By a resounding margin, Washington’s Legislature agreed to help sustain the state’s local newspapers.
The state House voted 89-7 to create a decadelong tax break for publishers. The proposal passed the Senate last month with a 47-1 vote.
More than two dozen weeklies and three dailies in Washington closed and remaining newsrooms shrank around 70 percent over the past two decades.
The tax break is one of many steps needed to stabilize and restore the industry, including antitrust enforcement to address unfair competition with tech giants and federal support.
But it will make a significant difference for the state’s remaining newspapers.
“Hopefully it keeps local journalism alive in Washington as long as possible,” said Sen. Mark Mullet, D-Issaquah, who sponsored the measure.
It took two years to get it done. An earlier push by Mullet and state Rep. Gerry Pollet fell short last year. This year the bill was reworked and backed by state Attorney General Bob Ferguson, whose office helped push for its passage.
The bill extends and increases a tax break for newspaper publishers that took effect in 2009 and was going to expire next year. It reduced business and occupation taxes on publishers from 0.484 percent to .35 percent, saving them around $400,000 a year altogether.
Senate Bill 5199 extends the preference for a decade and fully waives the B&O tax on publishers. It’s expected to save the industry, and cost the state, about $1 million a year and potentially $10 million or more over the decade.
Support by Mullet, Pollet, Ferguson and all the other legislators is much appreciated. This will benefit all Washingtonians, whether they read their local paper or not, through the civic engagement and public accountability that local journalism provides.
More state reporters
States Newsroom, a North Carolina-based nonprofit building a national network of statehouse news bureaus, is expanding to Washington.
The organization is launching an Olympia-based outlet in early to mid-May.
States hired a team of four Washington reporters. It will be led by editor Bill Lucia, a former Crosscut reporter who was editing Route Fifty, a state and local government trade news outlet.
“Our goal is to focus even more attention on state government policy and politics and how it affects people’s lives there in Washington,” States president and publisher, Chris Fitzsimon, told me.
Washington will be the 34th state covered by States. It also has partnerships with regional outlets in eight other states and aims to have a presence in all 50 in the first quarter of 2024.
That’s partly backfilling voids created by declining newspapers’ statehouse coverage. The number of full-time statehouse reporters at newspapers fell by one-third over the last decade, according to Pew Research.
Brier Dudley is editor of The Seattle Times Save the Free Press Initiative.
