Given global events, it’s unlikely most folks will look back at 2024 with fond memories. Allow me to wear the (ill-fitting) Minister of Optimism Hat to note one anomaly: It was a great year for local journalism in Northwest Washington, no longer a pending news desert.
It was 12 months of quiet but extensive growth at the local Cascadia Daily News, which effectively doubled its output of published journalism, both fun and deadly serious, in the past year. Here’s a very select few highlights of our most-impactful coverage from our third full year:
Accountability journalism is job one
Our reporters launched 2024 by following up their previous blanket coverage of the tragic, fatal Terminal Building fire in Fairhaven with award-winning reporting about city fire codes, raising public-safety questions that remain largely unanswered.
We followed that work with a deep, multi-part investigation of personnel practices in Whatcom County government after a Cascade PBS/Crosscut story revealed what amounted to a large, undisclosed payout over a sexual harassment claim from late 2023. Results of a county investigation into its own HR practices, spurred largely by our reporting, are still pending.
Our accountability journalism also became a more daily focus of all of our extensive work covering local government. We’ve been carefully watching and evaluating initiatives of newly elected Mayor Kim Lund to tackle city issues such as homelessness, the housing crisis, addiction and public-health issues, and other vital social needs. And we’re looking at leadership in Whatcom County government in general with a more focused eye.
The same applies to the Port of Bellingham, a local institution with a big role but little intense media scrutiny over the past two decades. CDN, led by versatile reporter Annie Todd, dramatically upped its coverage of the port as a regular beat. That process continues into 2025, with a sharper focus on leadership at the port, whose hands stir many vital local pots — Bellingham International Airport, anyone? (And speaking of the port, small p, CDN also completed a comprehensive look at Bellingham’s waterfront past and future, produced largely through the words and images of visual journalist Hailey Hoffman.)
Todd is taking the same enterprising approach to covering Whatcom and Skagit counties’ courts and our criminal justice systems.
Urban challenges
We led the way locally in serious reporting about the ongoing struggle to preserve downtown Bellingham as a safe, appealing, functional civic center amid the seemingly intractable problems of homelessness, substance abuse, crime and other common urban maladies. CDN’s reporters were the only local journalists to examine city actions on an ongoing, firsthand basis, working in the trenches alongside professionals who confront these problems every day.
Nonprofit scrutiny
CDN reporters launched a long-term commitment to peel back layers of Northwest Washington’s important nonprofit organizations, many of which receive regular allotments of public funds, mostly without much public scrutiny.
A standout example was the deeply reported examination of a legacy of troubles surrounding charismatic Northwest Youth Services leader Jason McGill, who resigned from the nonprofit in the fall, followed by the board president. I believe those stories, written after many months of work by investigative reporter Isaac Stone Simonelli, with a hand from numerous other CDN staffers, set a new local standard for careful, fair, contextual reporting. It’s the kind of work that can only be accomplished by a well-staffed, professional newsroom — illustrating the value an independent news organization brings to a community beyond clickbait and cut/paste headlines common in the broader industry.
Rural life
At year’s end, CDN made a new commitment to coverage of local government, civic issues and lifestyles of the rural communities in Whatcom and Skagit counties. We now have a reporter, Murrow Fellow Sophia Gates, devoted primarily to that task, including what’s likely to be longstanding reporting of the now-launched legal process to determine who gets rights to water, and how much, in the Nooksack River Basin. We’re also planning an enhanced focus on the two counties’ agricultural future this year.
Breaking news
Last year’s addition of reporter Todd also gave a huge boost to our ability to produce even more timely breaking news.
Again going beyond common norms, CDN’s reporters verify reported breaking news before publication, and endeavor to follow up breaking news with additional reporting that puts it in context — with standards that likely differ from other news outlets. We’re planning new ways to get this news to you even more quickly in 2025.
Business
CDN’s intrepid business contributor, Frank Catalano, along with other CDN staff, continued to provide NW Washington’s most intuitive business coverage, with deeply reported pieces on local institutions, business leaders, trends and openings and closings. Our business coverage will expand in 2025 to produce more reporting on business issues likely to arise from policies of the incoming Trump administration.
Election coverage grows
CDN’s award-winning Citizens Agenda reader-powered election coverage continued to grow, both in scope and reader participation, in 2024. We expanded our free coverage to include all of Skagit County, and along with local news site Salish Current participated in a statewide voter guide project managed by Seattle-based Crosscut/PBS.
CDN’s entire staff hit the road to cap off the historic Nov. 5, 2024 election with a real-time, comprehensive reporting project, “Turning Point.”
The environment
CDN continued its in-depth coverage of environmental issues, from controversies over logging-derived school funds to land use in the Skagit Valley, ongoing controversies about agritourism, battery farms and gravel mines, and other subjects, often steering into explanatory work in broader subjects such as our energy grid.
CDN was one of only 20 news outlets in the U.S. to be awarded an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Mass Media fellow, Ben Long, who reported popular stories on the area’s urban deer challenge, food forests and cleanup efforts of Bellingham Bay.
Intrepid general assignment reporter Julia Tellman, another 2024 newcomer, explored land-use issues in reader-friendly ways and took readers deep inside the often-confusing world of recycling via “Diverted,” a series smartly illustrated by visual journalist Finn Wendt.
Lifestyle and Sports/Rec coverage matures
All that news coverage made it easy to miss CDN’s ongoing transformation of its approach to lifestyle coverage, spearheaded by another newcomer. Lifestyle Editor Cocoa Laney spent the year expanding our features coverage and incorporating it more fully into our general news offerings. Through highly popular series such as “Made in Cascadia,” innovative local living arrangements and classic profiles, Laney’s talents as an evocative writer and photographer have enhanced CDN’s Living section on multiple fronts.
At the same time, CDN’s sports/rec offerings underwent a transition to a new master of ceremonies, the enterprising Nicholas Zeller-Singh, who smoothly adapted to our mix of professional-quality coverage of local prep sports and passion for outdoor recreation. That passion was evident in columns by our popular outdoor columnists, including the award-winning work of Bellingham native Kayla Heidenrich, and steady contributions from ace freelancer Elliott Almond, who also explored other complicated subjects in our pages in unique fashion. We also beefed up our coverage of Western Washington University sports with the introduction of the weekly Western Notebook.
This year, our “rec” coverage expanded to inside spaces in a series documenting the longstanding lack of indoor rec facilities in our midst. CDN’s Charlotte Alden and Wendt toured our region to take a peek inside the doors at successful indoor recreation facilities from Vancouver, British Columbia to Snohomish — providing a road map, of sorts, for an active group of citizens and city officials planning new facilities in our hometown of Bellingham.
We’re not finished!
We’re proud of all these 2024 accomplishments but I consider them just a new base upon which to build more, better local journalism. Part of that challenge is adapting CDN’s business model to make our publications increasingly self-sustaining — something critical to our long-term survival. We’ve found programs that help fund newsroom reporting positions.
We were thrilled to be awarded last month a two-year reporter from the Report for America program. That reporter, still being sought, will cover public health and health care in Whatcom and Skagit counties — a longstanding reporting need in our region. The latter position is partially funded by RFA funds, but half of the reporter’s salary also will rely on community donations to support the work; watch for opportunities to participate in that effort soon.
We’re immensely proud of how far we’ve come in only three years, but we’re also not prepared to cruise and rest. Many exciting 2025 innovations are being planned, including additional audio/video features, refocused social media and newsletter offerings, and a regular series of community town halls following on the heels of our well-received forum on fascism with travel expert Rick Steves in October 2024.
And, thanks to reader feedback, we’ll be showing off some tweaks to our popular Friday print newspaper at the end of this month.
Watch for more information on all this soon. Thanks, as always, for making it all possible by subscribing to and supporting your fiercely independent local news crew.
Ron Judd's column appears weekly; ronjudd@cascadiadaily.com; @roncjudd.
County growth plan must protect farming