Islander Linda Watson takes over sister publications

on child-rearing.

The new owner of Seattle’s Child magazine has no offspring and lives on Bainbridge Island.

How could she possibly relate to a 27-year-old Seattle-based parenting magazine?

One conversation with Linda Watson makes it clear she’s eminently qualified for the job of energizing Seattle’s Child and making it a bigger success.

Watson had been with the company for three years, as sales manager and then publisher, when the corporate owner, Trader Publishing, unexpectedly announced its closure last September.

Although the mood was somber, Watson was thrilled. She followed the lead of her fellow publishers in the company and decided to buy the free regional publication.

“Trade publications are all classified advertising,” Watson said. “We had content. Seattle’s Child had to stay around. It was always a community reference.

“Readers raised their kids with it and their kids are reading it. They pick it up initially for the calendar. The second thing they pick it up for are the ads, then they read the articles.”

With the help of friends, she pulled together funding and moved cartons to storage. While she dealt with paperwork and legal matters, her staff produced the November issues of Seattle’s Child and its sister publication, Puget Sound Parent, from their homes and got it to some 2,000 distribution points.

The purchase was finalized the last week of October, under the name Northwest Parent Media, making the magazine locally owned once again.

Started in 1979 in Seattle, the magazine was the first of its kind. After two decades, the original owner sold the magazine to a corporation, which later sold it again. Many stories, including a series on divorce, have won Parenting Publications of America awards.

“We tackle topics that are of concern to parents and really have something to say,” Watson said.

Her approach is to bring everything back to its local roots. Seattle’s Child is produced for King and Snohomish counties, and is distributed to libraries, elementary schools, day cares and toy stores. Puget Sound Parent is distributed in Kitsap, Pierce and Thurston counties.

“I don’t have children, but I’m a doting aunt,” Watson said. “As human beings we’re taught so little about our emotions and relationships. When you leave the hospital you don’t get a manual. I feel such a commitment to children. It really pains me to see unhappy children. It’s just lack of information, not knowing.”

Career path

Watson’s father was a professor; her three sisters became educators, too. She gravitated toward business, although she was “always in a book growing up.”

“I am a storyteller. In marketing and sales, you tell stories. I have to believe the stories I tell,” she said.

“Kind of a hippie,” Watson spent two years as an art history major at Tufts University in Massachusetts before switching to Goddard College in Vermont. She tried different careers until she hit her 30s.

For about six years in the 1970s, Watson worked at the Boston University library. After a year at a professional cooking school, she decided she didn’t want to be behind the scenes in a restaurant.

In the early ’80s, a friend steered her toward computers. She became a software distributor and later a training manager for a chain of stores in Boston before moving west 18 years ago.

She was director of international sales for an educational software firm for six months until a hostile takeover.

“It was a blast. I consulted in the education market and some of it brought me up here,” she said.

The technology field and Silicon Valley came next. Watson regularly vacationed in Washington, thinking she was returning for the climate and scenery. In fact, it was the community that beckoned.

When dot-coms crashed, she moved straight to Bainbridge. She bought a 1906 farmhouse, set up a consulting group and became friends with her neighbors.

“Sales and marketing is more my home. It’s more tactical, more hands-on,” she said. “I’m a strategist. I only can be in sales if I sell something I believe in.”

It was the wrong time for her team of three, so she applied for the sales manager position at Seattle’s Child. All the sales managers became publishers and the rest is history waiting to unfold.

“My way of being a manager is to support my group. Give them the vision and the tools to get there and give them the credit,” she said.

Watson’s motto is: “In print, online, in person.” There are different ways to reach different parents and to reach parents at different times, she said.

Her company publishes other magazines, including Sound Baby, which comes out four times a year and is distributed monthly to doctor’s offices and hospitals. The twice yearly Northwest Educator is strictly for teachers and administrators.

“Monthly publications take care of the base costs by and large,” Watson said. “I don’t want to take on anything that’s being done, like women’s sports. There’s still a place for a magazine where we fit in our families. It’s such a niche market, a more educated, more affluent market. Ninety-one percent of our readers are mothers, and they’re making the purchasing decisions.”

Despite her search for office space, Watson hasn’t stopped looking ahead.

She wants all magazine content online at www.seattle’schild.com and www.pugetsoundparents.com.

Her 2006 calendar includes annual events like the Tools for Parents Lecture Series, the camp fair in March and the education fair in November; and there’s more coming.

In January, all eight Puget Sound-area Borders bookstores will have kiosks filled with books reviewed by the Seattle’s Child/Puget Sound Parent editor beneath banners displaying the magazine names.

“I just keep moving us forward,” Watson said. “I’m taking it a little bigger…and pulling all the different pieces together.

“I have studied for this moment. I’ve done business plans for other people. I read strategy. This opportunity came (and) I was ready. Everything’s falling into place. I’m not getting enough sleep, but I’m not waking up petrified.”