Monterey County Weekly was launched in 1988 by Bradley Zeve, its founding Editor & Publisher, and current CEO. Zeve served as the Free Speech chair for the Association of Alternative Newsmedia, is the former president of the Sea Studios Foundation and co-founded The Sun newspaper in Santa Cruz, CA. Erik Cushman serves as Publisher and currently sits on the California Newspaper Publisher's Association Board of Directors. Cushman was the co-founder of the Missoula Independent. The Weekly established the Monterey County Weekly Community Fund at the Community Foundation for Monterey County in 2000, and launched Monterey County Gives! in 2009. To date, the fund has raised and donated over $28 million to 500+ local nonprofits, in partnership with the Community Foundation, the Monterey Peninsula Foundation, Neumeier Poma Investment Council, Cannery Row Company and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. The annual campaign runs from mid-November to midnight December 31. The Weekly currently reaches one in three households in Monterey County, making it the most widely read publication in Monterey County. The Weekly begin uploading its entire contents online beginning in 1996, the first media online in the county. Monterey County NOW, a daily e-newsletter to residents of the community was established in 2020, and reaches nearly 50,000 households. In March of 2020, the Weekly’s website had over 1 million pageviews. Most recent readership audit Print Publication: Average Net Circulation: 33,583 e-Edition only of Newspaper: Average Monthly Unique Users: 4,303 Website: Average Website Unique Users per week: 143,555 Social Media: Average Facebook Likes: 14,266 Average Twitter Followers: 8,406 E‐Newsletters: Average E‐Newsletter Subscribers: 36,086 Recipient of the First Amendment Coalition Free Speech & Open Government Award and Association of Alternative Newsmedia Free Speech Award. The mission of Monterey County Weekly is to inspire independent thinking and conscious action, etc.
Outstanding achievements
While its reporting is almost entirely local, Monterey County Weekly was the only newspaper in the alternative press to send a reporter to the middle east to cover both the Desert Storm war in the early 1990s and the Iraq war in early 2003 The Weekly was an early adapter to digital news and began publishing online, as well as in print, in 1996. The Weekly has 165 solar panels on its rooftop and generates 100% of its electricity from solar. The Weekly is headquartered in the first commercial office building designed by renowned architect Charles Moore and the 2015 Free Speech & Open Government award from the First Amendment Coalition.
