Two hooded figures with lamps approach a moonlit, isolated cottage. A woman answers the door. We have come for the child, says the hooded figure So soon? she asks It is time, says the hooded figure. The woman is distraught. We should never have got him a library card! What is done cannot be undone, says the hooded figure We couldn’t see the harm! We just wanted him to enjoy reading! For most, it ends there, says the hooded figure, turning away and walking into the wilderness Oh lord, What have I done! says the woman, the child walks past her and out into the darkness with them. Do not cry mother. I am a writer now.

my latest books cartoon for @theguardian.com

Briefs: Janicki Industries expands, Menace Brewing transfers co-ownership, Skagit median home price flat | Cascadia Daily News Business news for Whatcom and Skagit counties

New @cascadiadaily.com Business Briefs is out. Top news is Janicki Industries' expansion plans both in (and out) of WA, and the acquisition by PE of its spinoff Sedron. Both #Skagit County based.

Worth noting that Briefs is a Cascadia Daily News group effort. www.cascadiadaily.com/2026/apr/16/...

Torties are the Stitches of the cat world.

Call it a media crossover: the lead item in my digital Business Matters newsletter for @cascadiadaily.com is in the weekly CDN print edition today.

Nice way to reach two audience edges — those who favor newsy email newsletters, and those who prefer tactile paper news sources. (All do subscribe.)

Northwest Washington's Point Roberts is unusual: It's an exclave, requiring driving from the US through Canada to reach its US soil.

The headline on thoughtful new reporting by Cascadia Daily News Murrow Fellow Sophia Gates (outside the paywall) says it all. www.cascadiadaily.com/2026/apr/09/...

📈 Business Matters with Frank Catalano 04/07/26 Revising expectations for a “two-nation vacation”

The new Business Matters newsletter dropped for Cascadia Daily News subscribers.

In it: a longish look at revised expectations for a World Cup tourism #business "two-nation vacation." A round up of Northwest Washington biz news. And a book on ... LEGO. newsletters.cascadiadaily.com/p/business-m...

Vonda was a friend and an inspiration. I can't wait to read this.

Cascadia Daily News has posted its full subscriber-only newsletter archive, from health and business to prep sports and education. (And two more.)

All six newsletters have one month under their belts. So stuff to catch up on. Or revisit. newsletters.cascadiadaily.com/tags

Let's set aside what's petty, vindictive, greedy and vain starting this one day.

If it's in your heart. And you have a heart.

I just returned. It really stood out, for me.

From an exhibition at the Palm Springs Art Museum.

So some companies are now hiding behind PR people who are hiding behind AI? Can't wait to find out how to attribute those quotes.

Cascadia Daily News launching a new podcast | Cascadia Daily News To reach an even broader audience, Cascadia Daily News is launching a podcast focused on local news, its impact and the staff who bring CDN stories to North ...

Really glad to see @cascadiadaily.com took this podcast idea — to demystify local news — and ran with it.

The more the public understands how #journalism works, its standards and decisions, the better for all.

First weekly episode will drop March 31. www.cascadiadaily.com/2026/mar/25/...

People sometimes ask why I left the #edtech industry after three decades.

One reason? The technology always should be secondary to living, breathing teachers. Education is about more than relaying facts or skills. The best instruction provides human-to-human guidance. Connection. And inspiration.

📈 Business Matters with Frank Catalano 03/03/26 Growing new tech companies SWIFTly

Psst. I don't think this has been officially announced yet, but @cascadiadaily.com now has a website for its new newsletters.

If you're a CDN subscriber, your login gets you to an archive of ones you may have missed. Like the first Business Matters. newsletters.cascadiadaily.com/p/business-m...

How SFWA Is Administering the Nebula Awards Policy Against LLM-Use Seven of the 61st Nebula Awards finalists announced on March 15 were labeled with an asterisk denoted as meaning — *Provisional nomination; awaiting acceptance and response on LLM-use. File 7…

As someone who briefly played with generative AI as research (and didn't like the bland sameness and inaccuracies of its results), I think SFWA's approach to outing AI for its Nebula Awards finalists will be revealing. A test case. file770.com/how-sfwa-is-...

RadioInsight - CBS News Radio To Shut Down In May BREAKING: As part of today's layoffs at CBS News, the company has announced that it will shut down CBS News Radio on May 22.

The end of CBS News Radio is a stunner.

CBS' radio news network — its hourly newscasts and coverage — was considered the gold standard, the NPR of commercial radio, in its heyday.

What a loss for radio #journalism, just under 100 years into the network's operation. radioinsight.com/headlines/34...

Our letters page is like a town square - The Northern Light We’ve made a few updates to our letters to the editor policies. But the core principle remains the same: The letters page is our town square, and we support that tradition. Community …

Blaine, WA's The Northern Light updates its letters-to-the-editor policy: No lies allowed.

Why? Libel.

Newspapers aren't social media platforms. So fact-checking is a must.

Refreshing. www.thenorthernlight.com/stories/our-...

Meet Jon Bauer, our new deputy editor | Cascadia Daily News CDN welcomes multitalented journalist to editing team

Good news about the news: Cascadia Daily News hires Jon Bauer, Everett Herald veteran, as new deputy editor.

“Moving to a new coverage area with Whatcom and Skagit counties really appealed to me." www.cascadiadaily.com/2026/mar/16/...

Why Frank Blethen spent his family’s fortune to save Seattle’s newspaper During his 40 years as publisher, Blethen led The Seattle Times through profound changes. For him, it was always about the newspaper’s survival.

“They were knocking down the building, everybody was in tears and freaking out, and somebody asked [publisher] Frank [Blethen], ‘God this must be tearing your heart out.’ And he’s like, ‘Are you kidding? That’s our future. That’s funding our #journalism.’ ” www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news...

Anthropic copyright settlement claim filed. One book in the database: Starting & Running a Business All-in-One for Dummies.

Based on Internet Marketing for Dummies. And others, by others.

If there's a payout, it'll be tiny. So. Many. Authors. But worth doing.

Huge deal. Taylor is/was core to GeekWire. I enjoyed working with him and watching his professional growth (yeah, I'm older) when I was a columnist and then tipster.

I know Todd, John and the team will keep GeekWire the top-notch tech #journalism source it is. And I wish Taylor the best.

Happy Anniversary AMAZING STORIES! - Amazing Stories Today, March 10th, 2025, marks one hundred years since the debut of Amazing Stories. Our best information informs us that the magazine was first

Personal memory jog: This week marks the 100th birthday of #scifi mag Amazing Stories. I was one of its two book review columnists for several years in the 1980s.

It's survived and had several well-known editors (Hugo Gernsback first; mine, George Scithers). 100! amazingstories.com/2026/03/happ...

Traffic to top tech publications has plummeted since 2024, new analysis shows Organic search traffic to some of the internet’s most-read tech publications has dropped by 58% since 2024, according to a new analysis from the SEO and GEO marketing firm Growtika. The report pulled...

"...The report lays out a compelling case that there has been a massive loss of organic traffic across tech #journalism in just the past two years ... It can’t prove causation, but does speculate the roll out of Google’s AI Overviews is contributing to the decline." www.niemanlab.org/2026/03/traf...

I'm rather enjoying now being one of many contributors to — and not the sole author of — the latest iteration of @cascadiadaily.com's popular Business Briefs.

Bonus: It allows me to play the "guess what I wrote?" game.

(Spoiler: It's usually the most boring stuff.)

Cascadia Daily News email newsletter image, with the text below a heading of "Business Matters with Frank Catalano": Growing new tech companies SWIFTly: A spark near a forested area is usually a bad idea. Unless that spark is one of business innovation. That admittedly dad-joke-adjacent thought crossed my mind as I wound my car through worn historic buildings that still dominate the tree-filled former campus of Northern State Hospital in Skagit County. Yet as I passed a tennis court on Northsound Drive, a modern sign on a newer one-story building came into view: “IRC Lab-SWIFT,” it declared in large green letters. I’d come to check on the progress of this initiative of the Northwest Innovation Resource Center, a Bellingham-based nonprofit that helps entrepreneurs build innovative businesses in Northwest Washington. It had planted its latest physical shared space on the inside edge of what is today called SWIFT (Sedro-Woolley Innovation for Tomorrow) Center, run by the Port of Skagit.

Fusion energy. Sustainable aviation fuel. Ocean monitoring.

All in a shared workspace and tech startup lab tucked into a forested area of Skagit County, WA from the Northwest Innovation Resource Center.

My first Business Matters newsletter for @cascadiadaily.com, available to subscribers today.

Image showing a clipping of an email newsletter: Happy Birthday — to us! It’s a notable day in our Bellingham newsroom: Today marks the fourth anniversary of CDN Vol. I, Issue I, our print newspaper, which hit the streets and coffee shops of Whatcom and Skagit on March 2, 2022. We had been online for more than a month by then, but the rolling of the presses in Mount Vernon was a special occasion. Particularly so for me, a veteran of four decades in the news business who still had some amount of ink flowing through his veins up on launching CDN. Includes a photo of CDN's Jaya Flanary holding up a copy of the first printed CDN at Skagit Press in Mount Vernon, WA.

It's a doubly auspicious day for @cascadiadaily.com: the first subscriber-only newsletter (this regular one from Exec Editor @ronjudd.bsky.social looks Inside CDN) and the fourth Cascadia Daily News print anniversary.

More focused newsletters, and more hyper-local coverage, ahead for Northwest WA.

Briefs: Tam Tam Pizza and Aegis Games expand, new Japanese restaurant opens | Cascadia Daily News Business news for Whatcom and Skagit counties

Jam-packed, group-effort Business Briefs from @cascadiadaily.com staff for the third week in a row. Pizza! Japanese! Gardens! Beer! Piroshky! Coffee! Plus ... a bank.

Catch up on Northwest Washington #business news in one carefully balanced recipe. www.cascadiadaily.com/2026/feb/26/...

Twitter: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) YouTube video by LastWeekTonight

And this is largely why I — and many other writers & journalists — gave up on Twitter/X after investing years into the platform.

John Oliver has the (entertainingly delivered) receipts.

Once a social media platform is enshittified, it's hard to unshittify. youtu.be/p7ZG_xWYLzI?...

CDN offering new subscriber-only newsletters | Cascadia Daily News Cascadia Daily News is excited to launch a new newsletter initiative featuring exclusive content for subscribers. Starting in March, six content-specific em ...

More detail of the half-dozen subscriber-only newsletters from @cascadiadaily.com starting next month: health care, education, prep sports, arts & entertainment, business and the CDN newsroom behind the scenes.

And we'll be a bit more personal there, too. www.cascadiadaily.com/2026/feb/22/...