The Skagit Valley town of La Conner is rallying to save its local newspaper but time is running out.
Residents held a public meeting on saving the La Conner Weekly News before its scheduled closure in December. That drew 60 to 80 people, organizers said, and ended with plans to form a nonprofit to acquire and continue publishing the paper.
“I think something can be worked out if everyone’s willing,” said Andrew Ashmore, a retiree with a background in direct-mail publishing who is helping lead the effort.
I wish them luck and appreciate the groundswell of support for saving local news.
It’s also a daunting project. They’ll need to raise $250,000 just to buy the paper. They’ll also need enough resources to keep the paper going and invest in its journalism and technology.
La Conner’s plight should be noted by state and federal representatives. An array of legislative proposals are at hand, including tax credits and policies to help small news organizations get fairly compensated by tech giants.
The proposals would save newsroom jobs, local papers and independent reporting that’s essential to a well-functioning democracy. But Congress has dawdled, even as newspaper failures accelerated last year to 2.5 per week on average.
Several La Conner residents I spoke with are well aware of how important the paper is to keep the community informed.
“We can always turn on TV and get news from everywhere else,” Ashmore said. “But finding out what’s happening with the school board or what’s happening with the town hall or things in town, it’s really nice to have a local paper that gives that information.”
Ashmore said he was spurred to act after reading editorials by Ken Stern, the publisher since 2017.
Stern is preparing to retire after trying to find a buyer for more than a year.
He plans to publish the last edition on Dec. 18 unless a firm plan to acquire the paper is in hand. That would end a paper that calls itself the longest continuously published weekly in Washington, founded in 1879.
A similar fate has befallen newspapers in small towns across the United States, where roughly a third of local papers closed over the last 25 years. That’s left more than half of U.S. counties and millions of Americans with little to no local news reporting.
Most of the roughly 3,000 papers lost were weeklies. Some merged with neighboring papers and some closed after years of losing money. Others, like the La Conner Weekly News, were owned by people approaching retirement age who couldn’t find buyers and simply turned off the lights.
Stern said he’s proud of what he’s done with the paper but he’s done.
“It’s not my responsibility to keep a newspaper open in La Conner and I have said that to folks for over a year,” Stern said. “And I’ll be sad, disappointed and frustrated if the newspaper closes, because no one can figure out how to purchase it or somehow work out a transition where the paper continues to publish.”
Stern’s been trying to sell the paper for $250,000, which is double what he paid for it in 2017.
A national advertisement he placed was viewed 825 times and Stern eventually received four calls, including one from a deputy editor at The Washington Post.
“None of them was serious,” he said. “Well, the one that was most serious was a fellow down in Tacoma and a week later his wife got a better job and he said we’re not moving.”
Stern said it’s been enlightening and disappointing.
“What I’m finding out, I think partly from the fellow from Tacoma, is journalists can afford to buy a newspaper or they can afford to buy a house in Skagit County,” he said, “but they can’t afford to buy a house and a newspaper at the same time.”
The paper is profitable, Stern said. Last year it grossed $287,000 and netted about $79,000, he said.
Three people work at the paper, plus Stern, freelancers and a part-time proofreader.
Stern, 69, said he used to employ a general manager. When she left a few years ago he decided it was time to look at retiring.
The weekly prints 1,100 copies a week and has 900 subscribers, including about 800 in Skagit County.
That’s good penetration. The Census found 3,521 people and 1,587 housing units in La Conner in 2020.
Turnout at the Sept. 25 community meeting suggests support for the paper will continue if a solution is found to keep it going.
Aven Wright-McIntosh, a retiree with a public-relations background, organized and promoted the event.
“I just got tired of people going ‘what shall we do, it’s terrible, what’s gonna happen, we need the paper,’ ” she said. “So I just said hey let’s have a meeting, let’s see who shows up. And if no one showed up, well, then that was an answer too, right?”
Ashmore’s first idea was to emulate the Green Bay Packers, the NFL team that sold shares to community members. Further research led him to explore forming a nonprofit, similar to news startups such as Gig Harbor Now.
Now he and around eight others are working on forming a board of directors to guide the project.
Ideas floated at the meeting included making the paper digital-only.
“That went swinging down right away,” Wright-McIntosh said.
“I’m on screens enough and so when I get the paper, you know, I want to settle down away from my screen and soak it up,” she said.
Also rejected were proposals to make the paper bimonthly or publish just on social media, she said.
Stern said he’s “not so optimistic” the group will be able to raise the money in time.
But you’ve got to love the community’s enthusiasm for saving its paper and hope this pocket of the Skagit Valley is fertile enough to keep it alive.
This is excerpted from the free, weekly Voices for a Free Press newsletter. Sign up to receive it at the Save the Free Press website, st.news/SavetheFreePress. Seattle Times’ Brier Dudley is the editor of the Free Press Initiative, which aims to inform the public about issues facing newspapers, local news coverage, and a free press. You can learn more about the Free Press Initiative, or sign up for a newsletter, at https://company.seattletimes.com/save-the-free-press/.
