded by Tim Keck, who had previously co-founded the satirical newspaper The Onion, and cartoonist James Sturm. Its first issue came out on September 23, 1991. The paper is distributed to local businesses, newsstands, and newspaper boxes free of charge every Thursday. It calls itself “Seattle’s Only Newspaper,” an expression of its disdain for Seattle’s two dailies (the Seattle Times and the (now defunct print version of the) Seattle Post-Intelligencer) and The Stranger’s main rival, the Seattle Weekly. The paper regularly covers Seattle City Council politics.