This past week, our colleagues at the Skagit Valley Herald, Anacortes American and Stanwood Camano News announced their intentions to strike after nine months of negotiations with their Minneapolis-based corporate headquarters failed.
These Skagit and Island county journalists are asking for something remarkably simple: enough pay to build a life here in the communities they serve and assurances that artificial intelligence will strengthen their journalism rather than weaken (or worse, replace) it.
We support them.
Not because we believe every newsroom should be the same, but because we share a common belief: if journalism matters to our community, then the people who create journalism matter, too.
According to Indeed.com, the median pay for a journalist in Washington state is $49k a year. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s living wage calculator determined a living wage in Skagit County in February of this year was $23.87 for a single person without children, or just about the same at $49,650 a year.
When Washington State University set the wage for the WSU Murrow Fellows/Report for America fellowships, they argued for $55k a year for journalists because most are college graduates and have student loan debt to pay. When we started La Conner Community News, we used this number as the guideline for setting reporter wages.
Why? Because our readers in La Conner and Swinomish know that newspapers don’t simply appear in their inbox on Tuesdays or on their doorsteps every Thursday morning.
They are made by reporters like Bill Reynolds, who never misses a La Conner Braves sporting event, and Luisa Loi, who pores through pages of policy documents to update you on local government, fisheries and agriculture.
They are made by photographers like Nancy Crowell, who donned rubber boots and worked 12-hour days in the rain to get pictures of the flooding in nearby Conway and Fir Island.
They are made by editors, ad reps, designers, bookkeepers, press operators and our proud army of volunteer newsies who deliver the paper every week — the people whose names rarely appear in print, but whose effort makes every issue possible.
This is true in La Conner and it has been true in Mount Vernon. If we believe Skagit County deserves a daily newspaper, then we must also believe people deserve to earn a living making it.
That isn’t charity. It’s infrastructure.
At La Conner Community News, we face the same economic headwinds as every other newspaper. Advertising is not enough to cover the high costs of paper, printing and postage. Subscription habits have changed. Technology ages out and demands to be replaced.
We haven’t escaped those realities, but here in La Conner, we made deliberate decisions about what we choose to protect when the town’s last newspaper closed up shop.
We chose independent, community ownership.
We chose to make a living wage part of our DNA — a decision we could only make as a community, together, because those wages are paid for with your donations, subscriptions and ad dollars.
And we believe AI is a tool for some tasks, but never a stand-in for the human judgment, relationships and accountability that define local reporting.
This isn’t only a question for newspaper leaders; it’s a challenge for all of us.
Every time we say local journalism matters, we’re also making a statement about what we value.
For those of us in Skagit County, that means standing with the journalists who strike for better pay and investment in communities and funding the organizations that are building a sustainable future. Support and strengthen community journalism wherever you find it (especially here!). Subscribe. Advertise. Donate.
The striking journalists are preparing to strike with a GoFundMe page, which you can contribute to here: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-keep-ai-out-of-your-newsrooms. La Conner Community News always needs your donations, which you can give here: https://mp.giving/a4n6tj
Because democracy doesn’t happen by accident. Neither does journalism.
