Cascade PBS News (formerly Crosscut)

What you're reading

Cascade PBS News is the Pacific Northwest public-media news operation headquartered in Seattle, publishing as the news division of Cascade Public Media — the regional nonprofit that operates KCTS 9 (the Seattle PBS member station) and the Crosscut digital news brand. Crosscut was founded in 2007 by former Seattle Times editor David Brewster as one of the first US digital-native nonprofit local-news startups, and merged with Cascade Public Media (parent of KCTS 9) in 2015. The publication was rebranded from Crosscut to Cascade PBS News in 2024 as part of integration with KCTS 9 broadcast operations.

The newsroom covers Seattle city government, King County, Washington state politics from Olympia, the rural-and-Eastern-Washington perspective (an unusual focus for a Seattle-anchored outlet), tribal-nations and Pacific Northwest indigenous-affairs reporting, climate and Pacific salmon and orca coverage, housing and homelessness in Seattle, the Microsoft-Amazon-Boeing corporate-civic ecosystem, and Washington elections. Format mixes digital long-form reporting with PBS-broadcast documentary work and short-form video. The audience is engaged Pacific Northwest residents, policy professionals, and the regional public-media listener-and-viewer base.

Ownership & funding

Cascade Public Media (nonprofit). Funded primarily through nonprofit + memberships.

Nonprofit-plus-membership funding from Pacific Northwest individual donors, regional foundations (Bullitt Foundation, Seattle Foundation, Allen Foundation), and PBS-member-station support removes ad-driven traffic pressure and creates space for long-form, beat-driven regional reporting. The Cascade Public Media umbrella means the news desk benefits from shared services with KCTS 9 broadcast operations and from the broader public-media editorial-standards regime. Corporate-underwriting revenue from Pacific Northwest businesses and institutions introduces a real conflict-of-interest watch point, though public-media editorial standards firewall the news desk. Scope is regionally focused on the Pacific Northwest and Washington state, with no sports, lifestyle, or general national news. CPB federal funding is small but politically sensitive.

Where they land on the spectrum

nwsly's editorial team places Cascade PBS News (formerly Crosscut) at Center with a factuality rating of High.

Cascade PBS News sits at Center because public-media editorial conventions require named sourcing, multiple-perspective framing, and avoidance of opinion in the news report. Coverage of Seattle city government, King County, the Washington legislature in Olympia, and statewide policy fights treats Democratic and Republican actors descriptively, with right-of-reply built in. Coverage of homelessness, housing, and Pacific Northwest tribal-affairs stories is unusually substantive — the publication has won regional and national recognition for its tribal-and-indigenous-affairs reporting. Coverage of rural-and-Eastern-Washington concerns is taken seriously, which is unusual for a Seattle-anchored newsroom.

The pattern leans modestly toward the broader Pacific Northwest progressive-liberal-establishment worldview on some social-issue framings — Seattle is one of the most lopsidedly Democratic large US cities and the publication's audience reflects that — but the news report itself holds to public-media standards-desk conventions on impartiality. Coverage of the regional tech-industry stories on Microsoft, Amazon, and Boeing runs in a fact-driven register that doesn't tilt left-or-right. Factuality lands at High because the reporting is sourced, edited by experienced public-media editors, fact-checked before publication, and held to the broader public-media editorial-standards regime. The corrections record is clean.

Editorial vs news side

Cascade PBS News operates primarily as a reported-news publication with occasional first-person essays clearly labeled as such. There is no editorial board, no candidate endorsements, no signed-columnist commentary tradition in the newspaper-style sense. Public-media editorial standards tightly constrain personal-view expression by on-air and on-byline staff. The Center rating reflects the news report itself — beat selection, sourcing pattern, framing. Readers should treat the entire publication as reported public-media journalism with the regional-progressive-liberal audience worldview shaping which stories get covered, similar to how other PBS-and-NPR-affiliated newsrooms operate. There's no separate opinion lane to evaluate independently.

Why we include them in nwsly

Pacific Northwest public-media news desk covering Seattle and Washington politics.

The Pacific Northwest is a major US region with outsized influence on tech-industry policy (Microsoft, Amazon, Boeing), climate-and-environmental questions (salmon, orca, the Cascadia subduction zone), tribal-affairs and indigenous-rights policy, and homelessness-policy debates that have set US-wide templates. Cascade PBS News brings the most-substantive Pacific Northwest civic-affairs coverage of any regional source, particularly on tribal and rural-Eastern-Washington beats that Seattle Times and KIRO don't always reach. nwsly uses it for Washington state policy stories, regional environmental and indigenous-affairs reporting, and Seattle civic-affairs coverage from a public-media-standards register. Among Center sources, it brings distinctive Pacific Northwest regional depth.

Recent nwsly briefs citing Cascade PBS News (formerly Crosscut)

Coming soon — feed from /today and /catalog will populate this section.