Spokane's Spokesman-Review newspaper pivots to a nonprofit model
Discussing the future of newspaper operations, Stacey Cowles doesn’t sugarcoat reality. “A newspaper doesn’t offer much financial return to investors,” said Cowles, the publisher of Spokane’s daily paper The Spokesman-Review.
Cowles and his family have owned the paper for more than a century and didn’t want it to go the way of so many others: to a hedge fund or corporate entity more invested in the organization’s assets than its journalism.
Instead, earlier this month, the family took different path: They would donate The Spokesman-Review to a new nonprofit in Spokane, along with $2 million to transition the paper into a subscription-driven publication rather than one dependent on advertising, as it had been for decades.
“The Cowles family chose what in my mind is community service rather than profit maximation,” said Benjamin Shors, chair of the Department of Journalism and Media Production at the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University. “It would have been snapped up in a heartbeat by a chain or hedge fund. That would have been problematic for local news in Eastern Washington.”
https://www.cascadepbs.org/news/2025/04/spokanes-spokesman-review-newspaper-pivots-nonprofit-model