Yellow Pages
Newspapers are where they don’t want to be — beneath grim headlines in their own pages — as they struggle to find a business model suitable for the digital age and a faltering economy.
Recent articles detailed the final printing of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and, in Denver, the Rocky Mountain News. Here in Skagit County, however, the Skagit Valley Herald continues on every day, printed on a brand new press, after 125 years in business.
In the midst of major news industry changes and the Skagit Valley Herald’s birthday celebration, fans and critics shared their thoughts about their local newspaper.
The paper connects readers to their neighbors, their leaders, their high school alma maters and their world, some lauded. Others charged the paper can be too liberal, too biased and too small.
“I like Pearls Before Swine,” 22-year-old Cyrena Gilpatrick, who owns the Same Ol’ Grind coffee shop in downtown Mount Vernon, said of the Skagit Valley Herald comic as she prepared an espresso.
Gilpatrick, who lives in Anacortes, grew up with the paper and still reads it every day. She likes the local news and the crossword puzzle. In elementary school, she wrote a letter to the editor criticizing a change in school boundaries that sent her best friend to a new school.
Nearby, business owner Fred Lee, 65, said he too reads the paper every day and has since he was old enough to read.
It’s the sports page that Lee, who covers high school basketball games for local radio stations, grabs first.
“I like Francis, and I like Pyle,” said Lee, referring to Skagit Valley Herald sports writers Eric Francis and Trevor Pyle.
He’s read a lot of sports reports and other news in the paper over the years, but these days, he said there seems to be less in it. “I think it is smaller,” he said, noting the Skagit Valley Herald’s shrinking paper size and decreased number of sections.
Linda Larrabbee is a teacher at the Burlington-Edison North Program, an alternative high school, and the buzz about newspaper failures worries her.
“I am just so nervous about not having access to the newspaper,” said Larrabee, who uses the Skagit Valley Herald in her contemporary world problems class most days. “It is really fun to watch kids who haven’t really used the newspaper in their lives come in in the morning and grab the newspaper and tell me what is happening.”
“They really kept abreast of the Zamora case and also of the puppies. ... Anything to do with Obama,” Larrabee said, referring to murder defendant Isaac Zamora, the dogs seized in January from a Skagit County breeding kennel and the coverage of President Barack Obama’s historic victory.
Sedro-Woolley Mayor Mike Anderson does not share Larrabee’s enthusiasm for the Skagit Valley Herald.
“I was just amazed by how biased the paper became,” Anderson said of the paper’s coverage of Deluxe Recycling and Disposal’s bid to build a refuse facility in his town.
“They didn’t hear my side of the story, or Eron Berg’s.”
Anderson said he and Berg, the city’s supervisor and attorney, canceled their subscriptions after reading coverage of Deluxe’s proposal. Both men said they told the reporters repeatedly that they were powerless to stop Deluxe from coming to town and that the city had to rely on existing code when reviewing the proposal.
“I am not a bad guy, and Eron is not a bad guy. We are not crooks,” said Anderson, who faced a resident-initiated recall petition during the Deluxe controversy.
U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen, a Democrat from the 2nd Congressional District, said he likes to have the newspaper peering over his shoulder.
“From my first day in Congress, the Skagit Valley Herald has been there every step of the way, asking tough questions on everything from meth labs to earmarks to flood control,” Larsen wrote in a statement.
“The Skagit Valley Herald performs a true public service by reporting on why what happens in the other Washington makes a difference here in Washington state,” he wrote.
* 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
Family’s newspaper lineage dates back to E.W. Scripps in 1878
Longtime carrier learned about dependability
Back in time, A look at some notable businesses of yesteryear
Company ‘lifer’ never planned to stay long
Newspapers provide link to past, present and future for local woman
