Phyllis Campbell | Chairman, Pacific Northwest, JPMorgan Chase

“Why a hometown, local, regional newspaper is important is because it engenders that sense of community. It’s not just the local reporting; it’s the reinforcement of the importance of it and the issues and people that really create that sense of community. I think the Seattle Times is the only newspaper out there that can do that.”

Sherman Alexie | Writer

“With the City Council, lately it was the panhandling law, the stuff that really affects our community in very minute ways, but which no one outside of Seattle really cares about. So it’s those kinds of stories that we really get into. And with our specific kind of advocacy, where we work a lot with the poor and homeless — the weaker among us — it’s important that Diane and I look for the local newspaper to give us information about these kinds of communities.

Coinciding with that is local government coverage. Nobody sends a reporter strictly into city hall to cover news like a local newspaper will. And nobody has those kinds of relationships — reporters having long-term relationships with government officials — that don’t exist anywhere else. So it’s local newspapers that do that.

I appreciate the collective experience of the readers and knowing that the paper is highly aware of that as well.”

Sam Smith | President Emeritus, Washington State University

“I think one of the key things is we have to make sure that this family-owned, locally owned newspaper needs to be passed on to the next generation and it needs to continue. I value it  for all of the reasons I mentioned. I see [local ownership of nespwpers] as becoming less and less common over the next decade. And I think we have to make sure ownership stays local and independent because if it doesn’t, I think we’ll have a tremendous loss.”

Brad Smith | Senior Vice President and General Counsel, Microsoft

“Locally owned news reporting is a fundamental part of the community. It helps knit the community together by keeping us all connected with each other. It provides an honest voice on what each of us is doing. It enables us to understand what others are doing. It gives us the opportunity when we’re in a business that is making news to provide our point of view and, hopefully, have it told in a fair and objective way. It’s readily apparent why the press has always been considered the Fourth Estate even here in Washington state and the Seattle area. All the other estates depend on it at the end of the day.”