News / Clark County News

From the Newsroom: Even on slow days, we’re busy

By Craig Brown, Columbian Editor

Published: June 25, 2022, 6:02am

Although news is never routine, I would say that the last few weeks have been typical for Clark County and for The Columbian. There has been a decent amount of news, and our newsroom has been close to fully staffed.

But what is typical these days? I thought I would try to find out, so I did a little research to see how much we had produced between May 15 and June 15. Because not all our systems can search that way, I had to make some approximations, but here goes:

Approximately 240 local news stories. When I queried our database, the total was 362, but that included many of the “skyboxes” and “teases” on the front page that lets you know what is inside the paper.
451 local photos created. These are the total number of photos input into our archive; not every photo was published.
85 photo assignments completed.
828 pages published, including extra pages in the e-edition of our daily paper and our Monday e-edition. This count includes advertising sections we produce, plus the Sunday comics.
52 free newsletters sent, not including the breaking news alerts. If you haven’t subscribed, visit www.columbian.com/newsletters to learn more.
2,400 posts to The Columbian’s Facebook page. This is an estimate; we had 2,448 posts in May, and 1,157 posts in the first half of June, which is the only way I knew how to measure it without hand counting.

And that is not including content we posted on Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.

I thought I would share some of the local work that I liked the best:

A May 22 story by Dylan Jefferies about Vancouver’s efforts to clean up homeless camps around the city. The story answered a top-of-mind question for readers, judging by the questions and comments I hear, and explained how and why the camps were cleaned up and what happens to the people living there.
A May 25 story by Will Campbell about a local software company, Toolbelt, and its efforts to assist software developers in Ukraine. Not only are the Ukrainians at risk of coming under fire, they also have to worry about their contracts being canceled by Western firms who fear they can’t deliver. The story was played on A1 but got buried with breaking news about the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting.
A May 29 story by Monika Spykerman about Jae’lynn Chaney, a plus-size travel blogger and social media influencer. Chaney has led an interesting and challenging life, and found success on her own terms. I thought it was a terrific read.
A series of stories throughout June by our Sports reporters profiling the all-region spring sports athletes. People who say media never write about the good kids should pick up the sports page; there they will find all sorts of interesting feature stories about young people, their accomplishments and their aspirations.
In celebration of Pride Month, Hope Martinez has been profiling members of the LGBTQ+ community in our weekly “Working in Clark County” profile. Giving a voice to people who are under-represented in the public eye are an important part of what newspapers do. And, their stories are just plain interesting!
Education reporter Griffin Reilly chose “Finding a path” as the theme for an interesting June 12 series of vignettes about this year’s high school graduates. Every year, we try to pick a different theme or approach for this and find a variety of students to write about. We don’t want to always write about the five most brilliant and academically successful kids in Clark County. This year’s group faced unique struggles in their own way, and found paths to graduation.

It’s rewarding to be able to tell all these stories. Thank you for being our audience.

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