SPOKANE — The Cowles family intends to donate The Spokesman-Review to a recently formed Spokane-based community nonprofit organization that plans to continue publishing the newspaper amid the changes and challenges roiling legacy media.
The plan calls for Publisher Stacey Cowles and his family’s Cowles Co. to transfer ownership of the newspaper and award a $2 million matching grant to the nonprofit, called the Comma community journalism lab, which was founded by current Spokesman-Review Executive Editor Rob Curley.
“It’s been a great venture for 132 years, but if you had the chance to extend its viability, as people know and love it, why would you not do that?” Cowles said. He is among the fourth generation of the Cowles family to publish the city’s daily paper.
Cowles will stay involved with the newspaper as a member of Comma’s board of directors. Curley also will serve on the board of 11 and lead the nonprofit as founder and president.
“We firmly believe this is a great plan and the community and Comma have the resources to carry it off,” Cowles said. “Of course, we’re going to be helping to whatever extent we can. We’re super excited to see this go.”
The change will not affect how readers get their newspaper, Curley said. The Spokesman-Review will continue to publish as it does currently: six days a week in print and always online behind a paywall, though stories reported and written by reporters whose positions are funded at least partially by outside grants will remain free.
When the nonprofit reaches its fundraising goal and takes over the newspaper — potentially by mid-summer — readers will be offered subscription plans with different ways to engage with the newspaper content and process.
“We believe a community should own its narrative, and the local newspaper must be created with and for its communities,” Curley said, “especially in today’s climate, that starts with putting power back into the hands of readers and citizens.”
The agreement includes a stipulation that current employees of The Spokesman-Review keep at least the same pay and benefits, Cowles said. He noted there are some details that needs to be ironed out as Comma works to raise the initial $2 million to trigger the Cowles’ $2 million match.
“There won’t be any positions cut as a result of this move, per se,” Cowles said. “But we’re always looking for efficiencies, so we’ll have retirements, we’ll have restructuring, but that won’t be contingent on the nonprofit.”
Comma’s business model, developed with help and guidance from nonprofit consulting firm the Bridgespan Group, calls for donations from individuals and major local companies and institutions such as Avista Corp. or Gonzaga, for example.
Curley said what sets it apart from similar ventures is a hybrid revenue stream called the “Spokane model.” The newspaper would shift from a reliance on advertising and subscription revenue under a for-profit structure to a hybrid model that continues gathering these forms of revenue with added philanthropy.
Conversations around this model have been underway for years as Curley weaved elements of philanthropy through his eight years as editor.
He started fundraising efforts through the Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund, which includes Northwest Passages book club events and collecting corporate sponsors for coverage, such as the annual Difference Makers series.
Last year, the newspaper collected about $300,000 from nonprofit ventures, Cowles said. Now it’s going a step further under a model that could bring in between $800,000 to $3 million each year.
It’s an effort to move from “a community newspaper” to “the community’s newspaper,” Curley said.
Cowles said the newspaper’s focus on a community-style of journalism has better resonated with readers, who felt they were more represented in the stories on the front page. Cowles described the style as “the way of the future.”
“(Curley’s) brand of community journalism is really what has driven this and the response he got when in the first two months, we went from 10 complaint letters to 200 love letters,” Cowles said. “What more do you need to say, ‘Well, this looks like the right formula.’ Then the question is, ‘Well, how can we sustain it over a long, long period?’”
The added revenue stream is necessary to the function of the newspaper as readers know it today, Cowles said. The Spokesman-Review is not immune to woes of the newspaper industry struggling with profitability and survivability.
“We’re losing two newspapers a week across the country. And we have been for three years now. The industry is in a crisis; there’s no question,” Cowles said. “That’s why you’ve got people like us coming up with solutions like this because of necessity. If we don’t figure something out, we’re going to end up on the junk heap.”
It’s the societal shift toward digitization that has made it difficult for most newspapers.
The Spokesman-Review is generating 70% less revenue than it was in 2007, largely due to the shift from print to digital advertising, Cowles said. Revenue from subscriptions isn’t enough to compensate for this drag, even with hikes in subscription fees and value-added pricing for delivery that grew subscription revenue over the past five years, Cowles said, but even that is now leveling off.
“How do we fill the gap if we’re going to stay at some semblance of the size newsroom we have,” Cowles said.
Philanthropy, future Comma executives hope, is how to fill the gap, and for more than just The Spokesman-Review.
“It’s a way for people that are subscribers to grow into being supportive philanthropists within the community,” said Comma principal and board member Scott de Rozic, who has worked with Curley to make Comma ready for the transfer.
Once finalized, Comma’s business plans, financial models, legal documents and other details will be open source, available for the reference of other newspapers, which de Rozic hopes could help keep other publications afloat.
“We also want to deeply inform through sharing and an open source model, all of our learnings here with the rest of the country,” de Rozic said. “Because geographically we know we can’t fix all the problems in the country, but we want the lessons that we learned and invested money in to be available, freely available, for the rest of the industry.”
The decision to transfer Cowles’ family’s long-standing asset wasn’t easy for him or his family, who all weighed in on this deal.
In his sixth-floor office of the iconic Spokesman-Review Tower at the corner at southeast corner of Monroe Street and Riverside Avenue, black-and-white photos of his family offer reassurance.
“I think all my ancestors would agree this is a good move,” Cowles said.
