A newspaper dynasty ends in Spokane, turns to nonprofit

A bold experiment will determine the fate of The Spokesman-Review, a pillar of local journalism in northeastern Washington that’s being donated to a nonprofit startup.

The startup’s founder believes it has the right formula to sustain and grow The Spokesman and potentially other newspapers.

I hope so, and this is better than seeing the paper closed or pillaged by an out-of-state chain.

But I wish it hadn’t come to this and that more, not fewer, daily newspapers were owned by local families with ink in their blood.

The Spokesman is being donated by the Cowles family, ending a 132-year-old newspaper dynasty with family ties to The New York Times and other major publications.

But The Spokesman is now a small part of the Cowles’ conglomerate, which includes real estate, broadcasting and more.

The newspaper is stable and important to the region, according to William “Stacey” Cowles, the current publisher and president of Cowles Company.

But it’s no longer a thriving business under its current model and none of the family’s younger generation was driven to be its next publisher, he said.

“Ultimately the mission is what really matters. That’s what resonates with the company and our family, that drove the decision,” Cowles, 64, said in a phone interview.

Asked if the family all agreed, Cowles, said they were “pretty unified.”

“I would say the older folks were opposed except when they look at what the numbers looked like,” he said. “We’re all in favor of hanging onto the newspaper as long as it makes some money.”

The Spokesman “made a little money in some years and has been break even,” he said.

“I would say we haven’t really lost money except in years like COVID, but this year we’re beginning to see everything slow down a little bit,” he said.

That didn’t entice the next generation.

“Had there been somebody who was desperate to be publisher of a newspaper we may have hung on a little longer … it’s going to be tough, even having philanthropic dollars,” Cowles said.

Currently The Spokesman employs 115 people, including 55 in the newsroom. It prints six days a week and has just under 60,000 paid subscribers. Cowles noted that it employed 750 when he started there 33 years ago.

“We’ve been a victim of Big Tech because … Big Tech takes the headlines and isn’t paying us for them yet,” he said. “But also we’ve leveraged all that digital technology too and we are way more productive than we used to be.”

The Spokesman will be given to Comma, a nonprofit formed in 2022 by Rob Curley, the editor. The deal is expected to be finalized in October.

Curley said he proposed this sort of transition to Cowles when he was hired eight years ago but it took years for all the pieces to come together.

Community response to the announcement is “overwhelming,” he said.

“All of them know they’ve dodged a bullet because our paper wasn’t sold to a hedge fund,” Curley said. “They were always worried that some day the owners of the paper might wake up one morning and not want to run it anymore.”  

In addition to the newspaper, the Cowles family is donating $2 million to the nonprofit, on condition another $2 million can be raised to support it.

Fundraising is now an important part of the local news industry, helping to sustain local coverage as advertising revenue dwindles.

Nonprofits have also become an important segment of the news industry and converting existing outlets to nonprofit ownership is a significant trend. Nonprofits acquired papers in Maine, Georgia, Illinois and Colorado in the last four years. Dailies in Philadelphia, Salt Lake City and Tampa Bay were previously donated to nonprofits.

Even so, aside from standouts with big endowments, it’s early to say the model is more durable than the for-profit approach in place at more than 90% of local news organizations.

Spokane will further test this in a mid-size market. Curley said Comma will share its business plan with other newspapers interested a similar move.

“We want it to be replicable,” he said.

The Cowles family is keeping the paper’s landmark building in Spokane and the printing operation that’s now run as a separate business. It also continues to produce newsprint at a mill. Cowles said it will continue printing the newspaper and probably convert the building to office space.

Spokesman employees are likely to relocate to a building on the campus of Gonzaga University used by Comma. The nonprofit plans to partner with Gonzaga and other schools, potentially involving journalism, business and education students.

Curley is confident The Spokesman will continue and potentially even grow its newsroom despite the lack of a major endowment.

A model developed with consulting firm Bridgespan, and shared by Curley at a conference last October, aims to have the paper remain funded mostly by circulation, advertising and event revenue.

Individual memberships, philanthropy and corporate sponsorship are expected to provide around $2.1 million toward the paper’s roughly $20 million annual budget in 2028, the October presentation said.

Creativity and positioning the paper as a civic resource will help, said Jim Friedlich, CEO of the Lenfest Institute, a Philadelphia nonprofit that advised The Spokesman.

“Making it devoutly local is critical and seeking public support in new and different ways is encouraging,” Friedlich said.

Some nonprofit news outlets are wildly successful, like The Baltimore Banner that started with a $50 million donation in 2022.

But they aren’t immune from the pressures on traditional media, including rising costs, loss of advertising to tech giants and difficulty competing for attention online.

The same day The Spokesman made its announcement, the nonprofit Houston Landing closed after two years despite $20 million in funding.

The Chicago Sun-Times was acquired by a nonprofit public media outlet in 2022 and began cutting 20% of its staff in March after financial challenges. Also in March, the nonprofit that acquired Maine’s largest newspaper group announced it was laying off 49 people and reducing print editions.

Meanwhile most for-profit dailies have turned to philanthropy and community donations to help supplement or sustain their newsrooms, an approach pioneered by The Seattle Times.

There are also hundreds of nonprofit, digital news startups though they’re mostly in big cities and have nowhere near the reach of newspapers. A 2024 tally by Northwestern University’s Medill School found around 5,600 remaining newspapers including 1,033 dailies.

Washington state is an outlier because several of its largest dailies remain independent and family owned. The Spokane experiment may inspire others to follow suit or to batten down the hatches and stay the course.

“It’s a big turning point for Spokane — the Cowles have had that paper forever,” said Ted McGregor Jr., publisher of the Inlander weekly in Spokane.

McGregor said he knows of some nonprofit conversions that worked and some that did not.

“I think those guys are doing what they think is right,” he said. “But I’m a little sad when I see family papers say, well, Google won, let’s go to nonprofit.”