The Seattle Times failed to credit PubliCola’s original reporting on King County Assessor John Arthur Wilson yesterday in a story titled “King County Assessor In Hot Water After Social Media Post.”
The King County Council discussed our reporting yesterday before voting to send a letter to Wilson demanding his resignation in light of new charges against him for allegedly stalking his ex-fiancée, Lee Keller, and violating a restraining order.
On Monday, April 20, PubliCola broke a story about two Instagram and Facebook posts in which Wilson appeared to flippantly celebrate a judge’s decision that he would not have to wear an ankle monitor, overturning an earlier order after Wilson claimed he had to to fully submerge both his legs every day due to a medical condition called lymphedema. The monitor was supposed to ensure Keller knew right away if Wilson came within 1,000 feet of her.
As we reported, both posts showed Wilson, shirtless and smiling at the camera, in a hot tub. The first, posted on Wednesday, April 15—the day the judge lifted the ankle monitor requirement— read, “What a great night to just soak in the tub and let your cares float away.” The second, posted two days later, said, “Great to soak my legs after a productive and successful week.”
Our story circulated widely on social media and was one among the reasons county council members said it was time for Wilson to step down. Prior to voting on the letter Tuesday afternoon, County Councilmembers Sarah Perry and Teresa Mosqueda both cited PubliCola’s coverage directly. “I want to appreciate the reporting from Erica C. Barnett,” Mosqueda said, “in terms of the journalism that was done after that court hearing.”
The Seattle Times reported on that meeting and the social media posts, presenting the news as their own original coverage, last night, and included a screen shot identical to one of the two PubliCola posted on Monday. They did not link PubliCola’s coverage or credit our work, despite the fact that it had been widely circulated and even cited directly in the meeting the Times was covering.
This was not the first, or even the twentieth, time the Seattle Times has failed to credit PubliCola’s original reporting when writing their own followups on stories we broke.
Editorially, the Seattle Times often complains about the demise of local news reporting in areas outside Seattle, focusing exclusively on the closure of small print newspapers. In their own city, however, they seem more than happy to lift smaller outlets’ work—not just from PubliCola but the Urbanist, Capitol Hill Seattle, and many smaller outlets. Editors at the Times, who are ultimately responsible for deciding whether to credit outlets where stories originated, have ignored every request for a link and credit that I’ve ever sent them, demonstrating that they think it’s fine to run roughshod over local reporters in their own backyard.
While it might sound like a small thing—a series of rude social media posts by a local politician is hardly Watergate—the cumulative impact of the Times’ routine failure to credit small outlets like ours is significant. Compared to PubliCola, the Seattle Times is a behemoth, with revenue from ads, sponsorships, foundation grants, and paid subscriptions to both their print paper and their paywalled online content. When the local paper uses PubliCola’s work without credit, our original reporting becomes invisible—Google results promote the bigger outlet, other outlets link to the Times, and before you know it, it’s their story, even when it was our reporting.
This, of course, is the part where I encourage you to support PubliCola, and also all the other scrappy local outlets that are out here busting our asses to report news the big daily paper is more than happy to ignore—or scoop up a day after we publish and present as their own. With rare exceptions, we all see each other as part of an ecosystem, covering stories and neighborhoods that the big daily paper and TV stations ignore. The Seattle Times’ management has shown over and over again that they don’t see itself as part of this same ecosystem, which is a shame. If they’re the only one left standing, think of all the stories that won’t get covered.
After taking office, new City Attorney Erika Evans discovered a backlog of thousands of cases left over from her predecessor, Ann Davison. The reasons for the backlog are complex, but Evans says she’s taking one step she believes will help: Reorganizing the city attorney’s office so that each case is handled by a single attorney from the beginning.
This week’s podcast was all about Mayor Katie Wilson’s plan to add 1,000 shelter beds—primarily by building more, and larger, tiny house villages—before the end of 2026. We talked about what it will mean if Wilson is successful, particularly for those living in tiny houses while they wait for actual housing, which is expensive and challenging to site.
The Seattle Police Department announced a still-unreleased report showing that when its Real Time Crime Center (home to SPD’s controversial surveillance cameras) is involved in a criminal case, SPD is three times as likely to make an arrest. Although SPD framed an increase in arrests as “victims getting justice,” they did not respond to our questions about whether these were justified arrests or if they led to prosecutions or convictions.
Three local right-wing activists (including one, former FOX13 reporter Brandi Kruse, who has posted repeatedly on X, “I am not a journalist”) got big mad when they were denied access to a special press area in the state House chamber. They sued, and are currently losing. The guidelines for press credentials in Olympia are content neutral, but they do require that reporters are primarily engaged in news gathering and not working on behalf of political campaigns or for advocacy groups—a low bar all three activists failed to meet.
KIRO Radio’s “Gee and Ursula” invited guest Angela Rye on their show to attempt to discredit my reporting about staff complaints against the director and deputy director of the city’s Office for Civil Rights. In a 10-minute segment, Rye claimed, inaccurately, that I had written an “unsourced” story with false information as part of a broader effort by Mayor Wilson and her deputy mayor, Brian Surratt, to remove Black leaders and other Bruce Harrell appointees from city departments. (Both Harrell and Wilson, like all mayors, replaced some of their predecessor’s department heads.) This week, KIRO ignored all my efforts to correct the record and explain my reporting process.
During the Downtown Seattle Association’s event celebrating the annual State of Downtown Seattle report yesterday, Mayor Wilson cheerfully defied expectations for political speeches at this glad-handing event—framing a commitment to good government as an explicitly left-wing priority.
Earlier this week, KIRO Radio’s “Gee and Ursula” show had a guest, Angela Rye, who spent most of a ten-minute segment accusing me of fabricating what she called an “unsourced” story on allegations made by city staff about Derrick Wheeler-Smith, the head of the city’s Office for Civil Rights. Rye belittled my work and this site repeatedly, making multiple false claims about my story.
One factual claim—that Mayor Katie Wilson did not put Wheeler-Smith and his deputy, Fahima Mohamed, on administrative leave—merits specific correction. As we reported, Wheeler-Smith has been on family and medical leave to care for his mother; the administrative leave is separate and unrelated.
Additionally, KIRO did not fact check or correct the false claim that Wilson had “been paid, by this gossip blog site, $30,000.” (Rye referred to me as a “gossip blogger” and PubliCola as a “gossip blog” no fewer than nine times—a standard, time-worn term used to dismiss and belittle female journalists and our work.)
As readers know, Wilson was an activist and writer for many years before she decided to run for mayor, and I solicited (and paid for) five pieces from her between 2023 and 2024. The total for those pieces, according to records from my payroll software, Gusto, was $3,900. It appears Rye looked at Wilson’s financial affairs statement and decided to interpret “less than $30,000” (the smallest category) as “$30,000.” The Stranger and the Urbanist also paid Wilson less than $30,000 for period columns in 2024, according to the report.
Here’s an edited version of the two statements I issued after KIRO aired its piece, which it then posted on social media and Youtube with various headlines belittling this website and my work. As of this morning, KIRO as well as the two radio hosts have not responded to any of the posts I have put up on social media, which tagged the hosts as well as the radio station; nor have they responded to comments I have made on the online versions of this segment.
KIRO Radio has still not reached out to me after running a ten-minute segment accusing me of fabricating my heavily reported story about allegations against a city department director by his staff, which their guest called “unsourced.”
They also referred to me as a “gossip blogger” nine times—a misogynistic term used to dismiss female writers since time immemorial. I have been working alongside KIRO Radio’s reporters for 25 years, and their decision to use their massive megaphone to run a 10-minute radio piece trashing me as a person and a journalist is outrageous and unacceptable.
The “Gee and Ursula” show never contacted me about my story before they handed the mic to someone whose apparent goal was to damage my professional reputation as an independent journalist. They have also ignored my comments about this on social media, on which I tagged them repeatedly and offered to come on their show to explain my reporting process for this story, including the reason whistleblowers who fear retaliation routinely speak to reporters on condition of anonymity.
PubliCola, in publication since 2009, is a fraction of the size of an outlet like KIRO Radio, so my ability to defend myself is dwarfed by KIRO’s ability to defame me as a “gossip blogger” and fabulist. It is appalling that this radio show spent ten minutes of airtime trashing me and my work without bothering to contact me or fact-check any of the false claims made about me by their guest, including the bizarre lie that I paid now-Mayor Katie Wilson $30,000.
Instead, they have shown they are proud of this segment by posting it on YouTube, KIRO’s own site, and elsewhere with splashy headlines like “Angela Rye Calls PubliCola Story a ‘Gossip Blog’ Amid Seattle Civil Rights Drama.” Wilson, who was a writer and activist for many years before she was mayor, wrote for me five times over two years, with the last piece in 2024, long before she ran for mayor. I paid her $3,900 total for those five pieces ($500 for one and between $1,000 and $1,200 for the others.)
I remain eager and willing to come on the “Gee and Ursula” show or any other KIRO show to correct the record about my work and explain my reporting process to their listeners. I realize this is less exciting than a personal and professional attack, but I believe any media outlet should be interested in speaking to the people they are talking about—especially when there is an opportunity to correct false claims they, perhaps unwittingly, led their listeners to believe were accurate.
1. The Seattle Police Department announced earlier this month that its Real Time Crime Center, which receives live feeds from dozens of police surveillance cameras trained on neighborhoods across Seattle, “Triples the Odds That a Victim Receives Justice.” That’s a bold claim for an operation that just got access to live surveillance footage late last summer, when the City Council approved the controversial cameras.
SPD, which is pushing Mayor Katie Wilson to expand police cameras into more Seattle neighborhoods, is using stats like this to convince Wilson that the benefits of surveilling Seattle residents outweigh privacy and overpolicing concerns. (And it appears to be working).
But what does a “300 percent increase in victims receiving justice” mean? SPD canceled a scheduled interview with PubliCola seven minutes before it was supposed to happen—according to Mayor Wilson’s office, SPD put out their press release before the mayor’s office had a chance to look at the report—so all we can go on is the scanty data they provided us prior to our scheduled interview.
That data shows that the 300 percent increase represents an uptick in how often a dispatch (such as a 911 call) resulted in an arrest, broken down further into arrests that included violent crimes and those that were primarily property crimes. Overall, 11.7 percent of dispatches that “involved” the RTCC in some way resulted in an arrests, while just 2 percent of dispatches where the center was not involved resulted in an arrest. The data does not show whether arrests resulted in prosecutions, the percentage of arrested people who went to jail, the demographics of arrestees, or how the RTCC was “involved” in the arrests.
Even with the lack of information beyond arrests, it’s important to note that SPD is describing arrests in themselves as a form of justice, when they could just as easily represent the kind of over-policing that often results when police concentrate their energy on specific neighborhoods and communities. As SPD’s blog post noted (in order to make the opposite point), the new cameras are not located randomly; they’re trained on “high-crime” neighborhoods, including Aurora Ave. N and downtown; if the planned expansion moves forward, SPD cameras are also coming to the Central District and Capitol Hill.
SPD’s blog post goes so far as to describe every arrested person as an “offender,” regardless of whether they were ever prosecuted or found guilty of a crime.
Unsurprisingly, the data showed that in general, SPD was more likely to arrest a person for calls that involved a violent rather than a property crime.
2. Yesterday, a US federal district judge ruled that three right-wing activists—Brandi Kruse, Jonathan Choe, and Ari Hoffman—were not entitled to press passes allowing them into the non-public press areas inside the state house and senate. The three had requested day passes from the Washington State Capitol Correspondents’ Association (CC, saying that they were journalists and should be allowed the same access as the rest of the press.
*Except when requesting special access to legislators, apparently
Kruse, a former FOX 13 reporter, has posted over and over (and over) on X, “I am not a journalist.” She frequently speaks at right-wing rallies, including a rally against trans children held at City Hall last year. Choe, a former KOMO reporter, works for Turning Point Media, the campus activism group founded by Charlie Kirk, and the Discovery Institute, the local right-wing think tank that spawned influential MAGA activist Chris Rufo. Hoffman is a onetime City Council candidate who has a talk show on KVI Radio; he also plagiarized PubliCola on at least one occasion, directly stealing quotes and reporting and representing our work as his own.
Both Choe and Kruse recently took part in a cringe-inducing praise circle at the White House, at which Kruse told Trump that supporting him had made her “more attractive.”
The CCA guidelines for press access say, “It is important that a line be established between professional journalism and political or policy work. This is the spirit in which the Legislature has offered access: The press should act as an independent observer and monitor of the proceedings, not an involved party. This means that we cannot endorse offering credentials to one who is part of, or may become involved with, a party, campaign or lobbying organization,” even if that person worked as a journalist in the past.
The judge in the case, David Estudillo, wrote in his ruling that the CCA rules require media to work for an organization “whose principal business is news dissemination” rather than political activities. Although the three activists accused the organization that issues press passes of being biased against them because of their political views, Judge Castillo noted that the legislature has issued badges to media across the political spectrum; the difference in this case, he wrote, was that all three activists’ main job is advocating and speaking on behalf of political campaigns and causes.
As an example, Estudillo noted that Kruse was a listed speaker at a recent rally outside the state Capitol advocating for two anti-trans initiatives targeting children. The first would overturn state legislation designed to protect LGBTQ+ kids from being outed to their parents if they confide in a trusted adult at school; the second would bar trans girls from participating in school sports. Kruse and the other activists were arguing, in essence, that they should be allowed to headline a rally calling for the repeal of state legislation on the Capitol Steps, walk inside, and demand special access to the state legislators they were just rallying against by claiming to be “media.”
A few of PubliCola’s records requests that have been “grouped” by the Seattle Police Department. SPD’s public disclosure unit will not begin (or resume) responding to any of these requests until they’ve completed the one they’re currently working on. We filed that one, for information about SPD’s use of generative AI, in September; so far, we’ve only gotten only a delay notice in response.
SPD has shown they won’t comply with the state Public Records Act on their own. So make them.
Erica C. Barnett
It’s time for the city to audit the Seattle Police Department’s public disclosure office—and, if they ignore the auditor’s recommendations, for incoming Mayor Katie Wilson to force SPD to follow the law.
The state Public Records Act makes it clear that the government’s obligation to disclose information is no trivial responsibility. “The people of this state do not yield their sovereignty to the agencies that serve them,” the PRA says. “The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know. The people insist on remaining informed so that they may maintain control over the instruments that they have created.”
For years, SPD has failed to comply with this bedrock premise. Instead, they’ve evaded disclosure by delaying responses until the records they’ve held back are no longer timely, refusing to work on more than one request at a time, and using the public disclosure process to conceal information that used to be public as a matter of course, including police reports and responses to basic factual questions.
Public disclosure of public information is in everyone’s interest, but for PubliCola and other media outlets, the availability of public records also affects our ability to keep our readers informed. Currently, PubliCola has 10 open records requests with SPD, with the oldest dating back to mid-2023. (We had older unfulfilled requests, but closed them in an effort to triage requests that were still relatively timely).
In all of 2025, SPD provided a single document in response to one of our public disclosure requests—a one-page Excel spreadsheet showing the total compensation for police officers in 2024.
Not only did SPD fail to meaningfully respond to our outstanding requests, they will no longer respond to more than one request at a time from individuals or entities with multiple requests. This practice, known as “grouping,” violates a 2023 agreement between the city and the Seattle Times, which is currently fighting SPD in court to eliminate grouping entirely. It also appears to violate the Public Records Act, which requires agencies to respond to individual requests “promptly,” with specific estimates for the time it will take to respond to each request.
As the Times’ recent motion for summary judgment puts it, “The Grouping Policy denies prompt responses to those disfavored requesters who cannot wait for an old request to slowly emerge from SPD’s backlog before making a new request. … Nothing in the PRA authorizes an agency to choose which requests to process and which ones to leave on a dusty shelf.”
I’ve filed a declaration in support of the Times’ latest lawsuit, describing the ways in which SPD has thwarted PubliCola’s requests for public records and how these actions have affected my ability to keep the public informed about what SPD is up to—from former chief Diaz’ alleged coverup of an unethical affair with a staffer he hired into a specially created position, to the investigation into a police union official who whooped it up over the killing of a pedestrian by a speeding cop. Times reporter Mike Carter’s own declaration shows a similar pattern of selective inaction by SPD—including one request for which he waited 19 months, only to receive the documents unexpectedly because SPD fast-tracked a similar request from a KOMO reporter.
If the Times prevails over SPD, it will directly benefit those in the public and independent press who can’t afford to fight years-long legal battles against the deep-pocketed police department. Meanwhile, though, SPD is still claiming the right to effectively deny records requests by putting them off for years. Earlier this month, the department moved its generic “placeholder date” for PubliCola’s nine inactive “grouped” requests from December 31, 2025 to December 31, 2026. Unless something changes, the remaining unfilled requests will get pushed forward to 2027 at the end of next year.
The single PubliCola records request SPD says it is working on—for information about SPD’s use of generative AI—has already been delayed by three months, until January, and could move again. Until SPD has finished responding to this one request, they will do no work at all on our other nine requests.
Because SPD refuses to process more than one request at a time, I have stopped filing records requests with them. It’s pointless. In effect, their obstructive decisions have succeeded—whether I go through the motions of filing a request or not, SPD will never respond “promptly,” as required by the PRA, or provide the “fullest assistance” the law requires.
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So, in addition to conducting a formal audit, Mayor-elect Wilson should send down legislation to eliminate “grouping,” which has not accomplished its purported goal of weeding out bot requests and those that are excessively burdensome or “extraordinarily broad.” If bots are a problem, separate legislation can address that issue; if a huge number of people are filing harassing or unreasonable requests, the burden should be on SPD to prove this is happening, and to work with the mayor and city council on legislation to address that narrow problem. SPD is currently using city dollars in a legal battle to use “grouping” to conceal public records. It’s long past time (and should not require a lengthy legal battle) to take this tool away from them.
SPD’s lack of compliance with basic public disclosure standards has gotten worse in recent years. But it isn’t new. In 2015, the City Auditor’s Office audited SPD’s public disclosure unit and found serious problems with how the office handles public disclosure requests.
That audit recommended that SPD hire more public disclosure officers, implement a centralized system for managing records requests, and streamline the response process by handling simple requests before more complex ones and prioritizing timely responses. It also recommended some basic best practices—like asking requesters for clarification when necessary and “proactively communicat[ing]” with people who ask for records—something that currently does not happen consistently, if at all.
SPD did not concur with most of the 13 recommendations in the 2015 audit, agreeing explicitly with just two—the recommendation to hire more public disclosure staff, and the one suggesting they set up a new records management system. Over the past 10 years, SPD has added nine new positions to the public disclosure unit to keep up with the increasing pace of requests, up from just five in 2014. That’s a positive step on paper, but it doesn’t actually help if public disclosure officers are steeped in SPD’s current culture of concealment.
Another practice SPD uses to evade public disclosure is expanding the type of records the department refuses to hand over without a public disclosure request.
In the recent past, for instance, SPD put ordinary police reports online as a matter of course—an extension of the department’s earlier practice of printing out copies of police reports and making them available at police precincts. (Yes, you could just walk in to any precinct and grab the day’s police reports!)
Today, police reports are no longer available to the general public through SPD’s website and the reports SPD provides to media (when they choose to do so) consist of heavily redacted and edited “narratives” that omit important information that the public generally has the right to know, such as the names of the officers who respond to calls and write the reports.
Additionally, SPD sometimes refuses to provide police reports, including those cleaned-up narratives, without explanation. Although SPD’s policy manual says explicitly that “Media Representatives May Obtain Copies of Police Reports Through the Public Affairs Unit,” that unit frequently directs PubliCola to file a records request for police reports.
This “file a records request” brushoff applies not just to written reports but to questions of all kinds. If SPD’s communications office—headed, under Police Chief Shon Barnes, by a former corporate PR representative with no prior experience in government—doesn’t want to answer a question, “file a records request” is a polite synonym for “fuck off.” Too far? Not when you consider that even the simplest records requests often take years—if I want to know about a crime that took place downtown last night, the Wilson administration could be halfway over before I find out.
The police, in short, are getting away with refusing to follow the letter and spirit of our state’s strongly worded public disclosure law—a law explicitly designed to ensure that the public has access to information that isn’t mediated and managed by government agencies and their press offices.
SPD has made it very clear that they won’t meet their legal obligation to provide public records unless they’re forced to do so—by legislation, a court order, or a directive from the mayor, who has the ability to fire for reprimand the police chief if his department is failing to comply with expectations.
It’s possible, perhaps even likely, that the Seattle Times will prevail in its current attempt to get SPD to stop grouping records requests, taking away one of the department’s current methods for withholding public documents.
But undoing a culture of obfuscation could require forcing, rather than asking, SPD to meet its obligation to provide records that ultimately belong to us, the public.
An audit laser-focused on these tactics will outline the problem and lay out solutions and a timeline for compliance. Mayor Wilson can then show she’s serious about transparency by requiring SPD to show progress on public disclosure, and holding Chief Barnes directly accountable if his department fails to act. SPD has had plenty of chances (and received plenty of public funding) to fix a broken process. It’s time they face consequences for their inaction.
Cascade Public Media, the Seattle-based PBS affiliate that owns the long-running website Crosscut, is laying off most of its newsroom staff, eliminating 19 local news positions—16 of them filled— just months after finalizing a union contract with newsroom staff.
The cuts mean the end of the road for Crosscut, a nonprofit news website started by Seattle Weekly co-founder David Brewster and two former Weekly editors in 2007. Crosscut merged with the PBS station KCTS 9 and lost its original name in 2024, when both outlets became part of Cascade Public Media.
In an internal email to staff, Cascade CEO Rob Dunlop said the decision to “cease production of our long-form journalism published online” was one of the “hard choices” the nonprofit had to make in response to federal funding cuts for local public media. “Sadly, we are joining public radio and television stations around the country who are making similarly difficult choices,” Dunlop wrote.
According to internal emails, Cascade PBS will “focus going forward” on video, including local series about history, hiking, and food, including Mossback’s Northwest, The Nosh, Nick on the Rocks, Out & Back, and Art by Northwest, and expand its quick-bite video series, The Newsfeed, to five days a week.”
“These are painful decisions to make and none of the impacted team members did anything to bring this about. They have served Cascade PBS and this region with passion and distinction. To the journalists affected, their work has earned much well-deserved recognition that has elevated our mission,” Dunlop wrote.
Dunlop blamed the layoffs on federal funding cuts in July that slashed $3.5 million of the station’s funding, or about 10 percent of its budget 10 . “While we had prepared for this possibility, it is still a significant blow to our organization and to public media nationwide,” he wrote.
Don Wilcox, Cascade’s director of programming, marketing, and communications, told PubliCola that the Trump Administration’s decision to shutter the Corporation for Public Broadcasting “is a seismic event that is reshaping public media nationwide. The permanent loss of more than $3.5 million each year is massive, and it’s forcing us to make difficult choices. We’ve decided the best way forward right now is to focus on the video programming that our communities have relied on for decades.”
Cascade has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from new members since the CPB announcement in July, and still more from current members who’ve increased their giving in response to the federal cuts. Wilcox, echoing Dunlop’s internal email, said Cascade can’t make financial decisions based on the upsurge in individual contributions.
“We know from experience that heightened, crisis-related donation levels are not sustainable, and there is no indication that federal funding will return,” Wilcox said. “It would be irresponsible to deplete our finite resources based on speculation or wishful thinking. This isn’t what any of us wanted, but it’s the most responsible course in the face of drastic cuts and an uncertain future.”
Cascade’s news reporters watchdog City Hall, do lengthy, in-depth investigations, and provide important analysis of what’s happening in state and local politics. It’s the kind of coverage that’s becoming increasingly rare in Seattle’s media ecosystem, which has seen a fair amount of upheaval, including last year’s sale of the Stranger, in recent years. Josh Cohen, Cascade’s city hall reporter, covered news for PubliCola back in the early 2010s, and is a ubiquitous presence City Hall—a welcome face who we hope we’ll see again soon when another publication scoops him up.
The news team at Crosscut recently finalized a contract that included moderate wage increases after stalemating with management for more than a year. Among other wins, the Cascade PBS Union (part of the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild) ensured a minimum starting salary of $67,000 for its unionized newsroom workers and guaranteed that no one in the bargaining unit would make less than $70,000 a year.
Last year, according to Cascade’s IRS filing, Dunlop had total compensation of more than $550,000. In all, Cascade’s nine executive staff made a total of more than $2.2 million.
Wilcox said there are no plans to cut compensation for executive-level staff. “We still need to attract and retain talent to support the success of the operation,” he said.
Courtney Scott, executive officer of the newspaper guild, said the union is “deeply disappointed that Cascade PBS is choosing to eliminate its newsroom and lay off of its reporters at a time when we need good, thoughtful journalism more than ever. We do not yet fully understand why this decision was made and we will be meeting in Cascade PBS executives and management in the coming days to discuss the impact on our union members and the reasoning behinds these decisions.”
Seattle mayoral candidate Katie Wilson, a former Crosscut contributor who wrote an op/ed for PubliCola after Crosscut shut down its opinion page, has floated a democracy voucher-style program to fund local media, including small and nonprofit publications. Mayor Bruce Harrell has ridiculed that idea as “taxpayer funds for online blogs,” and called it an “unachievable goal.”
Wilson said that with the Trump administration “hellbent on dismantling our democratic institutions, this is a terrible time to be losing journalists.
“We desperately need a sustainable funding model for local news, and I believe Seattle can be a leader, Wilson said. “As mayor, I hope to develop such a program to strengthen our local news ecosystem and ensure that everyone has access to the information and analysis needed for a healthy civil society.”
Cascade management held all-staff meeting today at 3:00.
