With the search on for a new editor-in-chief, Cascadia Daily is pressing on with plans to build revenue through a new quarterly magazine.
The firing of Cascadia Daily News Executive Director Ron Judd was a shocking development to many in the local media landscape and community.
Judd was fired May 26 after being summoned to Cascadia Daily News owner David Syre’s home for a meeting, Judd told Salish Current in a phone interview.
After being told he’d no longer be working for the company, Judd drove directly back to the CDN newsroom to find he’d already been locked out of his work computer and company email account, he said. He then called a staff meeting to break the news of his firing.
“I thought that would probably be my only chance to talk to them,” Judd said. “People were shocked and very upset. It was emotional. The whole thing was very emotional.”
In a Facebook post, Judd said his firing was due to “irreconcilable differences with ownership.” In a CDN article, Publisher Cynthia Pope said the company fired Judd because he didn’t see its new magazine, Cascadia Daily Life, as a “significant editorial product.”
When asked if the decision to move on from Judd was a sudden or thought-out decision, Pope told Salish Current she couldn’t speak on Syre’s behalf. Syre, she added, was not available for comment on the matter.
Judd also declined to comment when asked to elaborate on concerns about the new magazine, but said disagreements between the news and business sides of a media company are commonplace throughout the industry.
“It’s part of the nature of the beast,” he said. “And that’s healthy, in some ways. In those kinds of disagreements, when we’ve had them, I have always leaned heavily on the side of ‘our core product is our mission here.’”
Judd said he wasn’t opposed to a company having other products, and he understands the need for modern media companies to be diverse. The mission of CDN, he said, has always been about producing professional, insightful journalism to inform and impact the local community and earn their trust.
Nearly five years in, Judd said he thinks that CDN has done a great job at that so far.
“I have seen a huge change in this community,” he said. “I’ve lived here for 26 years, and the institutions around here do not do things in the same way that they used to, before CDN was here. Because our whole mission was public accountability and doing the kind of complicated reporting work that allows you to show what’s going on behind the scenes and who’s getting paid for being on administrative leave for a year. You look at our impact page: I will forever be proud of that. And it has changed the community.”
Newsroom and community reaction
Judd’s firing leaves current CDN managing editors, Audra Anderson and Jaya Flanary, to perform his duties until a replacement is named.
That replacement will not be known as the executive editor, but as an editor-in-chief of Cascadia Media Company, according to a newly-posted job listing.
Pope told Salish Current that the new position will oversee the editorial calendars of both the magazine and newspaper. The editors of each publication will report to the editor-in-chief, who ultimately reports to the publisher, Pope said.
No additional newsroom changes are planned for CDN, she added, and the paper will continue to provide the same award-winning coverage as it did under Judd’s tenure.
Anderson said the CDN newsroom is hurting emotionally since Judd’s departure. The firing, she wrote in an email, came without any warning to staff.
“Ron was a wonderful mentor,” she wrote. “He took a chance on a lot of us. What he has built here is of incredible value to our community. The newsroom is fervent in our mission, ardent in our ethics and dedicated to continuing the best we can without Ron at the helm. We miss him and are immensely grateful for his leadership over the last four years.”
Flanary, who summed up her thoughts on Judd in a June 1 opinion column for CDN, called Judd the “North Star” of their newsroom.
“I spent some of the most formative years of my life working directly under a man whom I quickly came to respect as a journalist, a mentor and eventually, a best friend,” she wrote. “During his time at CDN, I learned nearly everything I know about being a good journalist from him.”
The newsroom awarded Judd its “Plucky Duck Award” on May 29 — a wooden figurine of a duck in red boots given to the team’s most valuable team member at the end of staff meetings, Flanary wrote. She later dropped the figurine at his house along with two copies of the May 29 newspaper.
Online, social media accounts expressed a wide range of opinions, but many seemed to view Judd’s firing as a mistake. Several people said they were even considering cancelling their CDN subscriptions as a result.
Judd said doing so is a personal decision for each community member, but he hopes the community will continue to support CDN’s newsroom and the work they do.
“The people that are there now are just super, super talented, and qualified and dedicated,” he said. “They’re every bit as dedicated as I was to (CDN’s) original mission.”
The path ahead
Cascadia Daily Life, the company’s new magazine, is an “invitation to experience and celebrate the beauty, culture and community that is daily life in our corner of the Pacific Northwest,” according to its mission statement.
Having released its first issue in May, Pope said a second issue will be out in October, before the magazine goes quarterly in 2027. The eventual hope, she added, is to make the magazine monthly.
Pope said the publication is meant to expand Cascadia Media Company’s coverage of the area known as Cascadia, which technically extends well beyond the borders of Whatcom and Skagit counties.
“That’s difficult to do with a newspaper that is devoted to breaking news and government coverage,” she said. “So, we decided to launch the (CDL) magazine so that we’d have a broader reach.”
The hope is that the magazine will provide greater reach for both its advertisers and writers, Pope added. The magazine also hopes, of course, to be profitable, allowing the company to reinvest profits towards CDN, which still relies on capital contributions from Syre nearly five years in.
“We are not yet profitable,” Pope said of CDN. “But we’re certainly in way better shape than when we started.”
The first CDL issue was mainly written by freelancers, as well a few CDN reporters. Articles in the magazine will provide newsroom staff with additional bylines and pay and will not be required.
“From my point of view, this is an opportunity for our reporters to write a different kind of story and do a different kind of reporting from their hard news reporting that they do on a daily basis,” she said.
Pope also expressed hope that CDL can complement the existing Bellingham Alive magazine instead of competing against it, as CDL will be taking a more long-form and regional focus than Bellingham Alive generally does.
Pope said there are no immediate plans to hire additional staff for either the magazine or newspaper, but CDN hopes to retain health reporter Owen Racer, who is beginning the second year of a two-year contract with Report for America, a national service program made possible by grant funding from a variety of sources.
Any concern the magazine will take away from the newspaper, she said, is unfounded.
“The magazine is meant to complement the newspaper, not replace it,” Pope said. “It’s editorial content being published under the same ethical standards we use for the newspaper, but it’s a different kind of content and is not intended to compete with the newspaper.”
And what’s next for Judd? He’s unsure but said he has options.
“I’m not one to just sit around and not do anything,” Judd said. “I’m not ready to retire yet, obviously.”
In the meantime, he is taking stock of how far CDN has come, with the hope that it maintains its momentum without him.
“I’m tremendously proud of what I did (at CDN),” Judd said. “I could not have had a better experience and worked with better people in the newsroom. It’s really enriched my whole life, and I hope, everybody else’s, too.”
—By Matt Benoit