For those who might not have heard the story, Bellingham, Whatcom County, and the surrounding region will have a new newspaper at the end of January, the Cascadia Daily News. About five months ago, John Servais broke the news of the retirement of Ron Judd from the Seattle Times in several articles entitled “Cascadia Daily News To Begin In January,” and “Ron Judd Bids Farewell To Seattle,” in which he gave a bit of the backstory on this welcome event, the development of a real newspaper that will be run by Ron, a very experienced author and reporter. It will replace and expand upon the now closed Cascadia Weekly, run for decades by Tim Johnson, a capable newsman in his own right.
This from the Cascadia Daily News website:
Cascadia Daily News is a new, locally owned newspaper set to debut online January 24. Our state-of-the-art news website is nearing completion, and we have reporters and photographers on the street working on stories. A weekly printed edition you can hold in your hands will roll out in March.
This is a for-profit venture that will accept advertising, seek subscribers, and act as a paper of record for local government. According to Ron, its reporters will be paid a living wage - is that not a refreshing bit of news? Ron stated that the paper will have an active editorial voice and will be in constant communication with the public. In a recent email to me he said:
“Also wanted to let you know that we will regularly be running guest editorials from local writers, 500-800 words, on our editorial page. … We’ll have another announcement about that up on our website next week. The contact person for that is me, at ronjudd@cascadiadaily.com.”
For those who want a more in-depth look into the plans for this newspaper, the Bellingham City Club has a video interview with Ron Judd and Amy Nelson, publisher of the Salish Current, an online news site that began operations about 18 months ago.
We at NWCitizen want to wish Ron and the team at the Cascadia Daily News the best as they launch this sorely needed newspaper.
Comments by Readers
Michael Riordan
Jan 11, 2022Glad to hear about this new publication, and hope to be able to contribute.
Dianne Foster
Jan 19, 2022i have submitted a guest editorial to the email address, .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), and received a bounceback. So I sent it to letters to the editor instead, asking them to forward it to Ron, and haven’t heard a thing. I went down to their address, but the building is locked. Not feeling very welcomed.
Ron Judd
Jan 20, 2022DIanne, we like many others have been working with very limited staff on-site lately and also working pretty furiously to launch the news site. I’ll see if I can find out what happened to those emails. Ron