Time to celebrate! The JOLT is 6 — and The Thurston Chamber is 150!

Danny Stusser

Photo by Madeline Shannon

Time to celebrate!  It's hard to believe that The JOLT has been publishing local news for Thurston County for six years as of today.  Thank you to the 1,206 people, who sent us (tax-deductible) donations to support our work over the past year.

And another local institution is celebrating a more significant milestone: The Thurston County Chamber of Commerce is 150 years old this week. Congratulations to our colleagues and friends there.

No one would argue that the Thurston Chamber is an institution, with a history, purpose, grateful constituents, and what appears to be an on-track and prosperous future here.

It’s The JOLT News Organization whose status as an “institution” is premature. Despite having raised some 40 percent more funds from 30 percent more donors in 2025 than in 2024, most of the national funders that together provided up to about 45 percent of our funding in previous years have moved on to other causes and organizations.

Both our organization and our journalistic mission are threatened by an array of market conditions, too few years of operation, too little marketing outreach, and a small potential audience size. On top of that, most potential new readers are either apathetic about news in general or antagonistic about it (present company excluded, of course).

Don’t worry — we’re sticking to our budget, and we can see all the way to 2027, although at a lower level of operation than the one to which we aspire.

We're growing

We’re getting ready to file our IRS Form 990, the annual nonprofit corporation income tax return for 2025.

Once it’s ready, you’ll be able to find it several places online, nearly instantly, including at ProPublica and Candid (which ranks The JOLT News Organization with the Candid Gold Transparency Seal. You’ll see that in 2025, we grew operations significantly, so that our budget was approximately $325,000 for the year.  But revenues were flat compared with 2024.

Revenues this year are challenging; all of the national grantmakers have withdrawn the  programs that provided up to 40 percent of our funding in 2025, 2024 and 2023.  They are collectively telling us that we’ve got to stand on our own in Thurston County, and fund our operations entirely locally. We’re working to identify and develop new sources of income to support our work, and we’re looking to increase the number of local people who contribute to our work.

New initiatives

You might have seen something from our new collaboration with the League of Women Voters of Thurston County, which provided financial support and volunteers at our first-ever big event, Local News on Trial, on April 8, as our observance of the (also first-ever) Local News Day.

(In case you missed it, our friends at TVW recorded it that day and broadcast it recently, too.  Any time you want, you can watch a video-on-demand recording of the event here.)

The League is also providing the funding and much of the creative energy behind our new weekly feature, The Savvy Citizen News Quiz.

The JOLT Seniors

Next week we’ll introduce The JOLT’s Seniors Section, a new newspaper-within-the-newspaper, which will combine original local writing along with wire stories, and other features, all focused on the interests of our 70,000 or so Thurston County neighbors, who are over age 60. We welcome Senior Action Network (SAN) as its prime sponsor. SAN is a local volunteer organization that produces a monthly program of interest to seniors, as well as funding for a wide range of local needs.

This week we will welcome a new columnist, Glenn Harper, whose “This Week in the Elderhood,” will remind some longtime readers of the work of our first columnist, Kathleen Anderson.  His weekly writings will cover a panoply of issues focusing on the needs of people he calls elders.

Summer Reporting Intern

In two weeks we’ll introduce you to our summer reporting intern, who comes to us from The Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City College of New York, whom you might meet at a local festival, news event location or somewhere yet to be determined in Thurston County.

Two generous households stepped up and volunteered to host our summer worker/summer visitor. The Newmark School is covering roughly half of the cost to bring him here and pay him; our organization is picking up the balance.

Assuming this works as well as it did with last year’s student-reporter, Maven Navarro, we intend to make room for student-intern-reporters every summer — and we’ll be seeking local support to make it possible.

Would you consider making a monthly contribution to support our work?  To support independent local news for Thurston County? Please click here to make it happen!  

If you’re curious about the numbers, or anything else about what we’re trying to do here at The JOLT, please give me a call.

Danny Stusser is the founder and publisher of The JOLT — The Journal of Olympia, Lacey & Tumwater — and the executive director of The JOLT News Organization, its nonprofit publisher.