Sequim Gazette Editorial and Letters to the Editor
Kessler's tax cut breaks the clouds overcasting papers
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OLYMPIA, Thursday, March 12 - The room held all the gloom of a group of grave diggers burying a band of morticians.
About three dozen editors and publishers from newspapers across Washington were visiting the capital to hear a parade of state legislators, elected officials and administrators talk about the state's economic crisis.
The journalists understood feeling like grains of sand in an hourglass that had no bottom.
Thirty-seven writers once covered capitol affairs for the state's newspapers. Now the correspondents' corps has shrunk to 10.
Moreover, only two-thirds of the usual number of ink slingers joined the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association's annual pilgrimage to the capital, their numbers thinned by staff cuts and decimated travel budgets.
On the table where attendees picked up their name tags, two badges never were claimed. Both of the absentees worked for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the once-scrappy daily that today implodes into an online ghost of itself.
If the late columnist Emmett Watson were still alive, he'd bawl like a baby over the demise of his beloved Pee-Eye, as he chose to call it.
Most of the people who did show up acknowledged that community papers like the Sequim Gazette will survive the winnowing of print media.
Even these publications, though, are paring expenditures as advertisers - many of them small, independent retailers - take up some of the slack in their sales by eliminating self-promotion.
As for the politicians and bureaucrats who addressed the journalists, they had trouble agreeing on how deep the deficit would be or what programs should be trimmed, suspended or terminated outright.
"I feel confident that we'll be eliminating a lot of things," Rep. Lynn Kessler, D-Hoquiam, said. Her 24th District includes the North Olympic Peninsula.
With the possibility that tax revenues might go into free fall, it perhaps seemed odd that Kessler had introduced a bill to reduce the Business and Occupation Tax that newspapers must pay.
Kessler's bill, which had passed the state House of Representatives by a 91-5 margin a day earlier, would put print papers in the same privileged B&O class with the Boeing Co., Microsoft and Weyerhaeuser
Enjoying probable support in the state Senate - where it was introduced by another 24th District legislator, Sen. Jim Hargrove of Hoquiam - it would cut the tax by 43 percent and reduce state revenue by $3 million to $5 million during the 2009-2011 biennium.
Sen. Joseph Zarelli, of the 18th District that borders the Columbia River, said he opposed the bill. It was just too much to cut taxes, he said, for papers whose editorials regularly had supported tax increases.
It seemed even more ironic because just before Kessler's and Zarelli's remarks, Allied Daily Newspapers lobbyist Rowland Thompson had briefed the journalists on bills that would compromise the state's Open Meetings Act and the Public Disclosure Act.
Opponents of these moves, the newspaper representatives instead want to pry open even further the sometimes-secret sessions of government, requiring that they be tape recorded. City councils, county commissions and other government groups would have to surrender the recordings to reporters if court-ordered to do so.
Newspapers and politicians always have been uneasy partners in democracy, so the representatives' overwhelming support for the B&O tax cut could look curious to a casual observer.
But 90 representatives had agreed with Kessler that "this isn't just about newspapers. This is about democracy."
As newspaper circulation and advertising has been undercut by bloggers and Web sites, journalists wonder if Internet news completely can supplant print media's touchable, foldable, put-it-on-the-refrigerator-door and paste-it-in-the-scrapbook reality, not to mention its accountability.
For the newsprint faithful, Kessler's bill resonated like a rendition of that Depression ditty "On the Sunny Side of the Street" on a day whose sound track otherwise was a funeral dirge.
Later, the journalists gathered for a reception in the Temple of Justice hosted by state Supreme Court Chief Justice Gerry Alexander.
The jurist, too, applauded the B&O tax cut measure.
"We can't enforce the First Amendment," he said, "if we don't have any press to protect."
Jim Casey can be reached at editor@Sequim Gazette.com.
About three dozen editors and publishers from newspapers across Washington were visiting the capital to hear a parade of state legislators, elected officials and administrators talk about the state's economic crisis.
The journalists understood feeling like grains of sand in an hourglass that had no bottom.
Thirty-seven writers once covered capitol affairs for the state's newspapers. Now the correspondents' corps has shrunk to 10.
Moreover, only two-thirds of the usual number of ink slingers joined the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association's annual pilgrimage to the capital, their numbers thinned by staff cuts and decimated travel budgets.
On the table where attendees picked up their name tags, two badges never were claimed. Both of the absentees worked for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the once-scrappy daily that today implodes into an online ghost of itself.
If the late columnist Emmett Watson were still alive, he'd bawl like a baby over the demise of his beloved Pee-Eye, as he chose to call it.
Most of the people who did show up acknowledged that community papers like the Sequim Gazette will survive the winnowing of print media.
Even these publications, though, are paring expenditures as advertisers - many of them small, independent retailers - take up some of the slack in their sales by eliminating self-promotion.
As for the politicians and bureaucrats who addressed the journalists, they had trouble agreeing on how deep the deficit would be or what programs should be trimmed, suspended or terminated outright.
"I feel confident that we'll be eliminating a lot of things," Rep. Lynn Kessler, D-Hoquiam, said. Her 24th District includes the North Olympic Peninsula.
With the possibility that tax revenues might go into free fall, it perhaps seemed odd that Kessler had introduced a bill to reduce the Business and Occupation Tax that newspapers must pay.
Kessler's bill, which had passed the state House of Representatives by a 91-5 margin a day earlier, would put print papers in the same privileged B&O class with the Boeing Co., Microsoft and Weyerhaeuser
Enjoying probable support in the state Senate - where it was introduced by another 24th District legislator, Sen. Jim Hargrove of Hoquiam - it would cut the tax by 43 percent and reduce state revenue by $3 million to $5 million during the 2009-2011 biennium.
Sen. Joseph Zarelli, of the 18th District that borders the Columbia River, said he opposed the bill. It was just too much to cut taxes, he said, for papers whose editorials regularly had supported tax increases.
It seemed even more ironic because just before Kessler's and Zarelli's remarks, Allied Daily Newspapers lobbyist Rowland Thompson had briefed the journalists on bills that would compromise the state's Open Meetings Act and the Public Disclosure Act.
Opponents of these moves, the newspaper representatives instead want to pry open even further the sometimes-secret sessions of government, requiring that they be tape recorded. City councils, county commissions and other government groups would have to surrender the recordings to reporters if court-ordered to do so.
Newspapers and politicians always have been uneasy partners in democracy, so the representatives' overwhelming support for the B&O tax cut could look curious to a casual observer.
But 90 representatives had agreed with Kessler that "this isn't just about newspapers. This is about democracy."
As newspaper circulation and advertising has been undercut by bloggers and Web sites, journalists wonder if Internet news completely can supplant print media's touchable, foldable, put-it-on-the-refrigerator-door and paste-it-in-the-scrapbook reality, not to mention its accountability.
For the newsprint faithful, Kessler's bill resonated like a rendition of that Depression ditty "On the Sunny Side of the Street" on a day whose sound track otherwise was a funeral dirge.
Later, the journalists gathered for a reception in the Temple of Justice hosted by state Supreme Court Chief Justice Gerry Alexander.
The jurist, too, applauded the B&O tax cut measure.
"We can't enforce the First Amendment," he said, "if we don't have any press to protect."
Jim Casey can be reached at editor@Sequim Gazette.com.
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