Owner will shut down paper Dec. 18 as no purchase agreement reached
It may soon be the end of the line for one of Washington’s longest-running weekly newspapers after a nearly 150-year run.
The La Conner Weekly News team is prepping its last edition this week, sticking to a Dec. 18 deadline owner and publisher Ken Stern gave prospective buyers after announcing his plans to retire over a year ago.
But community members haven’t thrown in the towel on efforts to save the paper quite yet.
La Conner Community News, a community nonprofit formed to buy the paper and eventually oversee it, has raised only about a tenth of Stern’s $250,000 asking price since it formed in October.
Their plight has drawn statewide attention, including from the Washington Newspaper Publishers’ Association, which has stepped in to help with negotiations.
“It was too important to me, personally and in my role, but also to the La Conner community to keep the newspaper publishing,” said Ellen Hiatt, Washington Newspaper Publishers’ Association’s executive director. “I think the community group just didn’t have time to pull it together.”
Negotiations
The two groups, along with a retired publisher and newspaper broker, met with Stern late last week to try to buy more time. Those who attended expressed varying degrees of optimism.
“We felt we made a fair offer — basically, the idea is we need more time,” said La Conner Community News President Andrew Ashmore. “I’m optimistic, but he can always say no, or who knows what he’ll say.”
Ashmore declined to name a dollar amount but said they discussed a March 31 deadline for purchase. Stern also expressed willingness to help with the transition until then if the group can raise enough money.
“The negotiations were fruitful and they’re entering into a process of attempting to finalize a deal that keeps the community newspaper in La Conner,” Hiatt said. “It’s not a done deal. There’s work to be done.”
Stern confirmed the two parties have not yet come to an official agreement, adding that the price the nonprofit offered was too low. He also declined to name how much he’d be willing to accept but said he was negotiating from his $250,000 asking price.
“I wish I was more hopeful — no more than 50-50,” Stern said of the paper’s chances of survival. “It’s very exciting and hopeful that people in the community want to see their local newspaper continue. And I am very appreciative of all the efforts everyone is making to make that a realization. …I certainly don’t want it to end, and I’m hoping for the best, but I’m preparing to wrap things up because I need closure.”
Stern said he intends to run his final edition on Wednesday and then take some time off for the holidays. Without a written agreement, he worries the process will be dragged out beyond March.
“But certainly by either side of Christmas, they have to be clear that they can raise funding that matches the worth of the paper,” he said.
A plan moving forward
Ashmore said the La Conner Community News nonprofit has raised about $30,000 so far. That money has come from about 15-20 individual donors, he said, all from individuals in town and surrounding communities in the Skagit Valley.
“There has been fairly good support. It’s been a very, very short amount of time and not really much of a fundraising campaign,” he said. “Now we’ve got three months to go out — if Ken agrees — and really hit the streets and put forward a real fundraising campaign.”
There is also talk of former journalist Kari Mar coming on as the paper’s publisher, according to Ashmore. Mar worked for the Bellingham Herald and the Seattle Times in the 2000s and multiple digital marketing gigs since then, according to her LinkedIn profile. She did not respond to Salish Current’s request for comment.
Ashmore also hopes the paper’s current staff will stay on as well, although he’s unsure of many of their plans since Stern had already announced the Dec. 18 closure. Even with the current staff, that would still leave some vacancies for roles like sales manager and bookkeeper — jobs Stern currently does on his own.
Ashmore said that if successful, the nonprofit hopes to keep the paper running as is with some enhancements. That would mean keeping both the print version and the website. Some of the motivation to continue print subscriptions comes from what Ashmore called a “substantial” amount of revenue from legal notices in the paper.
While the two groups attempt to hammer out the agreement, however, there are looming consequences of the paper’s closure.
“I’m worried. It’s a subscription newspaper,” Stern said. “Subscriptions expire. If people don’t get the newspaper for a couple weeks, they might not renew their subscriptions.”
Hiatt added that the loss of the paper would leave a hole in the community.
“The La Conner Weekly News has been an excellent example of the kind of journalism that is engaged in their community and in their government processes,” she said. “To lose any newspaper leaves a void of oversight and accountability, and it is crucial that we keep our newspapers publishing in this state and I’m committed to that.”
— By Sydnee Chapman