As The Columbian’s faithful readers know, Editor Lou Brancaccio retired in February, though he’s continuing to write his Press Talk column every month.
With that in mind, let me belatedly introduce myself as his successor, with a few differences. First of all, I won’t be writing a regular column — we still have Lou for that! But I do want to write when we have something to share with our readers.
This seems like a good time to do that. Since Lou has retired, we have made several behind-the-scenes changes, with some job duties changed and rearranged. For example, our newsroom web expert, John Hill, is now co-leading the metro reporting team along with longtime editor Mark Bowder. That gives us more opportunity to work on what’s being called data journalism and other special projects. And I am still doing enough editing to probably annoy the heck out of both of them.
John’s shift to metro has given us the opportunity to hire an extra photographer, Alisha Jucevic, who is due to start on Tuesday. I am so excited! We have an extremely talented photo team of Amanda Cowan and Ariane Kunze (witness their recent Society of Professional Journalists honors) and having Alisha join them will give all three more time to produce their best work.
We’re also trying to engage more with readers, let them see our faces and know more about us. Recently we launched a promotional campaign, “Real reporters find real news,” featuring our reporters and photographers. I’ve spent the last 15 years leading The Columbian’s local news effort and I can say this is one of the best groups of reporters we’ve had. They’re bright, motivated and concerned.
A second phase of our reader engagement effort is some new software we purchased that helps us elicit story ideas from readers and gauge how interested readers are in those stories. We’re calling it “Clark Asks,” and it’s currently live on our website. You can see it about halfway down the home page, on the right side.
Developed originally for public radio, news organizations that are using this software report their online readers show unusual affinity for these stories, measured in terms of page views, time spent reading and shares. It allows us to ask readers to choose which stories they want covered, and then we can give the readers public credit for suggesting the idea. Some reporters have even taken the readers along to the interview.
We soft-launched it this week, and already we have almost 20 questions. One of them was something that I thought “Oh, everybody knows this,” but it’s already been asked at least twice: How did Mill Plain and Fourth Plain get their names?
At the risk of spoiling the surprise, the answer can be found on our very-cool-but-poorly-promoted history page, history.columbian.com. In 1846, Dugald McTavish of the Hudson’s Bay Co. explored the land north of the Vancouver fur trading post. He reported finding four “plains,” each separated from the next by a band of timber, with the fourth one being the only one of any size. The company later built a mill on the first plain, and the rest were numbered from there. And, there’s also a Fifth Plain! Though there’s no road by that name, Fifth Plain Creek flows through Hockinson before it dumps into Lacamas Creek.
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