Editorial: Hope flickers to ‘irrigate’ the state’s news deserts

Published 1:30 am Saturday, February 28, 2026

“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter, but I should mean that every man should receive those papers & be capable of reading them.”

— Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to Edward Carrington

Jefferson’s letter to Carrington, a fellow Virginian and an officer in the Continental Army, written in January 1787, a few months before work began on the U.S. Constitution, spoke to what Jefferson and others of the Framers would establish as a key right in the First Amendment and its necessity in informing and guiding the new nation.

Nearly 240 years later, Jefferson might not have imagined that the nation might actually be edging closer to the former, government without newspapers.

A parched landscape: News deserts — whole counties and regions of the nation without a local source of news and information — have grown over the last 20 years, according to Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. Almost 40 percent of all local U.S. newspapers have vanished in that time, leaving 50 million Americans with limited or no access to a reliable source of local and regional news. And the newsrooms that remain — at newspapers, online publications and radio and TV stations — have seen devastating cuts that have laid off experienced journalists and diminished their ability to cover their communities.

A report last March by Washington State University’s Edward R Murrow School of Communication provided a look at the state of journalism focused on Washington. Its researchers identified nearly 1,100 news outlets in the state, but determined that only 353 of them — less than a third — consistently produced locally relevant news. Of the state’s 39 counties, 12 of them had two or fewer such sources of news; while two had no local news source. And 25 of the 39 counties fell below the state average for news outlets per capita.

Time to water: Notable efforts in recent years have looked to build a irrigation system to hold back those deserts, providing support to existing publications.

Report for America, a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms, has since 2019 helped fund the salaries of 17 reporters in the state for two-year periods, including at The Herald, splitting those expenses with the publications.

In the same vein, WSU’s Murrow School has also placed young journalists in newsrooms across the state. Starting with $2.4 million in funding from the state Legislature, the Murrow News Fellowship has since 2024 fully funded two-year fellowships for 16 journalists, at publications, large and small, including The News-Tribune, The Spokesman-Review, Washington State Standard, KNKX-FM, Cascade PBS, TVW and even at The Newport Miner, a weekly paper in the state’s far northeast corner.

In the fellowship’s two years, its journalists have produced an average of 30 stories a week for 22 news organizations, although their reach has been even broader as those stories are made available to all news outlets. The Herald, for example, published a two-part series by WSU fellow Nate Sanford, writing for KNKX and Cascade PBS, in August that detailed how the cities of Everett and Bellingham were using AI chatbots for a range of tasks.

Those selected for the program, for the most part covid-era journalism graduates, were welcomed by their newsrooms and quickly produced high-quality journalism, said Jody Brannon, director of the Murrow Fellowship and a veteran journalist who has worked for state and national publications.

“I’m pleased that our program recruited a lot of all-stars who have made an impact,” she said. “They accepted the challenge and have proven that their stories matter.”

For those 16 journalists, however, their two-year fellowships have now concluded or will wrap up later this year, along with the salaries that the program provided. It will be up to their publications or others to keep them on. That was as intended by the program, with a new cohort of fellows expected to be selected and again sent out to publications throughout the state.

Fallow fellowship? But more fellows might not follow, as the Murrow Fellowship may not be able to count on continued funding from the state, as state lawmakers continue to work to fill a substantial budget gap this session and funding requests mount from a range of reasonable and necessary programs.

Another potential source of funding has also likely foundered this session. Senate Bill 5400, sponsored by state Sen. Mark Liias, D-Edmonds, and first proposed last year, would have provided an expanded and sustainable funding source for local journalism in the state.

The legislation would have established a business and occupation tax surcharge of 1.22 percent on social media platforms and search engines with revenues of $5 million or more — huge tech companies that benefit from their use of locally produced content for which no compensation is provided to publications — to fund a grant program to support employment of journalists at local newspapers and online and broadcast outlets covering civic affairs throughout the state and in under-served communities. An amendment this year would have extended funding to the Murrow program.

The legislation, however, while given a public hearing this year before the Senate’s Ways and Means Committee, has not advanced as the end of the session approaches in less than two weeks. Liias, speaking to reporters and editors last week, said the legislation has gained the support of more lawmakers this year, and he is committed to working for its passage in coming sessions.

The stalled legislation has been a disappointment for Brannon and others, especially following the success of what the Murrow program has produced in its two years and in the hopes for its expansion.

“I will tell you, as impactful as our fellows have been, one reporter in each of these communities has not been enough,” she said.

Joining forces: With or without state funding, however, the irrigation might continue with plans for expansion announced earlier this month that WSU will team up with Report for America to expand the program to place a reporter in each of the state’s 39 counties by 2029, starting with a cohort of 13 journalists beginning in 2027.

The program will rely on philanthropy, working to build a $10 million fund over five years for its support, WSU announced earlier this month.

But the drive demonstrated by the Murrow Fellowship and Report for America to continue and expand its “irrigation” should not be accepted by lawmakers as an excuse to move on to other concerns. There remains a duty for state lawmakers to ensure the sustainability of journalism here with a reasonable tax paid by the likes of Google, Meta and others to help support the news and information that they now aggregate — assisted by voracious AI engines — for their own use and profit.

Without it we step still closer to Jefferson’s fear of the former.