Newspaper purchase effort falls short

The effort by the La Conner Community News group to purchase the La Conner Weekly News and secure its future into 2025 and beyond appears to have fallen short, but not for lack of effort.

Unless an angel investor comes forward in the next two weeks, the final issue of the La Conner Weekly News under publisher Ken Stern will hit the streets and mailboxes on Dec. 18.

"It's a sad day for La Conner," Mayor Marna Hanneman said. "It takes a village and when something important in the village goes, it leaves a big hole."

Stern told readers that the Weekly News was for sale in an editorial on Aug. 2, 2023.

He was open and honest about his desire to find a new owner, preferably a journalist, so he could retire. He advertised the Weekly News in national and online publications. He pitched his newspaper as a great opportunity for mid-level professional journalists to chart their own success. He sent sales prospectuses to university journalism schools. He recruited and met with some 20 La Conner and area residents in 2023 to explore potential group ownership of the newspaper.

He got a few nibbles, but no serious offers.

June 26, Stern wrote another editorial on the future of the paper on the seventh anniversary of his ownership. He said he wouldn't publish the Weekly News beyond 2024 and set a final issue date of Dec. 18.

Shelter Bay resident Andrew Ashmore was one of a few readers to take the June 26 editorial seriously enough to act.

He and Aven Wright-McIntosh spearheaded a community meeting Sept. 25 that galvanized creation of La Conner Community News and its effort to preserve local news coverage in La Conner.

Stern reminded the 80 or so people who gathered to save Weekly News why he was selling.

"I'm tired. I'm toast. I'm burned to a crisp," he said.

Twenty-one people volunteered to serve on an interim or permanent board or expressed some other interest to preserve the Weekly News beyond 2024.

Board members and Stern met several times to discuss and understand newspaper business operations and staffing and how a group would operate a sole proprietorship. However, the board ran out of time to create a new business plan and raise money to meet Stern's schedule to present a purchase offer.

"It's been difficult to organize a fundraising campaign" in such a short time, Ashmore said. "If we had started a year ago, we could've pulled it off."

La Conner Community News is still getting pledges and donations, Ashmore said, "but not enough to move the needle."

Ashmore stressed how much the community values the Weekly News and specifically Stern's editorial voice. La Conner Community News will "regroup after the holidays" and study options for continuing Stern's La Conner news legacy in some form other than a weekly printed newspaper.

Stern said Adams Publishing Group, owners of the Skagit Valley Herald, Anacortes American, Stanwood-Camano News and about 100 other newspapers across the U.S., has expressed interest in buying the La Conner Weekly News and its property on North Third Street.

Stern has long maintained it is not his responsibility to keep a newspaper open in town.

"Of course I'm disappointed," he said Tuesday. "I am inordinately proud of the quality and the depth of coverage that this newspaper – through the hard work of the staff – has provided the past seven-and-a-half years. Since November 2022, I have reached out to people and editorialized more than once that community ownership was the guaranteed route for continuing the newspaper.

"The newspaper is not distressed. The paper is a success. It is very sad to see it end.

"This odd democracy thing. People are literally watching it dribble away."

Mayor Hanneman echoed the sentiment.

"I kind of equate it to a member of the family. Sometimes, we don't always agree," she said of the town's relationship with the Weekly News. "But in this day and age of social media, we need that check and balance."