Editorial: Sustaining Journalism Requires Action

A call buzzed my phone while I was meeting with other newspaper associations from across the country: one of our association’s members needed to sell his paper and hasn’t been able to find a buyer. It hasn’t been profitable and he and his staff are near or past retirement age. I returned to the zoom meeting to hear other representatives of the industry struggle with how strongly we convey the precipice newspapers face. 

Do we paint the picture as dire as it feels — that without subscriptions and donations, your community’s paper may go away tomorrow?

Conflicting statistics show that while many people don’t subscribe to their local newspaper, if they knew it was going to close, they’d donate to it. Across the nation, the strongest level of trust in media is placed in local newspapers. But the fact that their revenue models have changed like the shifting sands of time isn’t fully understood.

I want to be clear: excellent journalism is going on in our communities across this state and our country. Vitally needed story telling, investigative work and and accountability journalism is happening every single day. And some newspapers are finding success in the traditional models of subscriptions and advertising revenue, interest spurred by solid reporting.

On the other hand, the state lost five newspapers last year alone. And too many are struggling to afford enough reporters to adequately cover their community.  In Washington State, the majority of newspapers have just one to three reporters. And in some cases that one reporter is also the owner, editor, and business manager.  

The situation for too many newspapers truly requires more than traditional business models. Newspapers will continue to close, impacted by a combination of factors: publishers are aging out; advertisers are shifting to digital outlets; search platforms and bots are scraping content without compensation; and there is a profound lack of awareness in communities that their newspaper’s loss may be imminent, and will leave a void which will be filled with misinformation and darkness where there should be the light of transparency.

Without their local reporters, who would consistently attend city council meetings and report on how tax dollars are being used? In Port Townsend, even one of the sitting city council members was unaware of the full scope of the city manager’s pay until the local newspaper investigated, interviewed, and made public records requests.

That’s why we need to step up as individual communities, and at the highest levels of leadership. It’s time to rethink the funding models that support journalism. And it's time to take action. Because newspapers are still the predominant source of that journalism across the state, it’s critical that the conversation includes their survival specifically.

There is a bill in the Senate Ways and Means Committee that appears to be stalled. It was proposed last year and never made it out of committee. Senate Bill 5400, sponsored by Sen. Marko Liias, has the potential to be a piece of the important funding puzzle. It would tax the largest of our tech giants to create a journalism fund, supporting both digital and print news media. 

To the original question asked in this piece’s opening: Do we paint the picture as dire as it feels? I say, yes. We do. The Senate Ways and Means Committee needs to pass this bill out of committee, and give the full legislature the opportunity to help us all keep journalism alive and well in Washington state.