I took a long Father’s Day weekend to visit my amazing daughter and her family in Medford, Ore., and also was off on Juneteenth, so there hasn’t been a lot going on in my office this week. Instead, I will use this space to catch you up on a couple of other recent developments.
You may recall that I previously shared we were successful in our application to host a Murrow News Fellow. This state-funded program, administered by Washington State University, puts 16 journalists to work in various locations around the state for two years, reporting important stories that aren’t getting told in today’s withering news media landscape.
Our application, submitted in conjunction with The Daily News in Longview, was for a reporter to cover the myriad of issues surrounding the Columbia River. We want someone with big-picture thinking, who can see the river as an entire ecosystem and economy, not someone who just sees one tiny aspect of it.
I think we have found our person! Last week, I got word that Henry Brannan had accepted our offer. Henry is a Portland native with fond memories of spending summers in Woodland fishing with his grandfather. He’s currently employed as a Report for America fellow, covering rural health care in the beautiful yet impoverished Shenandoah Valley of Virginia for two public radio stations/news websites. He is so excited to join our newsroom he sent me 13 pages of story ideas after his interview.
His tentative start date is Aug. 19, as he has to wind up his fellowship June 30 and relocate back to the Northwest. You can look for his stories starting somewhere around Labor Day.
Boosting our website
One of the important things I don’t write much about is the technology backbone that we rely upon to produce and distribute our content.
Brian MacKay, our information technology director, recently said his group is working on major upgrade to our website, www.columbian.com. As I understand it, we have outgrown our old technology solution. Our online content and audiences have both increased substantially. So we are in the process of upgrading some company-owned equipment and also moving web hosting to a vendor that handles bigger sites. The improvements will be happening over the next few weeks.
Brian says our online presence will look the same, but our readers may notice that web pages and other elements load faster. In addition, customers will get fewer error messages when the site is busy, such as my least favorite, the dreaded “404 error.”
Statewide voters guide
The Office of the Secretary of State works with county auditors, such as Clark County’s Greg Kimsey, to publish an official voters’ guide before primary and general elections. The guides are useful, but are limited to official wording of initiatives and candidate statements provided by the candidates’ campaigns, without being subject to editing or fact-checking.
This year, Seattle-based Cascade Public Media decided to produce a statewide voters guide that vets the statements and can be updated. They reached out to us, and we agreed to participate by providing information on local races. The guide is scheduled to be online before July 19, when the primary ballots are to be mailed.
By the way, even if you haven’t heard of Cascade Public Media, you likely are familiar with its products. It owns Seattle’s public television station, KCTS-TV, which is carried locally by Comcast Xfinity, and Crosscut, a Northwest-focused news site whose stories are regularly featured in The Columbian.
To me it’s a no-brainer to try to partner with other sites to present as much information as possible to our readers.
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