A big question with immediate importance: Can emerging news organizations like Cascadia Daily News, seeking to fill vacuums created by chain-ownership layoffs and closures, hold civic institutions accountable the way traditional newsrooms did?
Honest answer: Not in the old way, via large numbers of full-time journalists. Especially in smaller markets, that staffing expense doesn’t pencil out. And given the troubled financial state of the industry, the clock is not likely to run backwards to previous eras.
Does that leave us high and dry?
No. We’re not ready to accept that reality.
Like other news outlets fervently looking for new ways forward, we’re prioritizing outreach to potential news partnerships. In the coming weeks, readers of Cascadia Daily News are likely to see this manifest in two distinct ways.
Staffing enhancement
Since day one, CDN has benefitted from a group of talented local stringers with expertise in various coverage areas. We also have a successful internship program that is growing in shape and quality: We’ve been pleased to welcome, this summer, two promising young reporters through national-level programs.
Shortly after those two staffers, Olivia Capriotti, a Dow Jones intern; and Ben Long, an AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) Mass Media Science & Engineering Fellow, depart at summer’s end, a new hand should be waiting on deck.
CDN was thrilled to learn that we’ve been awarded a reporter from the Murrow News Fellowship, the state’s new local-news funding initiative administered by Washington State University.
Our fellow, expected to be in place in September, will be a state-sponsored journalist with a two-year tenure at CDN, joining 15 others statewide. The CDN Murrow fellow will bolster high-level news coverage of underserved communities in the rural areas of Whatcom and Skagit counties, focusing on public policy, climate change, water rights, local government, agriculture, border policy and general news about rural ethnic communities.
Like our election coverage and other CDN work we believe has vital local significance, all of this reporter’s work will be published free, outside our paywall, during their two-year tenure.
It’s gratifying to see our initial work — and our future potential — endorsed by a panel of peers at the Murrow program. We’ve pledged to make the reporting live up to the full potential of the program (also the legacy of its namesake, who grew up in Skagit County) by immediately boosting our reporting on issues outside our Bellingham home base.
CDN sees these sorts of sponsored staffing partnerships as key to our ability to bring big-city level journalism to our smaller, growing market.
We have a hand in crafting the job posting for this position, which will be managed and posted by the Murrow office at WSU in the coming weeks.
Reporting partnerships
In a conference call this week with a national nonprofit research group, CDN’s Managing Editor, Rhonda Prast, said it best: “News organizations have to be open to do things in new ways.”
That’s a core principle held by the two of us, who have spent a frightening number of collective decades witnessing what does and doesn’t work in news markets small and large — but also by the rest of our newsroom staff. CDN as a whole is committed to being a professional, consumer-focused watchdog, and we’ll employ any willing, like-minded partners in our ongoing quest for public accountability.
Working with select outside partners — and even with “competing” news organizations, which would have been anathema a couple decades ago — is an encouraging trend among brighter lights in the news industry. Partnerships are increasingly resulting in Pulitzer Prize-honored work.
We’ve already taken important steps with local partnerships. CDN has collaborated with community radio station KMRE on two award-winning, freely accessible news projects, the Beyond Bars series about the Whatcom County Jail, and our Citizens Agenda reader-driven election coverage. We’re currently part of a promising local-news partnership to cover the coming statewide election, spearheaded by Cascade PBS/Crosscut in Seattle. (Local nonprofit news site Salish Current is also a participant.)
We’d like to grow on that foundation by collaborating with a small number of national journalism or research organizations that provide high-level expertise. Many also bring the data-crunching capabilities and broader context that are difficult for smaller newsrooms to muster in house while minding the store with day-to-day coverage. Some irons already rest in this exciting fire; we expect results soon.
Better ways for impactful reporting
One of the most rewarding things about leading CDN for the past several years has been not only the willingness, but the expectation that we’re willing to toss aside some hidebound journalism-industry traditions in a quest for new, better ways to provide more impactful watchdog journalism to your kitchen table.
Part of this is the kind of quick-turn, accountability reporting on local institutions our reporters do daily, even hourly. That will not cease. But as editor, I am sold on the notion that much of the deeper-level reporting that our readership needs to navigate an increasingly complex, volatile world cannot be done by small newsrooms working in isolation.
We embrace that challenge and welcome the possibilities.
I hope this open-door philosophy will make us distinctive in our market. Critical to us is the belief that any new partnerships should enhance direct participation in local news by our most-important partner of all: CDN’s growing community of readers, who make it all possible.
We’re committed to making a subscription to the locally owned, independent Cascadia Daily News not just a smart news choice, but an investment in a broader public or civic cause: holding accountable the local institutions — public, private and nonprofit — that so dominate our lives. Sunshine remains the best disinfectant for incompetence, avarice and yes, greed.
Our lines are open to anyone interested in upping our available wattage.
Ron Judd's column appears weekly; ronjudd@cascadiadaily.com; @roncjudd.
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