Yellow Pages
Stedem Wood, publisher of the Skagit Valley Herald, doesn’t buy into that shopworn expression about newspaper people having ink in their blood.
“I think you learn the cliché before you learn there’s anything in there,” he said. “I didn’t figure it out until well later.”
The publisher’s roots — or inky bloodline — start at his mother, Susan Scripps Wood, and ascend to her great-grandfather E.W. Scripps, who published his first newspaper in 1878 and eventually came to own 25 papers. Today, Susan Scripps Wood owns 21 newspapers in five Northwest states, in a group called Pioneer Newspapers.
Stedem Wood was 8 years old when his mother’s family, under the business name Scripps League Newspapers, bought the Skagit Valley Herald and the Anacortes American in 1964. By age 9, he was working in the old office in downtown Mount Vernon, filling soda machines and changing fluorescent light bulbs.
From there, Stedem Wood eventually succeeded his father Leighton Wood as publisher in 1994. In between and since then, the Skagit Valley Herald has grown in leaps and bounds with the communities it covers.
Mount Vernon, a town of less than 8,000 according to the 1960 census, fit the Scripps formula to a tee — a small county seat with a community college and no direct competition for its newspaper.
In 1964, the newspaper had a circulation of less than 5,000. Now it sells more than 17,000 papers, seven days a week.
In the early days, Mount Vernon wasn’t as much of a bedroom community as it is now. There was the commute to Boeing’s factory in Everett after it opened in 1968, but overall, the county’s economy was based much more on farms, fish and trees.
The dynamics among local governments was much the same then as now. The cities fought over businesses looking to locate in the Skagit Valley the way they fight over economic development grants today.
All along, the Skagit Valley Herald’s editorial board promoted cooperation among the cities.
“As a paper, we have looked more at the region benefiting than one particular town,” Stedem Wood said.
As the region grew, so did the family’s business interest in the newspaper. The Woods started Skagit Valley Publishing and acquired the paper outright in 1986. The family credo is local.
* This report is part of a special section celebrating 125 years of news coverage by the Skagit Valley Herald. To see others, click on the headlines below:
Newspapers have become a multiplatform business
Longtime carrier learned about dependability
Back in time, A look at some notable businesses of yesteryear
Company ‘lifer’ never planned to stay long
Readers share opinions of the newspaper, positive and otherwise
Newspapers provide link to past, present and future for local woman
