I testified today at the Senate Ways and Means Committee hearing on SB5199, a bill to provide funding for Local Journalism co-sponsored by our own Senator Karen Keiser.
You can read more on the issue here… https://www.seattletimes.com/opinion/promising-proposals-in-wa-legislature-aim-to-help-journalism-crisis/
As some of you know, developing an ongoing reporting beat here has been a passion of mine for quite some time. We haven’t had anything like that now for about a decade and without context, even the most well-informed voters struggle to understand what’s really going on. The more I do whatever this is, the more I’m coming to believe that a good (emphasis on the ‘good’) reporter would be -the- single biggest improvement to local government that could ever happen.
SB5199 is not a panacea. It may not provide immediate help for Des Moines. But… ya gotta start somewhere. 🙂
I hope you will watch and provide your own support (you can fill out a form by clicking on the link in the video for SB5199–the WA LEG web site is way-cool like that.)
Testimony
I want to thank you for the opportunity to speak today. Des Moines is a relatively small town, 33 thousand people. But, We are playing with real money and we have a complexity similar to that of cities several times our size. We didn’t know it, but we had a couple of very good local newspapers for almost 50 years until about 2012.
It is striking to me, looking back how little effort it took to prevent an awful lot of bad things from happening. All that was needed was to have somebody actually on the ground here, a true beat reporter, to provide some context for voters.Didn’t take much at all.
And at the risk of sounding like I want to hijack this, i would also ask you to consider at some point, providing funds to scan those 50 years of print copies.
It is always eye opening for our residents to see even some small sense of history–even from 10 15 years ago. Once people have some context on people and events they make better decisions in the now.
I strongly support this legislation and anything that provides context to voters, both with current journalism and in providing an understanding of how we got to these decision points.
Thank you.