The suburban daily King County Journal newspaper will close next month. The new owners, Victoria’s Black Press, apparently couldn’t find a way to make the unionized operation profitable.
Meanwhile the company is expanding production of six smaller area newspapers from twice a month to twice a week. It’s not clear what will happen to its printing press in Kent, which may have excess capacity.
Update: To compete with Black Press, The Seattle Times may add weekly newspapers in the area.
The craze for locally grown food in Cascadia supports an industry of suppliers. But it’s being squeezed by urban growth.
Consider three Vancouver markets that serve 5,000 customers per week and are on track to break sales records, according to this story in The Tyee. British Columbia reportedly is the only area of Canada where the number of organic farms rose in 2005, though pressure to convert farmland and the difficulty of maintaining a supply chain for meats is a threat.
The Seattle area has seen a similar trend, with an increasing number of community farmer’s markets in King County — 27 this year, up from 7 a decade ago. The demand for locally grown farm goods competes with transportation costs and land conversion. Even the Pike Place Market has converted some space for tourism-related businesses.
Vancouver’s markets reportedly hope to find permanent, covered locations to accommodate customer demand — if they aren’t pushed out by construction staging for the 2010 Olympics. It will be interesting to see if corporate retailers help the cause. Organic home delivery is increasingly available and once-rare Whole Foods has grown from two stores in Cascadia to at least 13 open or planned.
Prospects to keep pro basketball in Seattle appear to be improving, while a proposed NASCAR track faces more hurdles.
The News Tribune reported that the owner of the Sonics is leaning toward building a new stadium in Renton. The site, which the city would give to the team at a steep discount, is close to Eastside corporate customers and near several highways. The team is expected to ask the state legislature for a subsidy of about $300 million.
The request likely further complicates plans for a 83,500-seat NASCAR track on the Kitsap Pensinsula. According to the newspaper, no legislator in the area supports a public subsidy for the project, which supposedly would bring a development boon to the region. Yet State Sen. Derek Kilmer of Gig Harbor, who holds an economic development PhD from Oxford, says financing the project should at least be considered.
Lest anyone ponder the durability of British Columbia’s economic boom, the province’s main newspaper weighed it with forecasts of a rosy year ahead for segments of both the old and new economies.
Rising global demand for commodities will continue to propel the mining industry in B.C., according to the head of a trade group. The province has 25 of Canada’s 52 viable mine projects and growth is likely to continue, despite land claims from native groups or concern that new mining could spoil fisheries, he said.
Meanwhile several B.C. video game companies are expanding, thanks to the popularity of new game platforms. The sector employs only about 3,000 but apparently hopes for growth are high. One reason for buoyancy: the federal government is giving 10 game companies a total C$2 million in development funds.
Most of the counties in the Olympic Peninsula area have seen their population remain flat or fall since the early 1990s, despite phenomenal growth statewide.
Still, the coastal economy is gradually shifting as retirees and other newcomers make up for some of the reliance on the harvest and export of trees and fish, according to this report in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
The trend is in line with the shift happening across the region in formerly natural resource-dependent areas such as Vancouver Island and the Oregon Coast. Retirees who like a damp, overcast climate are being joined by those who can work remotely. Pacific County, on Washington’s coast, advertises DSL service as a lure for both retirees and Internet-related business.
Realtors say Kitsap County’s market began to take off about a decade ago when it was first included in the Northwest multiple listing service for the Seattle area, according to the article. Retail is an attraction for Aberdeen, but the mostly low-wage big box stores won’t power the economy. More significant potential engines of growth include the alternative energy plant being built nearby.
A British Columbia government report says Canada could see a bonanza of another C$230 billion a year in trade and as many as 500,000 new jobs by 2020 — if the country gets behind plans for massive new port and transportation projects.
The report, leaked to the Vancouver Sun, is likely to stoke the upcoming federal election campaign and encourage examination of B.C.’s ties to Asia. Completing the projects on the government’s wish list could eclipse the planned trade-related development in Washington and Oregon.
The report assumes constant growth in Asia and no disruption in trans-Pacific trade. B.C. would gain 55,000 direct jobs by 2020, with the rest indirect or in other provinces. According to the report, B.C. would see about $76 billion of the additional trade in goods and services, the equivalent of 50 percent of B.C.’s current trade activity.
B.C. Ferries, already under fire for fare increases and service cutbacks, reportedly may not survive a series of legal challenges stemming from its safety record.
The quasi-private company faces lawsuits and negative publicity after one of its boats sunk earlier this year. Under current law, the province owns the ferry assets and pays a private operating company for service on less-profitable routes. That arrangement hasn’t prevented fares from climbing, at a time massive road projects around B.C. continue to subsidize car transportation.
Plans for one of Vancouver’s tallest skyscrapers recently passed a design-review hurdle, the latest sign of a tall-building boom sweeping Cascadia’s biggest cities.
The new 59-story hotel-office-residential combination would rival a new Shangri-La Hotel slated for completion by 2008. The projects will dramatically alter the modest Vancouver skyline that has preserved views of the mountains. They could even begin to shift the feel of the city — if you buy the idea, quoted in the latest issue of Dwell magazine, that the focus on the outdoors has kept Vancouver’s urban culture restrained.
Meanwhile Seattle recently approved taller towers, a step that had been verboten since the building boom of the 1980s. Even Portland, with its small blocks and human-scale buildings, may grow taller as it fills underused land near downtown.
The difference from earlier building booms is that channeling growth appears to be a larger part of the calculations, in addition to the vanity of building taller towers. Vancouver, where the first building above 37 stories opened in 2001, needs more office space in the center city to counter sprawl. Seattle’s traffic is bad enough to stoke demand for more close-in housing. Concentrating building along Portland’s existing transit corridors would maximize return on the investment.
Conservative Seattle-area radio talker John Carlson this week said the federal government should act to prevent further media-industry consolidation. Meanwhile, regardless of owner, the real need is for diversity of content.
Consolidation is a critical issue because snuffing out local voices could make Seattle more like British Columbia, where a single company controls most of print and broadcast media. In B.C., CanWest’s ownership of both Vancouver daily newspapers has led to fawning coverage of the ruling party and a pro-business slant on issues such as the 2010 Olympics.
In Seattle, variety of coverage is what’s missing. The Seattle Times sponsored preliminary FCC hearings last month where speakers of all political stripes spoke against allowing more consolidation. But how often have Seattle’s daily papers reported virtually identical information on their pages, despite different ownership?
It’s true that almost all Seattle broadcast outlets are owned by out-of-town chains, including some that have cut local investment. This year McClatchy took over several Washington newspapers, ownership of Seattle Weekly changed again and Victoria’s Black Press bought the King County Journal. Against this backdrop, remaining local media need to stand up and show why they matter.
A couple of new air connections from Cascadia stand out:
— Nonstops between Seattle and Austin daily on American Airlines, beginning in April. The first such connection between the cities is driven by business demand, the airline said.
— Nonstops between Vancouver and Manchester, Glasgow and Gatwick at least once per week during ski season on Zoom Airlines, a Canadian low-fare carrier. During the summer the airline offered tourism-focused nonstops from Vancouver to Belfast and Cardiff.