The San Juan Islander
The San Juan Islander, published at sanjuanislander.com, is an online news site based in Friday Harbor, Washington, that publishes news for the San Juan Islands in the Puget Sound region of Washington State. The modern website, online since about 1999 and launched as a news site in 2000, adopted the name of an earlier print weekly of the same name that was published in Friday Harbor from the 1890s until 1914. The two publications share a name and a community, but the website does not appear to have any direct connection to the original newspaper.
The modern online publication
The present-day San Juan Islander is a digital news outlet serving island residents in San Juan County, an archipelago community reachable primarily by ferry, boat and air. Based in Friday Harbor, the county seat and the largest community on San Juan Island, the site publishes daily news for the islands, covering the local matters that affect a small, geographically dispersed population spread across multiple islands including San Juan, Orcas and Lopez.
For island communities, an online outlet fills a particular need. Print distribution across water is slow and costly, while ferries, weather, county government, schools, utilities and development decisions affect residents immediately. A website can publish announcements, reports and community information as events happen, and can be read by residents on different islands, by part-time residents, and by former residents and visitors with ties to the islands.
Founding of the website
According to the history of its print competitor, the Journal of the San Juan Islands, a competitor news website named the San Juan Islander launched in 2000 and adopted the name of the former newspaper that had published from 1891 to 1914. The online site was founded by two former Journal employees, Sharon Kivisto and Matt Pranger. Wikipedia's account of the historical newspaper likewise notes that a website of the same name has been online since about 1999 and does not appear to be connected to the original paper.
The founding by journalists who had previously worked at the established county newspaper is a familiar pattern in early online local news. The founders knew the community, its officials and its routines of newsgathering, and the web offered a lower-cost way to start a competing voice than launching a print newspaper in a small island market. The choice of a historic name gave the new outlet immediate local resonance, recalling an earlier era of Friday Harbor journalism.
The original San Juan Islander, 1891 to 1914
The first Islander was founded in Friday Harbor by James Cooper Wheeler. Newspapers.com's archive history dates its first publication to March 6, 1891. Friday Harbor, on San Juan Island in Puget Sound, lies about halfway between Bellingham, Washington, and Victoria, British Columbia. The paper also carried news from nearby Orcas and Lopez islands.
The community the original paper served consisted mostly of farmers and fishermen. Reflecting that readership, much of its content was devoted to farmers' cooperatives, commodity prices, new agricultural production methods and the movements of shipping vessels. The San Juan Islands also produced lime used for concrete, and their scenery was already encouraging tourism, all of which formed part of the paper's subject matter.
Early difficulties and character
Producing a newspaper in a remote island location in the 1890s presented practical difficulties in moving equipment and supplies. In its first issue, the Islander told readers that its keg of printing ink had been lost overboard and floated around the bay for two or three days before being found. The anecdote, preserved in archive histories of the paper, illustrates the logistical fragility of island publishing in the print era.
The paper also declared its editorial posture at the outset. It announced its opposition to Friday Harbor's other weekly, the San Juan Graphic, published by Frank L. Baum, and promised to be independent in politics and more sympathetic to the patrons of the local saloons. Rivalry between small-town weeklies, conducted in their own columns, was a characteristic feature of nineteenth-century American journalism, and Friday Harbor, despite its size, supported competing papers.
Changes of ownership and name
Wheeler published the paper under the name The Islander from 1891 to 1899. It was then bought by Fred and Otis Culver, who changed its name to the San Juan Islander. Reference sources date the run under the San Juan Islander name from February 24, 1898, to 1914, reflecting the title's use in its later years, and describe it as a weekly newspaper published every Thursday.
The paper was sold to John N. Dickie in 1913 and ceased production in 1914. Its closure ended more than two decades of publication under Wheeler and his successors, and the title then lay dormant as a living newspaper for most of the twentieth century, surviving instead in archives and in local memory until its revival as a website name at the end of the 1990s.
Archival survival of the historic paper
Although the print Islander ended in 1914, its issues survive as a historical record. The paper is listed among the titles available through the Library of Congress's Chronicling America programme of historic American newspapers, and commercial archive services including Newspapers.com and GenealogyBank hold searchable runs of the San Juan Islander from 1898 to 1914. Genealogists and local historians use those archives to trace families, property transactions and community events in the islands during the turn-of-the-century period.
The archived paper documents an economy in transition: agricultural settlement, commercial fishing, lime production and early tourism, reported at a time when the islands' population was small and news travelled by boat. For researchers, the distinction between the historic weekly and the modern website matters, because citations to the San Juan Islander may refer to either an 1890s print weekly or a twenty-first-century online outlet depending on date.
Relationship to other island media
The modern Islander operates in a media environment shaped by the Journal of the San Juan Islands, the county's long-established newspaper, whose own online site launched on October 2, 1998. The Islander's founders came from the Journal, and the two outlets have provided San Juan County with competing local news voices in print and online. In a county of small communities, the presence of more than one outlet covering county government, the town of Friday Harbor, schools and public services gives residents alternative sources for the same civic events.
The Islander also exists alongside statewide and regional media based on the mainland, for which the San Juan Islands are a peripheral part of a much larger coverage area. Like other hyperlocal online outlets founded around the turn of the century, its premise is that island news is best covered from inside the islands, by people for whom ferry schedules, county decisions and island institutions are daily concerns rather than occasional stories.
Coverage and role today
The San Juan Islander continues to publish as an online source of daily news for the San Juan Islands from its base in Friday Harbor. Its coverage serves the practical information needs of an archipelago county: local government and public meetings, community announcements, schools, public safety, development and land-use questions, the environment of the surrounding marine waters, and the events of island cultural and civic life.
Its longevity is notable in itself. A website launched around 1999 to 2000 has operated through the entire transformation of local news from print-centred to digital-centred publishing, outlasting many larger early online ventures. For readers, the name connects that contemporary service to a much older Friday Harbor tradition: a weekly that reported commodity prices and shipping movements to farmers and fishermen more than a century ago, and a modern site reporting to an island community that still depends on the water around it.
