Under the Hood: The Present and Future of the Olympia Newswire

The Olympia Newswire launched out of nowhere just 5 weeks ago, on a shoestring budget and without any formal connection to any of the powers that be in Washington state politics or mainstream journalism.

The Newswire’s journalists come from a variety of backgrounds in Seattle, with experience in daily newspapers, neighborhood newspapers, community radio, alternative newsweeklies, and street newspapers. Its initial funding came in the form of small donations mainly but not entirely from Seattle liberals concerned about housing and human services issues.

Now seems like an important moment to reflect on our accomplishments and our limitations, and to give you, the reader, a preview about our plans for covering the rest of the legislative session and our plans for continuing the Olympia Newswire after the session is over. If you support what we’ve accomplished so far, and our plans for the future, I ask that you donate to support our work (using the button to the right, or by mailing a check to the Olympia Newswire, c/o Real Change, 2129 Second Ave, Seattle WA 98121).

Where We Are: The State of the State
With the Governor, state Senate, and House all having finally introduced their budget proposals, the rest of the legislative session will be dominated by political horse trading over whether to exact $600 million to $1 billion in cuts to government services, and raise a roughly equivalent amount of revenue through new taxes.

And let’s be honest: the fix was in from the beginning, at least in its rough outlines. The Democratic Party leadership has been perfectly clear in its public statements at least since December, 2009 that it was not going to pass an “all-cuts budget.” This meant it was going to raise taxes—or, as they prefer to call it, “revenue.”

Conservatives knew all along that Democrats would raise taxes this session, even as Republican legislators expressed outrage and sought to obstruct the process as best they could. Everyone knew that Democrats planned to repeal part or all of I-960, which required a 2/3 vote by the Legislature to pass tax increases, so that it could “raise revenue” with simple majority votes. Feigning ignorance is mainly a strategy to stoke the sense of outrage among the general public. But you have to mislead the public to produce that outrage, like when Dori Monson told a crowd of thousands at the capitol on President’s Day that the legislature was considering a grand total of $11 billion in tax increases– even though most of these were competing proposals, and it was unlikely the state would raise taxes even 10% that amount.

Meanwhile, liberals knew all along that Democrats would cut more services this session, even while they too have feigned outrage (albeit more mild that conservative outrage, perhaps because conservatives are so powerless this session). Spokespeople for the Rebuilding Our Economic Future Coalition publicly demanded a “no cuts budget”, and a crowd of five thousand chanted “stop the cuts” at a President’s Day rally at the capitol. But the only people I’ve spoken to in the last couple months who actually believed that a no cuts budget was politically possible were sectarian socialists with little knowledge of the legislative process.

People even knew roughly how much the Democrats would raise taxes this session. Liberals thought they’d be lucky to get away with $1 billion in new revenue. Even NPR correspondent Austin Jenkins dismissed calls for more revenue than that as a “liberal pipe-dream.” Most observers similarly have thought it would probably be less, though likely not less than $500 million. Why? Not because the Democratic Party has reached consensus about what kind of programs it considers essential and which are expendable. Not because of polling data. Not because any smaller amount of taxes would appease the anti-tax ideologues. But because $1 billion is a round number.

Such is the state of our leadership in Olympia. Despite the $3.3 billion in cuts already in the 2009-11 biennium budget, to raise more than $1 billion in revenue this session would sound bad… to someone. So battle lines are drawn over whose favorite government program will be thrown under the bus to accommodate this irrational drive to appear “centrist” without defining what centrism means.

In short, much of what takes place in Olympia is a dog and pony show, where public pronouncements and hearings on legislation mask the behind-the-scenes conversations that work out deals whose rough outlines are already known. The transparency of what really happens is, as Michael Reitz wrote for the Newswire, in “short supply.” Amazingly, the Legislature’s meetings are exempt from the state’s Open Public Meetings Act. As the Tacoma News Tribune documented, votes are often lined up in caucus meetings behind closed doors, making public debate a mere formality for the constituents back home.

Bold, visionary leadership is lacking because the system is dominated by citizen-legislators heavily influenced by special interests with a vested stake in maintaining their government programs or their tax breaks. A cynic might argue with good reason that politicians can never solve the problems they claim to address— only manage the threat that various public demands for change make upon them. Regardless of the cause, most of the deals that our politicians in Washington tend to work out are a series of band-aid solutions to structural problems with how the state raises and spends taxes. Our state’s tax system, little changed since 1935, stumbles from session to session, with whatever party is in power claiming victory by just having held the tottering structure together for another year.

What’s an honest reporter to do? Much of the reporting in Olympia is an attempt to break the details of plans made behind closed doors faster and in greater detail than everyone else. At its best, it provides a sense of explanation to a broad audience not well-versed in the inner workers of Olympia. It’s an act of translation, and it’s one that the Olympia Press corps is quite good at. If I had a hat, I would tip it to them for the incredible work they do on insane deadlines to cut through the half-truths of all sides to keep the general public well-informed.

And yet, as we survey the broad outlines of the debate set up for the rest of the legislative session, I think we still need to provide more analytical reporting, more in depth stories about how the system works rather than just the messy compromises that it produces. This is what the Olympia Newswire will do with its remaining coverage of the 2010 legislative session. And because it costs money to employ professional writers to take time to do this reporting, this is why I’m asking for your continued support.

The Olympia Newswire So Far
For a project with a quick start and humble resources, I’m quite proud of what we’ve accomplished with our attempt to provide a focus on how decisions made in Olympia will affect people’s everyday lives.

Our reporting and op-eds have highlighted, in ways you won’t find anywhere else, the way that a college education is in danger of being placed out of reach for low and middle-income Washington residents: by raising tuition at public universities, cutting our community colleges to the bone, and even potentially eliminating state need grants and work study.

Our coverage of early childhood learning and K-12 has been unconventional—showing how changing definitions of “basic education” have challenged schools to adapt without providing them resources to do so, and profiling how the failure to properly pay for K-12 education relies upon the tireless sacrifices of local parents and school districts to take time from their teaching and parenting to pass “emergency” levies that are now an everyday part of our lives. We’ve also provided critical coverage of the state’s attempt to try to “ban gangs” from schools.

Our coverage of the human costs of budget cuts has provided the only coverage I’m aware of to the Governor’s proposal to kick 13,000 people off welfare at a time when they have few other resources for surviving the “great recession.” Similarly, it has covered the effects that budget cuts could have on our foster care system and our system of care for the developmentally disabled, while also facilitating an important debate on whether this moment of budget cuts provides an opportunity to reform our residential habilitation centers.

And, last but not least, George Howland Jr.’s coverage of budget and tax issues in Olympia has provided news and analysis you won’t find anywhere else. This includes: a profile of the “progressive revenue coalition”, an outgrowth of the Rebuilding Our Economic Future Coalition; a survey of the fragmentation of the ruling coalition of Democrats into innumerable caucuses; and a spotlight upon how this year’s budget cuts are an effect not of our declining tax base, but of the failure of political will to end tax exemptions for large corporations and powerful special interests. The resulting debate within the Democratic Party—whether to raise the sales tax—is one that no one of any political persuasion looks forward to. George’s writing has been essential for helping us understand how we got here.

Olympia Newswire’s Plans for the Rest of the Session
Early on, the Newswire faced a choice based on its limited resources: its writers could regularly blog, or they could report less frequently but with more in-depth and well-researched stories. But we did not have the money to do both. So I chose the reporting. And we haven’t looked back.

Now, with three weeks left in the session, and the possibility of a special session looming, we are going to devote our resources to providing a broader view over the budget debates: a deeper understanding of the human costs of budget cuts, the economic effects of tax increases, the structural deficiencies in our social safety net and education systems which will persist no matter who wins and loses the political debates of the next three weeks.

It starts tomorrow with Tony Brouner’s series “Inside the Company Town” that is Olympia, and will continue for the rest of the session and ideally beyond.

The Olympia Newswire After the Legislative Session
The Olympia Newswire’s coverage of the 2010 legislative session is a pilot project. If nothing else, it serves to demonstrate that we don’t need years of studies and strategic plans and millions of dollars to provide professional, independent news about issues of significant public interest. We don’t need to sit passively as the newspaper industry declines, or simply cede the public sphere over to blogs based in one-source journalism. We don’t need wealthy patrons and we don’t permission from people in power to start a professional news service. The future comes from what we take on now. The Newswire at its core is an audacious act of hope.

My personal hope is to have the Newswire go into hibernation after the legislative session, to use the months of April, May and June to build a more permanent organization in collaboration with other media professionals and experienced non-profit managers, and to re-launch the Newswire in the Summer in time to cover the 2010 mid-term elections with a focus on state rather than federal or local government races. Afterward, we will be well-positioned to cover the 2011 state legislative session with greater depth and breadth, and make a lasting impact on our state’s political culture.

Whether we can accomplish these goals depends upon community support. You can’t hibernate something that is dead. To make it through the legislative session, we need to raise an additional $3,375 to pay our writers ($375 per reporter per week). Please help us make it through the legislative session by donating now by using the paypal button in the right hand column or by making a check out to the Olympia Newswire, c/o Real Change, 2129 Second Ave, Seattle WA 98121.

My promise to you is to use the success of this pilot project to receive foundation grants and do more fundraising to build a more lasting organization that can sustain investigative reporting and thoughtful analysis from all sides of the political spectrum, to improve the quality of the public sphere with issue-based instead of politician-based reporting on government and politics. With your support, we can make it happen.

Thank you,

Trevor Griffey
Publisher@olympianews.org

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