Color Scheme
Comma is the community’s nonprofit organization. It is owned by the public and operates for the public benefit. There are no private shareholders.
Comma is overseen by a board of directors that includes 10 dedicated community leaders with extensive management and board experience.
Comma’s 12-person staff manages technology, finance, community events and fundraising - and newly includes an HR expert who is supporting culture-building and professional practices.
It is important to distinguish three sources of funding:
The Spokesman-Review’s operating budget; community and philanthropic support provided directly to the newspaper since 2018; and funds raised by Comma to support the newspaper’s future nonprofit ownership and long-term sustainability.
Funds donated to Comma have supported work including the newspaper’s Olympia and Washington, D.C., bureaus, special reporting projects, training and other newsroom expenses.
In addition, the community-engagement focus that took root in 2017 with the launch of Northwest Passages helped lead to other sources of newsroom support, including the Community Journalism and Civic Engagement Fund at Innovia Foundation, Report for America, and corporate partnerships.
Comma’s staff prepares an annual budget draft based on hiring and operational needs. The draft budget is reviewed in detail by the board’s Finance Committee, who verifies that budget categories are allocated appropriately, fiscally responsible and aligned with Comma’s mission and goals. The Finance Committee then presents a recommended version of the budget to the entire board. After discussion and final edits, the board votes to approve the budget. The Finance Committee regularly meets with staff to review spending and performance to ensure funds are actually deployed in accordance with the approved budget.
Controls are in place requiring board approval for transactions above certain thresholds as well as for any unanticipated needs that are outside the budget.
The Spokesman-Review’s journalistic independence is sacred – it is central to our mission. Under no circumstances do we support or condone interfering with journalistic content.
Comma is building a culture of transparency and integrity in journalism by promoting accuracy, impartiality, and balance in news reporting for the public good. Comma aims to create a vibrant and open dialogue with readers.
Comma has developed a groundbreaking Trust Initiative to ensure newsroom independence and journalistic integrity. Part of the Trust Initiative includes that the newsroom will have direct access to an Ombudsperson who safeguards these principles.
Bill Simer has provided Comma with extraordinary leadership during an enormously demanding chapter, and we are deeply thankful for his service. Bill had been planning to return to retirement, and after helping guide Comma through this phase of the transition, he decided it was the right time to do that.
Our board remains fully engaged, our work continues, and our focus is where it has always been: completing the transition and building a strong, sustainable future for The Spokesman-Review and community journalism.
Chair/President: George Brunt
Vice Chair: Jeff Philipps
Secretary: Carla Cicero
Treasurer/Finance Committee Chair: Jeanette Hauck
Governance Committee Chair: Kim Pearman-Gillman
Community is our great unifier. It transcends political trends, thriving on what we have in common rather than accentuating our differences. Community helps us build trust. That’s the foundation of the nonprofit Comma Community Journalism Lab. Comma is committed to telling the stories that matter most to local readers.
The Spokesman-Review will be owned and operated by a local 501(c)(3) nonprofit, building a hybrid funding strategy different from what most other news nonprofits use. Comma is joining forces with nonprofit newsrooms, universities and public school districts across the region, while partnering with regional partners and reviving small-town weekly newspapers that readers have sorely missed.
More than two newspapers in the U.S. are shutting down every week, caught in devastating economic headwinds caused by the shift from brick-and-mortar shopping to online retail and the collapse of once-lucrative local advertising sales.
Making matters worse is that most newspapers surviving in this day and age are owned by hedge funds or corporations carrying massive debt, which then bleed the newspaper to death through extensive layoffs and other cuts. These papers are shells of themselves, and can no longer serve their communities in the meaningful ways they once did.
Comma’s mission is nothing less than saving community journalism by shifting to its nonprofit model, which gives our organization access to new funding, as well as the ability to work with new partners and education institutions.
From the moment we learn to read, we’re taught that commas connect different ideas within a sentence. When we’re reading, commas also give us a chance to pause and take a breath. If ever we needed a time to pause a moment to rediscover our common ground, this is it.
A comma also is not like a period; it doesn’t represent the end of something, it tells you something else is still coming.
This not only explains the simple and powerful role of an often-overlooked piece of punctuation, it also tells us why Comma was the perfect name for this new nonprofit organization. Comma builds on Spokane’s strong support for this newspaper’s Northwest Passages Book Club and Community Forum, the foundation of the newspaper’s reader engagement and grants programs.
No. This newspaper’s name will forever be The Spokesman-Review, with the opening capital T and the fancy hyphen.
This is the question most often asked by readers. The creation of Comma is the culmination of nine years of community-building, planning and fundraising by the newsroom’s leadership. It was proposed as a way to have our community even more involved with our newspaper, while enabling us to work on new ways – outside of just advertising and subscriptions – to help fund the tremendous expense of running a local news operation of this size.
The Cowles family agreed this would be a better way to find sustainable solutions for the long-term health of The Spokesman-Review.
These types of alternate funding options also give this newspaper the best opportunity to try to avoid future staff layoffs, as well as a further reduction of the number of days this newspaper is printed. Publisher Stacey Cowles and the Cowles family generously agreed in April to donate the 142-year-old newspaper to the nonprofit.
Any contributions to Comma, Northwest Passages and the First Amendment Club membership program are solely in support of community journalism, as well as literary and literacy programs. Donors have no control or influence over the newspaper’s editorial decisions. There is a hard firewall between funders and our journalism.
The Spokesman-Review has had philanthropic-funded journalists in its newsroom beginning in 2019, and it has shown since then that it has some of the industry’s toughest standards for keeping the independence of its journalists sacred. In most cases, the community-funded beat reporters didn’t even know who funded their positions. We plan to keep it that way.
Comma is building a culture of transparency and integrity in journalism by promoting accuracy, impartiality, and balance in news reporting for the public good. Through a foundational system of accountability and ethics-focused oversight, we believe the key is for a local news organization to remain answerable to its community by creating a vibrant and open dialogue with readers.
That includes new ways of having our community directly involved in the checks and balances of our newsrooms’ journalism, through a new advisory council, open news meetings, random source and fact checks for stories and monthly meetings with readers. We also plan to create a new position for an ombudsperson. We believe if The Spokesman-Review is truly going to be the people’s paper, then our community also deserves to have the people’s representative – an ombudsperson focused on answering readers’ questions about the journalism and how news is reported.
Since April 2025, readers have responded by pledging donations ranging from $5 to $1,000,000. The required $2 million fundraising target was met in May 2026. Since then, both organizations have worked diligently to make necessary preparations for the transition of the newspaper assets from Cowles Publishing Company to Comma.
There are real complexities in shifting to new accounting and payroll systems, not to mention employee benefits, or even just making sure things like email and phones continue to work on new software. We are currently working toward transition in late 2026.
The newspaper will continue to publish six days a week in print and every day online. Some stories will appear behind a paywall, while stories reported and written by reporters whose positions are funded at least partially by outside grants will remain free to all online readers.
The current reporters, editors and staff members will be asked to join the “new” newsroom.
It will remain under the ownership of the Cowles family, and The S-R newsroom will continue to be located there for the foreseeable future.
The money we are currently raising, along with the match from the Cowles Family, will be pooled together to become this new organization’s reserve fund, helping us not only now, but also in the future. This money does much more than just begin the transition process of The Spokesman-Review to nonprofit ownership. It also will help keep the organization healthy for years to come.
Here are four ways to support Comma and local journalism:
1. Advocacy: Help spread the word. Get others engaged. Stay involved. Learn more on this site.
2. Contribute: Your donations are tax-deductible.
3. Get tickets: Attend a Northwest Passages event and join the conversation. We go beyond the headlines to get Spokane talking – about ourselves, our ideas and our collective future.
4. Join the First Amendment Club: Become a community benefactor.