If you haven't seen much of me around Blaine, Birch Bay and Semiahmoo over the past six months — other than the occasional City Council meeting — there’s a reason.
I’ve been keeping the lights on.
And, sometimes quite literally, the toilets flushing.
Taking over The Northern Light has involved much more than publishing a newspaper every week. We’ve been navigating a massive transition from Point Roberts Press to Daffodil Press, while also beginning the much bigger transformation of this newspaper from a privately owned, for-profit business into a nonprofit community institution.
It has been a lot.
But we’re finally stabilizing. And that means you’re going to start seeing a lot more of me.
More importantly, I want to start seeing and hearing more from you.
When I took responsibility for The Northern Light, I didn’t want simply to preserve a newspaper. I wanted to help build a model that gives this community a greater role in its future.
Independent local newspapers are critical to communities, particularly smaller and more rural places like Blaine, Birch Bay and Semiahmoo.
And they are disappearing.
Across the country, newspapers have closed or consolidated into large chains and investment-owned companies where decisions about local journalism can be made hundreds or thousands of miles from the communities those newspapers are supposed to serve.
We’re taking The Northern Light in the opposite direction.
We’re working to transition it from a privately owned, for-profit newspaper into a nonprofit news organization with community ownership at the center of its future.
That distinction matters.
Blaine, Birch Bay and Semiahmoo are vibrant communities with a beautiful natural environment, long histories and people who care deeply about living here. There are complicated issues and disagreements, celebrations and tragedies, new arrivals and families whose connections to this place reach back generations.
We deserve to be in charge of telling our own stories.
And we need a strong, independent newspaper capable of doing that.
In the coming weeks, we’re going to roll out a redesigned print edition of The Northern Light.
Don’t worry: We're not changing what makes this newspaper The Northern Light.
We’re modernizing how we present it.
The redesign will feature larger, more readable headlines and a clearer organizational structure intended to make the newspaper easier to navigate. We’re keeping the five-column format, which means the change won’t disrupt the advertising sizes our local businesses rely on.
Think of it as renovating the house rather than tearing it down.
The same commitment to local reporting will be there. We just want to make that reporting easier and more enjoyable to read.
And we would love to hear what you think when you see it.
The bigger change may be online.
Our current website has served this newspaper for a long time, but technology has moved on. The site has become visually outdated, difficult to navigate and burdened with broken links. Its design can be choppy and unpredictable, particularly compared with how people now expect to read news on phones and other devices.
That’s not anyone’s fault. It’s what happens when a website is maintained over many years while the technology underneath it keeps changing.
The way websites handle data — including photographs, stories and archives — has changed dramatically. We need a modern system built for the way journalism is produced and consumed today.
There’s also a practical reality: The existing website is expensive to maintain. As a new publisher building a nonprofit news organization, that was a cost we couldn’t continue to justify for a platform that no longer serves readers as well as it should.
So we’re rebuilding.
When the new site launches, it will have the essentials, but it won’t have every bell and whistle.
That’s intentional.
Rather than spend a lot of money guessing what readers want, we’d rather start with a solid, modern foundation and ask you what we should build from there.
What do you want to find easily on The Northern Light website?
Breaking news? City Council coverage? School news? Community calendars? Obituaries? Police reports? Border information? Local history? More photographs? Easier access to archives? Email newsletters?
Tell us.
That’s part of the larger transition I hope you’ll see at The Northern Light.
Community ownership means more than changing the tax status of the organization that publishes the newspaper.
It means changing the relationship between the newspaper and the people it serves.
I want to hear what you think we’re doing well. I want to hear what we’re missing. I want to know which stories aren’t being told, which voices we aren’t hearing and what information would make this newspaper more useful to you.
There will be more opportunities in the months ahead to participate, offer ideas and help us think about what The Northern Light should become.
Because after spending much of the past six months behind the scenes making sure this newspaper could keep publishing, I’m excited to turn my attention outward again.
The lights are on.
The toilets are flushing.
The newspaper arrives every week.
Now we get to build what comes next.
And I invite you to help us do it. Watch these pages for information on community meetings with the publisher and team, which we are scheduling for early September. Until then, please give us your feedback through the survey (QR code) or by sending your thoughts to okusan@daffodilpress.net
