The Journal of Olympia, Lacey & Tumwater is Thurston County’s own nonprofit daily news service. It is succeeding but struggling like all local journalism around the country. As WIP undergoes reorganization, we encourage our readers to subscribe and financially support The JOLT, our only independent and unbiased local news source.
I sat down with The JOLT’s founder and publisher, Danny Stusser, to get a perspective about The Journal of Olympia, Lacey & Tumwater. Here are excerpts from the conversation:
Esther: What was your thought process when you started The JOLT? What was the motivation that gave you the energy to attempt it?
Danny: Like many people around here, I’d become frustrated at the lack of local news stories. The Olympian, which employed some two dozen people in its newsroom when I moved here in 1995, had been shrinking fast by 2011 when I wrote the first business plan for what would become The JOLT News Organization. By 2020, The Olympian had fewer than five local staff.
When the pandemic arrived in March 2020, The Olympian’s coverage diminished further.
I still thought that Thurston County needed reliable, consistent, fact-based local news. I knew that important topics weren’t being covered. There were very few stories about city-council deliberations, and especially about Lacey, Tumwater and the county, public-safety issues, school-district plans, businesses, and environmental topics. I believed that our communities were operating without essential information and with too little public involvement.
Esther: What happened next?
Danny: The pandemic here officially started, in my opinion, when Governor Inslee called a press conference on Monday, March 16, 2020 and announced huge changes to our business, work and educational worlds. First thing I heard was that all restaurants would be closing their dining rooms. At that moment, my previous business, publishing Coffee News, was shot dead instantly. No restaurants open, no distribution.
I floated around the house for a couple of days in wonder. What should I do?
By Thursday that week I’d started working 10 hours a day, re-examining what it would take to start a local news organization here.
By Friday I’d signed up to join LION Publishers, a trade association serving local independent, online news publishers. They gave me lots of training and introductions to publishers and editors around the country, who helped me to re-examine our 2011 plan. That was a good thing – that old plan would have failed.
Over the next two months I wrote a new plan, selected a technology vendor for our website and we launched with our first news story on May 20, 2020. It was about the fire that destroyed most of the old Econo Lodge motel, which is today the site of Quince Street Village, one of the supportive housing sites for people who are otherwise homeless.
Esther: What was the new The JOLT plan about? Is that what you’ve built?
Danny: Part of the planning was deciding where to put very limited reporting sources. Civic reporting was the most important. I created a list of all the public meetings I could find – councils, boards, commissions and committees. At launch, the list included about 40 of these; we’ve since found many more and regularly report on more than 60 meetings each month.
We started to report on what city councils would be considering—to give the public a chance to raise their hands if they wanted to. We began to publicize the hearings that people could go to, even if these were only online in those days.
Now we have five reporters who cover regular news beats for Thurston County and each of the cities and school districts in them. We do what’s called “service journalism,” publishing news people can use, reporting about road closures, weather stories, major hires by public organizations and business. We publish about four times as many local stories as the legacy newspaper here [The Olympian] as well as having a very comprehensive community calendar.
We started with the goal of covering all of the public meetings and are nearly there.
Esther: Did you start out as a nonprofit organization?
Danny: No. We launched as fast as we could, maybe too fast, but The JOLT was originally owned by my small business. After a few months it became clear that we’d be better able to become sustainable as a nonprofit organization. We made a new corporation in September 2021 and poured our meager assets into it. The IRS approved our application for 501(c)(3) public-charity status in March 2023, but back-dated it to September 28, 2021.
Esther: What changed after The JOLT became a nonprofit organization?
Danny: Nothing about our editorial mission changed. The new structure just helped us to do more civic reporting. I don’t own The JOLT – you own it, and so does everybody else in Thurston County.
And now I have seven bosses. Our board of directors makes the big decisions, and I report to them every month or more often.
Esther: What distinguishes The JOLT from The Olympian?
Danny: Well, we’re growing, and they’re shrinking. We send our daily newsletter product [The Daily JOLT] to some 8,500 people each weekday now. Their recent numbers show a combined print and online subscriber base of just under 6,500.
The Olympian is owned by McClatchy, a nationwide newspaper chain based in California that was itself acquired out of bankruptcy in 2022 by Chatham Asset Management, a New Jersey-based financial investor. The JOLT is community-owned and mission-driven. We exist solely to serve the public.
The Olympian’s longtime local editor retired last month, and is being replaced by someone based far away, working part-time. Our editor lives and works in downtown Olympia.
The Olympian’s pages are more than 90 percent filled with stories they republish from other McClatchy newspapers, The Washington Post, Associated Press and other sources. About 95% of what we publish is original to The JOLT.
The Olympian seems to focus on crime and major topics. The JOLT covers the regular and what some people call ‘boring stuff’—city councils, the port commission, school boards, public safety, land use—all kinds of topics. And our local columnists cover popular topics such as gardening, local wild birds, pets, special education, and more. About 40 original pieces each week.
The Olympian used to endorse candidates and recommend how to vote on local initiatives. I don’t know that they plan to continue to do that, but we never will. Why not? As a nonprofit we’re prohibited from it. And we don’t want to, anyway. We prefer to help our readers understand the issues so they can make up their own minds.
Perhaps most important to some people is this: The Olympian, being a for-profit business, has a paywall in front of its content. Its regular rate is $15.99 per month. No pay, no read. The JOLT is free to all, because our mission is to inform the public, not restrict information to subscribers. And we publish obituaries for free, too.
Another difference: The Olympian brings in a lot more money than we do, several times our budget.
Esther: How does the business work? Are you profitable?
Danny: Next May we’ll be six years old. In our first five years, we attracted funds from national philanthropic funders, whose support made up more than half of our income. Several of those funders have pulled back, and others have stepped up.
We are constantly looking for financial support, especially locally. In 2024, we received about $130,000 in support from national sources that just aren’t returning to the local news space. With our total budget this year at about $340,000, it’s put the squeeze on our growth.
On the other hand, maybe the best thing that ever happened to us came in September 2024, when we received a major two-year grant from Press Forward, one of 204 recipients out of 931 proposals. That enabled us to hire our first full-time editor, Wyatt Haupt, Jr., who has improved our quality and boosted the number of stories we publish every weekday.
Profitable? Hard to say. Each year we spend more than we did in the previous year to pay reporters and photographers and columnists and editors. But because we raise most of our local funding in November and December, the end-of-year snapshot looked fabulous from 2022-24. But 2025 is likely to be the first year we spent more money than we raised during the year.
Esther: How is fundraising going this year?
Danny: It started out really good, but has slowed. During the first three weeks of November, during The Community Foundation’s Give Local campaign, we raised about $51,000 from about 565 donors. We’re working to raise $80,000 from local donors, so we still have a way to go. We’re still participating in NewsMatch, so most donations will be doubled through a combination of national and local matching partners.
Thanks for asking about the who, what, when, where, why and how of The JOLT!
To sign up for The Daily JOLT, go to theJOLT.news and fill out the form there. To contribute to the organization’s work, click theJOLTnews.com/donate.
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