Ryan Blethen will serve as the next publisher of The Seattle Times, the daily newspaper his great-great-grandfather founded in 1896, the company announced Wednesday.

Blethen, 52, succeeds his father, Frank Blethen, 80, who will step down Dec. 31 after four decades in the role.

Ryan Blethen started working full time with The Seattle Times Company in 1997 and has served in multiple roles, most recently as assistant managing editor and associate publisher.

He represents the fifth Blethen generation, and is the eighth Blethen family member to lead The Times, one of the few family-owned newspapers still standing in a disrupted media sector marked by cuts and closures.

Frank Blethen, who has also served as The Seattle Times' CEO and board chair, will continue as chair. Alan Fisco, The Times' president and chief financial officer, will move into the CEO role and work closely with Ryan.

“Independent, family ownership is ... a rare situation in today’s media environment, Frank Blethen told Times employees in an email earlier this year. "Transitioning to a 5th generation is even more rare."

“It’s such a good team,” said Ryan Blethen, speaking of the organization his father has built to run The Seattle Times and its related businesses, including the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin and the Yakima Herald-Republic.

"I really do feel like my dad and Alan (Fisco) and the executive team have gotten us to a place where we have a chance to be successful," he said.

Wednesday's announcement had been expected since last year, when Frank Blethen shared plans to step down during a gathering with former Seattle Times employees, but stopped short of saying who would fill the role.

In a July email to company employees, Frank Blethen confirmed the succession plan, and noted that Ryan would be stepping away from newsroom duties as assistant managing editor in preparation for the move to publisher Jan. 1.

"This is a significant milestone for our organization reflecting my family’s commitment to local, independent ownership,” Frank Blethen wrote. "I am thrilled for our organization and family to have Ryan ready to move into the publisher role."

Frank Blethen’s great-grandfather, Alden Blethen, an attorney and teacher originally from Maine, founded The Times in 1896 after buying a failing newspaper called The Seattle Daily Times.

Hoping to unseat Seattle's then-dominant newspaper, The Post-Intelligencer, Alden Blethen shifted The Daily Times' conservative editorial policy and endorsed the nascent labor movement and populist causes, such as the Free Silver movement, according to historian Walt Crowley.

"These ideological stances would reverse within two decades as (Alden) Blethen transformed the Times into the voice of the Seattle Establishment," Crowley wrote in a 2006 essay for HistoryLink.org.

In his last will and testament, Alden Blethen "specified his desire that The Seattle Times would remain under local Blethen family stewardship and as a public-service organization," wrote Frank Blethen in a 2022 letter to readers.

Although The Seattle Times has had nonfamily publishers and in 1928 sold a 49.5% stake, currently held by Chatham Asset Management, owner of McClatchy Media Company, control of the newspaper has remained with the Blethen family.

The newspaper has expanded over the years, including buying the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin, in 1971, and the Yakima Herald in 1992

In 1998, the company purchased a Maine newspaper group, including the Portland Press Herald, but sold it a decade later as it encountered financial challenges.

Frank Blethen has called himself an “accidental publisher.”

Although he’d worked full time at The Times Co. since 1968, including a stint as publisher of the Walla Walla Union-Bulletin, Frank Blethen was thrust into the top role in 1985, following the death of then-publisher Jerry Pennington.

In his four decades since, Frank Blethen oversaw some of the paper’s best years, including nine of the paper's 11 Pulitzer Prizes.

But he also navigated some of the paper’s darkest moments.

That includes the loss of advertising revenue to online outlets, the downturn during the Great Recession of 2008-09, financial stains related to pension liabilities, as well as a 49-day strike by staffers at the Times in 2000-01.

Notably, Frank Blethen oversaw the paper's dramatic transformation starting around 2013, after The Times sold its former offices on Fairview Avenue and invested heavily in digital publishing.

"We saw a steady acceleration in digital subscribers from very few in 2013 to 90,000 plus in 2024," Frank Blethen, a longtime Mercer Island resident, told the Mercer Island Reporter last year. The paper has since topped 100,000 digital subscriptions.

In 2020, Frank Blethen was named Publisher of the Year by Editor & Publisher magazine.

He also worked to get more of the Blethen family involved in the paper.

“I got my cousins — John, Bob and Will Blethen — to join the board. Then we started focusing on the next generation,” he told the Mercer Island Reporter. “They were still kids in college, but we brought them into the business and gave them summer jobs.”

Ryan Blethen, who graduated from Washington State University and attended the University of Kansas, has worked in many parts of the company he'll now oversee, including stints at the Yakima and Maine newspapers.

"Ryan brings a strong passion for our journalistic mission that will perpetuate us for years to come," Fisco said Wednesday.

Ryan Blethen said he was grateful for the work his father and others have done to stabilize the organization after several tumultuous decades.

But he said he has few illusions about the road ahead, especially given the current climate of economic and technological uncertainty and political division over the role of the media.

The newspaper business has "been a struggle most of my career," he said. "So I think I'm very realistic about what I'm walking into.

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