We’ve now honed an eye for print media on our travels, and in the not-quite-newspaper realm, the Miracle of America Museum Quarterly Newsletter deserves a mention. The Miracle of America Museum in Polson, MT is a shrine to a bygone way of life, an enormous collection of old vehicles, war memorabilia, appliances, products, prints and posters of yore. In the newsletter, the founder, Gil, reports on happenings onsite – donations, snake sightings, school field trips. In keeping with the museum’s nostalgia, the Miracle of America news gives a nod to loyal old print.

In Bellingham, Washington, we found a more modern news scene. The city’s oldest newspaper, the Bellingham Herald, is owned by the McClatchy Company, a conglomerate encompassing 30 publications nationwide. Since McClatchy acquired it in 2006, the Herald has been reduced to a small newsroom. In 2022, the Cascadia Daily News (CDN) came along to fill the void.

“There was a lack of a decent news source here,” CDN Managing Editor Audra Anderson explained simply. The newspaper’s owner, David Syre, recognized a need and recruited veteran Seattle journalist Ron Judd to help lead the cause as executive editor. The team started at eight and has grown to sixteen writers, editors, and photographers, serving 8,000 subscribers. The Cascadia Daily News publishes weekly in print and maintains a daily online presence for its readers.

The road has not been without bumps. Syre is a well-known former businessman and developer in the Bellingham area, known for his real estate and timber company Trillium, and he has largely front-funded the Cascadia Daily News effort thus far.

“We feel like a unicorn in the industry,” Anderson acknowledged. “But David’s not going to be able to fund us forever.”

The Cascadia Daily News is working towards self-sufficiency, applying for grants and taking on reporters from outside organizations, like Report for America. Though Anderson reports that ad sales make up a healthy portion of the revenue, CDN is struggling to turn a profit, creating some friction on the managerial side.

On May 26, Syre fired Judd, sending the CDN newsroom reeling. Anderson was reluctant to discuss the details with us, but she described Judd’s gravitational pull as a leader and mentor.

“We all really respect him and his work,” she said. “It was very jarring and sad.” And it extends beyond the newsroom. She added, “It has caused a lot of upheaval with people who really appreciated Ron in the community.”

The firing has been much-discussed online. A Reddit thread is devoted to it, where several CDN readers have posted to mourn the loss of Judd’s beloved column, some even declaring they’ve canceled their CDN subscriptions. And there is animosity towards Syre, who has earned somewhat of a reputation for bad business in Bellingham. His company Trillium bought up agricultural land at the foot of the Cascade Mountains through the 1980s and 90s to build Bellingham’s mall, resort and community college, and his timber prospects abroad received harsh criticism from environmental activists. Troublesome deals caused him to step down from Trillium in 2007 and he declared bankruptcy in 2011. He has since reemerged as a fine artist, and together with Judd, he struck a business/editorial balance for CDN that lasted four years.

In the first week after Judd’s exit, Anderson recalled a lack of an immediate plan. Ultimately, her team chose to cover the firing as breaking news, assigning the story to Sophia Gates, a CDN reporter funded through the Washington State Murrow Fellowship, rather than Syre himself. Gates reported that the firing was the result of “irreconcilable differences” regarding plans to launch a magazine, one of many ways CDN’s business side hopes to diversify revenue.

Moving forward, Anderson is committed to keeping her editorial side of the CDN team and its ethics separate from the business dealings at the heart of the firing. She’s proud of the hard accountability journalism that has won CDN awards, and confident that Syre’s funding, or lack thereof, won’t compromise it.

“Old models just aren’t going to work anymore,” she said. “I feel like journalism will always exist in some form and I think we just have to find creative ways to keep funding it.”

The Cascadia Daily News is delving into shortform video and longer documentary work – the publication just put out a 40-minute film about a Reservation basketball team on the path to championship victory, facing prejudice and challenging history along the way.

“This is my end-all, be-all,” she said. “Good enterprise journalism. They did such a good job we submitted it to the regional Emmys.”

And while they wait to hear back, the Cascadia Daily News is on the hunt for a new executive editor and that ever-elusive profit margin.