A news website just launched in Pierce County but it doesn’t plan to do original reporting, at least for the time being.
The Cascadian will operate as an online bulletin board for the county’s west side, including communities south of Tacoma. People and organizations may share news and announcements on the site at no charge.
It’s modeled on The Suburban Times, a news site that closed Oct. 7 after more than 20 years. It was a side project of Ben Sclair, an aviation magazine publisher whose family used to publish a Lakewood-based newspaper with the same name.
“We’d definitely like to get to the point where we are generating reports of government actions and editorial direction,” said Walter Neary, co-founder of The Cascadian. “Right now, it’s empowering the community — civic education.”
Neary worked at another now-defunct local paper, The Lakewood Journal, and even helped its parent company, Sound Publishing, launch a paper in University Place in the 1990s. He was later an editor at The Olympian before starting a career in public relations.
Now retired, Neary started The Cascadian with Phil Lindholm, a mediator and podcaster recently elected to the Lakewood City Council.
The Cascadian is edited by Neary and Steve Dunkelberger, another veteran of The Lakewood Journal, with help from Neary’s family.
These sites help fill the information void created when places lose their local newspapers and regional dailies shrink and cut coverage of suburbs and smaller communities.
I wish the sites were doing accountability journalism and not just posting whatever comes over the transom. But they are better than social media, because they have some human curation and standards. They’re also designed so it’s easier to find and refer to articles, Neary noted.
And they provide further evidence that people still want local news, creating opportunities for civic-minded entrepreneurs.
The Suburban Times had around 3,100 subscribers to a newsletter emailed Mondays through Saturdays. Its website attracted 50,000 to 70,000 visitors per month, Sclair said.
“I’d hear from people saying ‘I really appreciate The Suburban Times, it’s the first thing I read in the morning,’ ” he said.
Sclair considered raising funds through advertising or donations to hire a reporter for a year “just to test it to see what could be done.” He was too busy, though, with his “day job” publishing General Aviation News.
“There is an appetite for journalism, true journalism, but it’s a struggle,” he said.
Sclair gave The Cascadian a parting gift. A farewell post linked to the site and helped it launch with 1,000 subscribers, Neary said.
Neary said it cost around $6,000 to launch The Cascadian. It will operate as a nonprofit. It’s aiming to generate revenue initially through donations and sponsorships.
“It would be nice to have something that’s a sustainable model,” he said. “What that looks like, we’ll figure it out.”
Just like everyone else in the news business nowadays.
News Help Desk: If these organizations ever employ journalists, they might turn to the News Media Help Desk, a new program to support local newsrooms and strengthen their business operations.
The Help Desk, debuting today, is operated by the Reynolds Journalism Institute and the Local Media Consortium, with Knight Foundation funding.
The Institute is providing an online resource center with case studies, how-to guides and tools for developing a news business. The consortium is connecting newsrooms with digital-media consultants and technologists providing services at pre-negotiated rates.
Quoted: “This is where the hatred of journalists leads! It led to the death of 67 journalists this year — not by accident, and they weren’t collateral victims. They were killed, targeted for their work,” Thibaut Bruttin, Reporters Without Borders director general, said in announcing the number of journalists killed and detained (503) as of Dec. 1.
AI licensing deals: In a remarkable flip-flop, Facebook parent Meta announced that it’s now making deals to license news content.
It announced deals with publishers including USA TODAY, CNN, Fox News, People and France’s Le Monde. Meta AI will use their content to answer news-related questions and include links to their articles.
This is another nail in the coffin for tech giants’ bogus argument that having to negotiate news content deals would “break the internet.”
Terms weren’t disclosed and Meta and USA Today (the newspaper chain formerly known as Gannett) declined interview requests.
In 2022 Meta threatened to block news across its platforms in the U.S. when Congress was considering a law requiring it to negotiate payments with news publishers.
Meta blocked news in Canada in 2023 to avoid paying Canadian news publishers. It threatened to do the same in Australia, where it fought rules requiring it to negotiate payment for news content.
The deals announced Dec. 5 don’t negate the need for U.S. policy requiring tech giants to fairly compensate publishers for their use of news content.
Securing fair payment for their work online is key to news publishers’ long-term success.
Meta’s deals confirm that news content is valuable to Big Tech platforms and that they can and should be licensing it.
But without policies requiring universal compensation, I fear they’ll make deals with just a fraction of news publishers, believing that’s all the news content needed on their platforms.
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/.
