Save Seattle News
Local news is in trouble. We can help.
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Journalism is the lifeblood of any free society
It is a carrier of information that unearths, educates, and holds those who would abuse power accountable.
Locally, journalism functions to inform Seattle residents. It keeps them knowledgeable about the functioning of their city government, the public school district, and other institutions. This knowledge ensures residents a clearer understanding of how public power is wielded and how their government is either succeeding or failing to serve them.
Local journalism's contributions to a city’s civic vitality have been confirmed repeatedly in study after study. In a democracy, it is essential public infrastructure. Benefits include increased participation in civic life, a slowing of polarization, increased attention to local issues, and a greater understanding of how the world works. It also fosters and affirms community.
Despite its essential significance, local journalism is under extreme duress
In the last several years alone, we’ve witnessed the closures or extreme scaling back of several newspapers including the Seattle Chinese Post, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Seattle Weekly, and the Seattle Globalist.
Even as a handful of media start-ups have emerged, most operate exclusively online and with skeleton crews. With limited budgets, scaling up to serve their current communities is nearly impossible. As many of those startups serve historically marginalized communities, their scaling up is all the more necessary. All of us in Seattle share the feeling that there are fewer sources for trusted news today.
The main culprit leading journalism on a death march, locally and beyond, is lack of revenue, as advertising revenue – historically the bulk of news companies’ revenues — has been diverted by major Internet search and social media platforms. Since few news media companies are likely to be “saved” by benevolent billionaires, this leaves media in the predicament of trying to raise revenue either by attracting eyeballs and advertisers, or building out a robust paid-subscriber base when people have grown to expect journalism to be free — a difficult feat when serving communities of lesser means.
Fact-based, accurate, high-quality journalism is costly to produce.
More and more areas are becoming news deserts, mainly because there is simply not a viable revenue stream to fund the work nor an economic incentive to serve readers who cannot afford subscriptions.
This does not bode well for our local journalism industry, in turn the shared knowledge of our city’s residents, and ultimately the health of our democracy.
Everyone, everywhere in Seattle, regardless of their economic means, background, race, or orientation, deserves media that is multidimensional, humanizing, and tells an authentic story of the community it purports to cover.
But what if there was a way to publicly fund media while keeping journalistic independence?
After all, public subsidy of news media has a long history in this country.
Modeled on our city’s existing Democracy Voucher program, a Local News Dollars program would provide individual residents of Seattle with vouchers they can assign to qualifying local news outlets. In turn, the outlets would collect money directly from our city government for each voucher received.
A Local News Dollars program would direct financial support to local news media outlets in proportion to the public’s desire to support them – all of the public, not just those who can afford to buy a subscription. It would provide essential funding to sustain news operations, and potentially startup funding to a new news organization that the community wants to support. It would strengthen the production of high-quality news, increase the number and diversity of news outlets, and connect people more closely with politics, events, and others within their communities.