OCTOBER 18, 2025 :: “‘What does the future of journalism look like?’ Tim throws the hardball while mics are rolling on the smokestack episode of his podcast, The B.I. Stander. Perhaps naively, I didn’t really expect him to ask that question. We run a free monthly print publication, we’re guesting on a weekly hour-long independent local podcast, in the age of an instantly updated ‘news’ cycle with an average twenty second attention span. What does that say about the future of journalism, I laugh to myself, hoping it’s not showing on my face. In an attempt to avoid cynicism, I fumble around for the funniest answer I can come up with on short notice. But in Timothy’s face, I can tell he is serious…”
That’s a moment from the notes of a story that never ran last year about this guy Timothy and his uber-local bainbridge podcast. It’s called The B.I. Stander. Every week, Timothy sits down for an hour-long conversation with someone in his community and publishes on the internet. He asked Smokestack onto the show and we were stoked. Timothy is not a journalist in the traditional sense. Technically, neither are we. He started his project, he said, as a challenge to his introverted self and as an exercise in empathy. See a couple-minute-long excerpt below and Catch the full discussion at thebistander.libsyn.com….
B.I. STANDER: …THAT’S A QUESTION THAT I WANTED TO ASK, PROBABLY THE MAIN QUESTION I WANTED TO ASK TODAY, IS HOW DO YOU HANDLE YOUR DISTRIBUTION? Smokestack: Remember when we were talking earlier about slapping up stickers for your ‘walking the dog’ thing?
SHH… THAT WASN’T ME, I WASN’T DOING THAT. Ha, ha. It’s the same concept, you go out and you do it. You make a list of places and you go deliver it. We’ve been doing it for years.
YOU’VE BEEN COMING HERE AND DROPPING THEM OFF, HERE AT THE GLOOM TOMB, RIGHT? Yeah, well upstairs above The gloom tomb at least, this is not the easiest part of the building to access. There’s a lot of secret codes to get down here. So we just drop them off up top. But, yeah, 150 locations, man. Some of those started guerrilla, just like that sticker thing.
ALLEGEDLY, HEH-HEH… Right, the alleged dog-walker-sticker incident… ha! But some of those locations, we’d ask permission and some of them we’d just go in and drop them off on the counter to see what would happen. Then we’d come in the next month and they’d say, ‘Smokestack, yeah! We’re so glad you’re back.’
YEAH, ‘WE NEED MORE…’ WE JUST GOT TIDELANDS ON THE FERRY, THAT’S A GOOD PLACE WHERE I SEE PEOPLE PICKING THEM UP. I ALWAYS BEND THE PAGE ON MY ARTICLE… Do you? That’s great. We’ve thought about that. You write for them, yeah? Tidelands? But you’ve never written for smokestack, what’s up with that? You like to write?
AT TIMES… BUT I’M MUCH MORE INTO THE GRAPHIC ARTS. Why don’t you design some stuff and send it into smokestack already, dude?!
YOU GOT IT. Alright.
WE’RE PARTNERS FOR LIFE…Okay, let’s do it… We’re gathering up as many partners as we can. That’s the other cool thing about Smokestack’s content is it’s not a staff of traditional newspaper thinking, where you have this set staff of writers and designers…
THAT’S OBSOLETE NOW… It is and it isn’t. I mean, we (me and Dan) lived it. And now we are living the after effects. But in that typical recipe you’d have this staff of people that told you what was happening in your town, correct? This thing is different in the sense that it asks you what is happening in your town? And the content is not driven by a staff of paid employees, so to speak, it’s driven by passionate people in their community.
wanna contribute to smokestack?
email: kitsapsmokestack@gmail.com
