NPI’s Cascadia Advocate celebrates twenty years of continuous publication

Today is a very spe­cial day in the his­to­ry of NPI’s Cas­ca­dia Advocate. 

Today, this blog — the pri­ma­ry medi­um through which we at the North­west Pro­gres­sive Insti­tute share our per­spec­tive on pol­i­tics and cur­rent events — turns twen­ty years old. 

It’s a huge mile­stone for a pub­li­ca­tion that began in the “infor­ma­tion super­high­way” era. In the last two decades, a great many online-only media out­lets have come and gone, includ­ing the major­i­ty of the sites on the blogroll that we cre­at­ed for The Cas­ca­dia Advo­cate in its first two years of oper­a­tion. Local sites pre­sent­ing oppo­si­tion per­spec­tives — like Sound Pol­i­tics and Orbus­max — are long gone as well. 

But The Cas­ca­dia Advo­cate is still here. Still going strong. Still pro­vid­ing thought­ful com­men­tary and analy­sis of goings-on in our region, our coun­try, and our world.

And that’s important. 

In an age of ram­pant mis­in­for­ma­tion and dis­in­for­ma­tion, and an age where good jour­nal­ism is get­ting hard­er to find as news­pa­pers dis­ap­pear and state and local polit­i­cal cov­er­age with­ers away, it’s essen­tial that the trust­wor­thy sources of infor­ma­tion we’ve still got remain avail­able and remain going con­cerns. Essential. 

Our region needs both out­lets com­mit­ted to the objec­tiv­i­ty tra­di­tion — such as The Seat­tle Times or the recent­ly formed Wash­ing­ton State Stan­dard — and out­lets com­mit­ted to the advo­ca­cy jour­nal­ism tra­di­tion, such as The Cas­ca­dia Advo­cate or The Cen­ter Square (which is right wing, but which attempts to adhere to basic tenets of good jour­nal­ism like we do.) A healthy media ecosys­tem with a mix of dif­fer­ent out­lets that val­ue the truth and prac­tice respect and tol­er­ance for oth­ers is crit­i­cal to democ­ra­cy’s future. 

We have always pub­lished com­men­tary here on The Cas­ca­dia Advo­cate and I can’t imag­ine that ever chang­ing. Advo­ca­cy is in our very name; our bias is inher­ent in every­thing we pub­lish. That’s inten­tion­al. Our val­ues and prin­ci­ples and pol­i­cy direc­tions are not a secret… we’re upfront about what we believe and what our agen­da is. But what sets our com­men­tary apart from what can be found in so many oth­er cor­ners of the Inter­net is its thought­ful­ness. A lot of care goes into what we pub­lish here. 

That’s espe­cial­ly true of the news we break our­selves when we report on our research. 

Our advo­ca­cy may be total­ly sub­jec­tive, but the research that pow­ers it (which we often present here in the form of poll find­ings) comes from neu­tral ques­tions asked of rep­re­sen­ta­tive sam­ples. We know, as expe­ri­enced and skilled researchers, that you can’t find out what peo­ple think if you’ve told them what to think first. So we avoid that. We’re stick­lers for the sci­en­tif­ic method and that’s evi­dent in the poll find­ings we publish.

It’s become a tra­di­tion at the end of each year for us to look back at the most pop­u­lar posts we pub­lished that year. Poll find­ings con­cern­ing upcom­ing elec­tions have often topped those lists, reflect­ing the wide­spread inter­est in our elec­toral polling, but also beloved by our read­ers are our reviews of books and doc­u­men­tary films. Cas­ca­dia Advo­cate fans can be assured that we have plans to keep bring­ing you more poll find­ings and reviews as we enter our third decade. We also plan to increase our cov­er­age of under­re­port­ed down­bal­lot races and bring you more labor-focused journalism.

Addi­tion­al­ly, our dis­tin­guished lega­cy of live event cov­er­age will con­tin­ue. In our first twen­ty years, we live­blogged con­gres­sion­al town halls, Fed­er­al Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Com­mis­sion hear­ings, nation­al con­ven­tions, pres­i­den­tial and guber­na­to­r­i­al inau­gu­ra­tions, and con­fer­ences such as Net­roots Nation. You can expect more such cov­er­age here.

I still vivid­ly remem­ber mar­veling at the flood of vis­i­tors who showed up when Talk­ing Points Memo linked to our March 2005 report of the only in-per­son town hall that for­mer Con­gress­man and now guber­na­to­r­i­al hope­ful Dave Reichert ever held, in Belle­vue, which pow­er­ful­ly demon­strat­ed the oppo­si­tion to pri­va­tiz­ing Social Security.

I also have fond mem­o­ries of tour­ing the USS Sten­nis with Sen­a­tor Maria Cantwell, fil­ing dis­patch­es from Char­lotte and Philadel­phia from the 2012 and 2016 Demo­c­ra­t­ic Nation­al Con­ven­tions for our read­ers back home, and par­tic­i­pat­ing in the inter­net strike against SOPA and PIPA, two bad fed­er­al bills that we joined a huge move­ment in help­ing defeat. 

Since March 29th, 2004, we’ve pub­lished over 10,000 posts in this space, authored by more than a hun­dred dif­fer­ent NPI staff, reg­u­lar con­trib­u­tors, and guest essay­ists. Our writ­ers range from folks in their eight­ies and sev­en­ties, like Lit­er­ary Advo­cate David Kobrin and colum­nist Joel Con­nel­ly, to folks in their teens, like Kamil Zai­di and Sub­ha Vad­la­man­nati from our staff. In recent years, our team has empha­sized lift­ing up the voic­es of women of col­or; you’ll find a col­lec­tion of essays writ­ten by folks like Shasti Con­rad and Erin Jones high­light­ed in The Cas­ca­dia Advo­cate’s sidebar. 

We’ll be bring­ing you more of those, too.

If you’re a reg­u­lar read­er, you’ve prob­a­bly noticed the blog looks dif­fer­ent today… a lot dif­fer­ent. That’s because, in con­junc­tion with our twen­ti­eth anniver­sary, we’ve debuted a new theme for The Cas­ca­dia Advo­cate that we’ve been devel­op­ing for the last few months. This new theme is mobile-friend­ly, uti­liz­ing the lat­est in respon­sive design prac­tices, and it is more image-cen­tric, mak­ing our pho­to­jour­nal­ism more acces­si­ble. This is the site’s fifth dis­tinct coat of paint, so to speak, and we’re proud of it. We hope you like it! We are open to sug­ges­tions on improv­ing it and will be con­tin­u­ing to refine it slight­ly in the weeks to come, so any con­struc­tive feed­back you have is grate­ful­ly appreciated. 

On behalf of our staff and board, I thank you for being a read­er of The Cas­ca­dia Advo­cate. If you like what you see and you aren’t already a mem­ber, I hope you’ll con­sid­er becom­ing one. Our mem­bers sus­tain the good work we do and ensure that we have first-class web infra­struc­ture to serve this blog from. 

Mem­ber dues also allow us to pro­vide spe­cial fea­tures like Last Week In Con­gress, send our staff to cov­er nation­al polit­i­cal events, and com­mis­sion research polls. In the future, mem­ber dues may also help us award stipends to guest writ­ers! You can sign up to give month­ly or annu­al­ly right here. Anoth­er option, for those who don’t like ongo­ing com­mit­ments, is to make a one-time dona­tion.

Here’s to anoth­er twen­ty years of hap­py blogging!