Each week on The Newsfeed, host Paris Jackson and a team of veteran journalists dive deep into one topic and provide impactful reporting, interviews and community insights from sources you can trust. Each day this week, this post will be updated with a new story from the team.
Archivists warn magnetic media crisis could mean losing history
By Jaelynn Grisso, story published 09/28/2026
VHS and other magnetic media empowered people to record everything - from public spectacles to home life. But the tape and media are degrading, and archivists are sounding the alarm that history will be lost if they aren’t saved.
MIPoPS, or Moving Image Preservation of Puget Sound, works with a range of organizations in the region to preserve their magnetic media, such as VHS or audio cassettes.
Magnetic media degrades more quickly than other media types like film. For example, a standard VHS tape only lasts for 10 to 30 years. That’s why the Library of Congress estimates most magnetic media will need to be digitized and archived by 2032.
Acting executive director Libby Hopfauf said it’s also important to preserve this media specifically because of the role it played in giving more widespread access to recording.
“Film was really expensive for a while,” Hopfauf said. “So, really, only people who had money could afford to buy equipment and record their own stories. Then when video was introduced, a lot more people were able to purchase the equipment and all of their tapes that they had. It was also more portable, so it's easier to carry around and tell your own story. And that's just really important because a lot of communities who didn't really have a voice and recorded history, like in moving image recordings, were able to document their stories and their cultures and their experience.”
MIPoPS has already digitized more than 12,000 tapes, but Hopfauf says there are thousands more to go before the 2032 deadline.
“Since magnetic media is actively dying, there's a lot of urgency around that to help support those preservation efforts before time runs out, and then important, unique content is lost forever,” she said.
From Film Festival to Film Center: Tasveer’s Next Chapter
By Venice Buhain, story published 09/29/2026
What launched more than 20 years ago as the annual Tasveer South Asian Film Festival now has a permanent home with the aim to build community.
Tasveer bought the century-old building in Seattle’s Columbia City neighborhood in 2025, after the beloved Ark Lodge Theater closed after 12 years in operation. The $3 million building was purchased with the help of a grant from 4Culture, which manages the county’s lodging and arts tax revenue.
“It was a 15 year long dream that we harbored to have our own space and create our own, art space and do our own events,” Tasveer co-founder and executive director Rita Meher said.
Meher co-founded the Tasveer South Asian Film Festival to focus on South Asian stories in the aftermath of 9/11.
“We saw there was a lot of hate and xenophobia, homophobia, Islamophobia in everywhere. Even I was I experienced some hate incident in Seattle, which is hard to believe. So that moment kind of changed me. And when my friend said, we should do something and start an organization to create a dialog around important social justice topics, I jumped on an idea,” Meher said.
Meher thought that film was an ideal medium to build a platform.
“You don't have to always understand the language,” she said. “An image can speak thousand words and it permeates deeper and widely very quickly.”
"No offense to books, but reading a book... you do it so single, sitting by yourself, but watching a film you can watch with the whole community and talk about it,” she said.
In the two decades since Tasveer was founded, the small organization has grown its impact. It is the only Oscar-qualifying South Asian film festival, and gets represented at major film festivals, including Sundance and the Toronto International Film Festival. But its core mission has remained largely the same.
“The original mission to inspire social change to film arts and storytelling,” Meher said. “That baseline is always there. But how we do it and how we adhere to that mission always evolve with time.”
The big change with the new building is that the organization is more accessible and can provide more opportunities for all of Seattle’s communities.
“Even though we are we started out to serve South Asian community, we are serving wider community that needs our space, our platform and tell their stories. And and we need also our community's help to help us stay in business and continue on. And yeah, it's a great place to come watch an independent film,” Meher said.
The 2026 Tasveer South Asian Film Festival runs October 13 through 18 at the Tasveer Film Center at 4816 Rainier Ave. S. in Seattle’s Columbia City neighborhood.
Sticky notes become thousands of tiny canvases for this Seattle artist
By Taylor Mirfendereski, story published 09/30/2026
Most sticky notes don’t survive the week. They hold a grocery list or a phone number and then end up in the trash.
Clare Johnson has kept hers for more than two decades.
Every night before bed, the Seattle artist draws one moment from her day on a 3-by-3-inch Post-it and adds a few words. It might be a swim with her dad, a friend’s joke, a bad migraine or a deeper thought.
“I thought it would be amazing to document my life in something that was meant to be thrown away — that was disposable,” Johnson, 45, said. “Instead of throwing them away, I save them forever.”
She calls the project “A Life in Sticky Notes.” The collection now contains more than 6,700 notes, a record of most of her adult life. This spring Johnson’s collection filled a Pioneer Square gallery. Now, she’s sharing the project in talks across the state through Humanities Washington’s Speakers Bureau, where she encourages audiences to hold on to small moments and create daily rituals of their own.
“It’s really a memoir, but a visual memoir … one that happens in real time, one night at a time,” Johnson said. “It gives me this great joy to complete a little art project at the end of the day and communicate something that I’m excited to share or to remember for myself.”
The big moments of her life are in the collection — her divorce, health problems and a move across the ocean — but they’re not what stand out among the thousands of notes. Many of the notes save the smallest moments that got her through the hard years.
“I won’t necessarily forget that my mom had cancer at a certain time … but I might forget this really delightful interaction that I had with a stranger,” Johnson said.
Johnson started the project in 2005 as a 23-year-old graduate art student in London. The idea began with grief.
After a close friend died suddenly, Johnson, who paints and does ink drawings, said she found herself unable to make anything. What finally got her working again was a pack of sticky notes.
“Making those little paintings on Post-it notes felt almost like me tricking myself into feeling like art was approachable again by using this really small format,” she said. “I really like that intimate square, small size. It’s very ordinary.”
The ritual that grew from it has helped her in other ways, too.
Johnson is neurodivergent and has a condition called visual snow syndrome, which fills her vision with tiny flashing dots, even with her eyes closed. Bedtime has been a struggle since she was a child.
Drawing before sleep gave her “some distraction, some safety,” she said.
“It’s both an art project and a very personal ritual that I designed for myself and my own brain and my own needs,” she said.
It has also helped her feel seen.
“I needed a way to both hold memories and make my life feel visible as a queer person, whose history has been actively erased,” she said.
When Johnson’s exhibition opened in May, strangers found pieces of themselves in it. One woman emailed her about a sticky note that simply says “clean sheets!” It made the woman think about changing her sheets more often, Johnson said.
“This project shows how many little tiny things are inside each person that we would never know about and maybe still can’t even understand,” she said. “Little moments have the power to be wonderful, even when other things are difficult.”
Tonight, she’ll save one more.
Dolly Parton’s legacy of giving books to kids broadens in WA
By Paris Jackson, story published 10/01/2026
As people grieve the loss of country music legend and humanitarian Dolly Parton, her legacy continues to touch lives in Washington.
Parton’s Imagination Library of Washington and Page Ahead Children’s Literacy Program recently announced a new partnership.
It restores the distribution of books to thousands of King County children thanks to new private and public funding.
“What I loved about Dolly’s program from the beginning is just that it’s so inclusive. It’s really child-centered. It’s focused on getting books into the hands of kids. The book comes to the child’s house with their name on it. Not their parent’s name, it's their name. Which if you remember being a little kid getting mail at your house is pretty exciting,” Page Ahead Executive Director Susan Dibble said.
The free program is open to children from birth to 5 years old. Each month, they receive a book tailored to their age and development.
Dibble says the thousands receiving books include families with children previously enrolled in the program.
“Right now, it is about 16,000 children in King County and that number is growing rapidly, especially with attention around Dolly’s passing and people really learning that the program has been restarted in King County,” Dibble said.
Dibble says registration is still open, click here to apply.
