Fog, Floods and the Vanishing Newsrooms of Northwest Washington
2025 was an extraordinary year for local journalism in Northwest Washington — and a devastating one.
In La Conner, we did something rare: we launched a weekly newspaper only weeks after its predecessor closed its doors. We rebuilt it and recommitted it to the town at a moment when most communities are quietly losing theirs.
But just up the road, and across the county lines, the picture is much bleaker.
The Concrete Herald spent the entire year up for sale. Its owner, Jason Miller, received offers — but none that allowed him to let go. As of today, he still owns it, and its future remains uncertain.
In February, the Lynden Tribune shut down its printing press, the last press of its kind in Whatcom County. The press printed not just the Tribune, but the Ferndale Record, the Sudden Valley News, and outside publications from across the region. Now, those papers are printed elsewhere if they are printed at all. The Ferndale Record, once its own paper with its own website, has been folded into the Lynden Tribune. Its standalone digital presence is gone, now a subsite under another community’s banner.
And in the foggy border towns — Point Roberts, Blaine, Semiahmoo, Birch Bay — the longtime owners of the Northern Light and All Point Bulletin put their papers up for sale after four decades of service. They got two offers; one with unacceptable terms and one that raised concerns about the quality of journalism that would be produced under the brand they so carefully built. They are now donating the assets to a nonprofit, hoping they can keep the lights on.
It is starting to feel like a desert along the Cascade coast. A quiet one. The kind you don’t notice until you’re thirsty.
Journalism as Emergency Infrastructure
If anyone still believes local journalism is optional — nice to have, but not essential —I invite them to spend a winter here.
When the atmospheric river arrived in my soggy corner of Northwest Washington, I pulled on my rain boots without thinking. I’ve covered weather here for ages. I know what a flood day looks like for a reporter: it starts early, ends late, and is spent chasing officials, checking roads, tracking rivers and translating bureaucratic language into something residents can act on.
La Conner sits in a perfect storm of informational need.
To the west: the Swinomish Channel, where saltwater floods downtown wooden buildings when barometric pressure drops and tides run high.
To the north, east and south: farmland — subtidal farmland — kept from flooding only by an intricate, century-old system of dikes and drainage ditches. When heavy rains fall, standing water forms quickly. If the Skagit River swells beyond its banks and those dikes fail, fresh river water pours toward town from the opposite direction.
That happened in 1990. The entire town was evacuated.
This storm was forecast to be historic. Tides high enough to flood downtown. River levels threatening the dikes. A scenario where La Conner could flood from every direction at once.
And it became a flashpoint — not just for weather, but for what happens when the public’s lost habit of reading local news collides with local government’s inability to fill the information gap.
The Information Vacuum
I reported around the clock.
I gathered updates from the town, the county, and the state. I published everything I could verify in real time. The Town of La Conner was an incredible partner, briefing me several times a day so information stayed current and organized.
Then the state issued an evacuation order — including La Conner, which was still dry.
Confusion exploded.
On Facebook and Nextdoor, residents posted desperate questions:
Which roads are washed out?
Can we get to groceries in Burlington?
Should we pack up and leave?
If we leave, how do we get out?
Where is the latest information?
Some people came to our website. Traffic more than doubled during those weeks.
Many didn’t. They shouted questions into the void, asking Facebook to answer them. They didn’t know where to go.
The town scrambled to put up an information page — basic, but something I could point people to. County emergency management launched a site with excellent guidance on evacuations, livestock, equipment, and shelters — when it worked. It didn’t for the first 24 critical hours.
People stopped me on the street.
“What’s happening?”
“Should we evacuate?”
My photographer Nancy, reporter Luisa and I knocked on doors. We demanded updates. We published them immediately. We worked wet, tired and relentless.
This is what local journalism looks like when it matters.
When Trust Breaks Down
Something else surfaced during the storm, too.
I watched a Facebook livestream from a dike district meeting. A viewer asked for information in Spanish. Other viewers told them — repeatedly — to “learn English.”
In a crisis.
For the first time in my career here, I identified myself to a farmer and he walked away from me, slogging through the mud to make his point: he had no use for “the media.”
A week later, a woman posted on Nextdoor about how impossible it had been to find information during the storm. When I suggested my newspaper — or any newspaper — she snapped, “Not relevant.”
She needed the information when it was happening.
Exactly.
We had it.
What Happens Next?
This is what our work is for.
Newspapers are local institutions not because they print paper, but because they know where to go, who to ask, and how to demand answers when it matters most. We translate evacuation orders. We pressure officials. We show up soaked and persistent and accountable to the people who live here.
So I look north — to Concrete, to Birch Bay, to Blaine, to Ferndale — and I wonder:
What happens when the next big storm comes and there is no trustworthy, sopping-wet reporter knocking on doors, gathering details and helping families understand what to do with an evacuation order?
Facebook did not serve that information this time. It won’t next time, either.
La Conner didn’t flood — this time.
The dikes held.
The tides stayed just low enough.
The boardwalk was wet-from-rain, not wet-underwater-wet.
We were lucky.
But luck is not a strategy, and the disappearance of local journalism is not abstract.
It is already happening — quietly, press by press, town by town — out here in the fog.