After weeks of negotiations, in one of the biggest moves in recent National League of Kitsap Journalism history, the Kitsap Sun has traded 17-year veteran reporter Josh Farley to a Seattle Area Fusion Energy Start Up Company’s Communications Department for an undisclosed package of free agents and future early-round draft picks. The news was announced mid-last month through the @byjoshfarley social media channels. Josh has worked as a journalist in this town for nearly two decades. He was drafted to the minor league club North Kitsap Herald in 2003. He was brought up to the majors by the Sun in 2005 and has been with that team ever since. Over his near-20-year career, he has gone on to win multiple first-place awards for his reporting. His work has been published in an array of local, regional and national publications. He founded the annual Bridging Bremerton festival and a monthly series of interactive Story Walks. He is also the creator and host of the Kitsap Quiz Night local trivia show and the Bremerton Beat Blast online series. In the spirit of the Beat Blast, we caught up with Josh at his latest Story Walk for five stories about his career in journalism…
NO. 1) I met Josh Farley in October of 2005 on a job interview. I was training to become his replacement at the end of his time as a reporter at the North Kitsap Herald. Josh had just gotten the job at the Kitsap Sun. Even back then, everybody loved Josh Farley. Parents. Coaches. Kids. Administrators. Politicians. He’s got that wholesome, curious, do-no-wrong demeanor. You could imagine all of their chagrin when I showed up to cover school board meetings with a mohawk.
WHAT IS YOUR BACK STORY, YOUR HISTORY, BEFORE YOU GOT TO THE HERALD? Well.. grew up in Portland Oregon. My parents owned a nursery. I got The Oregonian every day, and I would read writers like Tom Hallman Jr. and Richard Read. And I just fell in love with it. I’m still in love with it… So I ended up going to California for school. I went to a small liberal arts college called Saint Mary’s College and that’s where I met my wife, Rosi, and she’s from up here. I’ve come to Puget Sound my whole life, so when she said she was from here, I said, ‘Sign me up, I would love to live up here.’ I still love living up here. We moved into what was her folks’ place that we just rented from them. Then it was all about, ‘Hey, you gotta get a job somewhere.’ And, just like you, Joe Irwin took a chance on me at the North Kitsap Herald. I didn’t have a lot of experience, I had edited my college paper, but I had gotten a business degree. I just loved writing. I remember I would go to small concerts in San Francisco and write to the alt weeklies, saying “Hey I wrote this…” Most of the time it was “Thanks but no thanks.” But, you know how it is, you just have to be persistent and fight for it.
NO. 2) After two years at the Herald and six years at the Sun, Josh started hosting monthly Kitsap Quiz Nights, a local news trivia live show at the Manette Saloon. Farley carried that idea of live journalism through the regular quiz nights and went on to found the annual Bridging Bremerton festival as well as monthly interactive Story Walks around the county in 2015. Last month, he was out in 28 degree weather on a Saturday morning, walking the frosted grounds of the Seabeck Conference Center, talking to a crowd about the history of Seabeck with the center’s executive director Chuck Kraining.
SPEAKING OF PERSISTENT, HOW AWESOME TO HAVE MORE THAN A HUNDRED PEOPLE SHOW UP IN 28 DEGREE WEATHER TO LEARN ABOUT THE HISTORY OF SEABECK THROUGH ONE OF YOUR STORY WALKS? I really just sort of function as a connective tissue. You know, like, this is not rocket science. What it is, is that people want to be a part of their community. We learned that especially through covid. They just want to be plugged in. They want to be in the know. And so there is a place for that. I like the fact that journalism can take many forms. Being a tour guide to local history, local lore, current events, contemplating the future, it can all fit within that buffet of what a news media organization can do for its local community. And it’s sad because I think we are losing that in a lot of places. So I think people are starved for this.
HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT LEADING THESE STORY WALKS, DO YOU GET NERVOUS? I used to be more so than I am now… But I still get the jitters, if you don’t get the jitters there’s something wrong with you. It was actually Trivia Night that started it. I had this horrifying experience in seventh grade where I ran for class president. I thought I had my speech memorized and then, literally, blank stares. And I just had this ‘oh shit’ moment of “I am screwed. I don’t know what I’m supposed to say right now.” For years, I was terrified of public speaking. So in 2011, I started Kitsap Quiz Night and got in front of a crowd for the first time. I still fumble my words a lot, I still stumble, but you just gotta fake it til you make it, you know. And so, I started Story Walk in 2015. The first one was in January. The towering sequoias on either side of Veneta… We got like 80 people that came out, I was shocked. So clearly there was an audience and we had done something right. Over the years, I got a megaphone out of the deal…
I SAW THE NAME WRITTEN IN SHARPIE ON THERE AND WAS WONDERING WHO IT BELONGED TO. Robin Henderson gave this to me. He was like, “No, no, it’s yours. You’ve used it a lot more than I ever would.”
NO. 3) During his time at the Sun, Josh won multiple first-place awards through the Society of Professional Journalism of the Pacific Northwest in spot news reporting, short-form and long-form features. In 2019 the SPJ of Western Washington awarded him Innovator Of The Year. In 2018, the East Bremerton Rotary named him Citizen Of The Year. Josh’s reporting on the opioid crisis was included in a PBS Frontline Documentary in 2016. In recent years, he had become a regular guest on Bill Radke’s Week In Review series on KUOW public radio and also recently appeared on KUOW’s Soundside.
HOW MANY YEARS WERE YOU AT THE SUN? Seventeen. In total. Criminal justice, covering crime and court cases and learning about that stuff was so eye opening. So… seven years of that, seven years of covering Bremerton and three years of covering the Navy. And all this other stuff kind of mixed in. Bremerton Beat Blast started in 2015 as well. I had a very inspirational year that year, where I realized, what if the paper dies? How are we gonna communicate to people? How do we maintain our status as the hub of the community? I really thought about how we are a hub. People need hubs to go to. Whether its your downtown or whatever it is, you need a place where you can go to get information to find your culture, to find your people, to be together. That’s the bottom line. So much of our lives are so isolated on devices and gaming systems and stuff with the curtains closed… Open your curtains, like, look outside! As a community, we’ve got to stay together. That’s what makes us strong and full and interesting.
WHO CARRIES THAT TORCH AFTER YOU? I don’t know. I don’t know the answer to that. That will be up to the Sun. Well, it’s really up to Gannett. They have embarked on a mission to try and preserve local news, I respect that. But times are tough and what we haven’t figured out yet, I think in all of journalism, is people are reading our stuff more than ever but we have to find a way to pay for it. And whoever solves that question should win the Nobel Prize. Cause that’s what we have to do. As I was telling somebody earlier, local news especially—not The NY Times or Fox News or something—just local news, people going showing up to city council, county commission, covering the people in power and making sure that we are holding our leaders feet to the fire… In communities that don’t have that, you know, governments, corporations tend to behave in ways that are detrimental to the community at large. They just don’t behave as well because there’s no accountability. We need that accountability, we need people minding the store, and I worry about our future that way.
NO. 4) In one of his last projects for the Sun, Josh recently completed a six-part series on Kitsap’s energy infrastructure. His new venture is as Senior Communications Manager at a Seattle area company called Zap Energy. In response to the world’s quest for a renewable clean energy source, Zap is working to build fusion-powered power generators. It’s an incredibly detailed and difficult process which could potentially change the world, and Josh says he could have a part to play in that through telling those stories.
TELL US MORE ABOUT THE NEW ADVENTURE YOU’RE EMBARKING ON… It’s just a really exciting opportunity, I would’ve gladly stayed at the Sun but this job came open. It’s communications. I’m by no means a scientist or an engineer but I am looking forward to telling the stories of what they are doing. Fusion, the idea of fusion energy as a power source, has been around for a long time. What’s changed in the past ten years or so, there was a stream of government money that was just doing a moderate amount of research and going towards this as a goal, but now there are investors, a lot of momentum and private funding that’s going into this because there is a belief that fusion can happen. Fusion is the opposite of fission. It’s nothing like nuclear power. You’re not splitting atoms, you are putting atoms together. It’s exactly what the sun does, and all the stars in the sky… Essentially, if we can recreate a star on planet earth we will have clean abundant energy almost infinitely. If you took the sun right now for instance, if you could capture just one second of the energy the sun puts out, we would power humanity for the next half a million years. I’m not kidding. But that’s the sun. How do we do that on earth and how do we confine that. It’s really super heated plasma that is created by two things coming together, hydrogen isotopes mixing with an electrical current. The company I’m working for has a very special way of how they are doing it. I could give you the fancy acronyms and everything if you want, but… Zap Energy is the company. It’s called sheared flow stabilization. Essentially, you are running plasma, and the idea is that, in this electrical current, plasma is inherently very unstable. If we can stabilize it even for very, very short amounts of time, we will produce insane amounts of energy. But that is very difficult. It’s going to take a lot of time. We don’t know how long its going to be… but it’s very exciting to be going into that. And I am a huge science nerd, as you know, so I am excited to just take on a new mission. It’s a new adventure for me. It’s a new chapter in my life. It’s very hard to leave journalism, but if I was ever gonna leave it, this is it. This is what I’d want to do.
AND THAT IS AWESOME. THANKS SO MUCH FOR YOUR TIME JOSH AND THANK YOU FOR ALL THE STORIES. Oh my gosh, it’s that easy?
WELL, WE’VE GOT ONE MORE FOR YOU… NUMBER 5, OF COURSE. THE SMOKESTACK IS ALL ABOUT PEOPLE DOING STUFF… EVERY DAY PEOPLE JUST LIKE YOU, WHAT KIND OF STUFF IS JOSH FARLEY DOING TODAY? Like today? Uhh… what are we doing today? Honestly, it’s pretty boring. I think we are going to the store. We have to get Thanksgiving stuff together, we got invited to a dinner party tonight, like a Friendsgiving, and we are making the stuffing.
PEOPLE DOING STUFF AT ITS FINEST. THANK YOU, JOSH. // BILLMAN
[The Final Story Walk for 2022 will be The First Annual Kitsap Sun Ferry Walk aboard the 11:10 a.m. Dec. 10 sailing from the Bremerton Ferry Terminal, riding the boat to Seattle, discussing the historic ‘Mosquito Fleet’ and talking with experts about what’s next for the ferry system.]
[The next Kitsap Quiz Night will be at 7 p.m. Dec. 15 at the Manette Saloon, 2113 E 11th St Bremerton.]
