News / Clark County News

From the Newsroom: For us, it’s election season

By Craig Brown, Columbian Editor

Published: October 5, 2024, 6:10am

It’s football season. It’s pumpkin spice season.

And, for our journalists, it’s election season.

At The Columbian, we are preparing for the election in several different ways. On the news side, multiple reporters are writing stories about candidates for local and legislative offices, and their views on the issues. These stories have already begun to appear online and in print, and are directed by Erin Middlewood, our managing editor for content, and her small team of editors. An example of one of these stories would be Dylan Jefferies’ story about the 17th District Senate race, which appeared in print Sept. 28.

For statewide and presidential races, we’ll rely on wire services for our election preview stories, such as the Spokesman-Review story we published this week on the race for state insurance commissioner. It would be preferable to write our own stories on these races, but we need to concentrate our resources in areas where we don’t have other reliable reporting to present to our readers.

When choosing wire stories, we’re looking to present both the daily campaign-type story and the context stories about the issues, while minimizing the “latest polls say so-and-so is leading” stories.

Generally speaking, print readers can find these wire stories on inside pages, because we try to put our local news at the front of the paper. We have more room in print on Saturdays, so look for them on that day.

Another major part of our election coverage takes place on the opinion side. Greg Jayne, our editorial page editor, has worked hard to schedule interviews with candidates for state and local office. We strive for joint interviews, so that both candidates can be heard from at the same time.

The editorial board — Greg, Publisher Ben Campbell, Assistant News Editor Colleen Keller and me — interviews the candidates with the intention of making a recommendation to our readers on who we think would make the best elected official. We record the interviews and make them available for free on columbian.com and on our YouTube channel. So far, we’ve done 16 of these endorsement interviews this season, with more to come later this month.

Perhaps following the lead of Donald Trump, this year, a few Republican candidates have declined to make themselves available to answer our questions, including gubernatorial candidate Dave Reichert, who is not well known in this part of the state, and newcomer Brad Benton, who appears to demonstrate many if not all of the same traits of his father, former public official Don Benton. Nor has congressional candidate Joe Kent ever agreed to answer our questions over two election cycles. Rest assured that Greg made repeated attempts to schedule all of these folks.

One question I have been asked is whether we plan to endorse a candidate for president. We’ve decided against it, for the same reasons we declined to do so in 2020. We have no special access or insight into either candidate, nor has either made any proposals specific to Southwest Washington.

We don’t disclose addresses

A week or so ago, I got a call from a frequent letter-to-the-editor writer. After her most recent letter had been published, she got a quick response from an elected official who took issue with some of the comments she made in the letter. She wondered how he got her email address, and whether The Columbian had shared it.

The short answer is he didn’t get it from us. We have a firm policy that we don’t disclose addresses, physical or email, of the folks who submit letters. Nor do we give out their phone numbers. My guess is that this person had previously submitted a letter directly to the official or the agency, and thus her email address was on file. Or maybe it turned up in an internet search. But it didn’t come from us.

We don’t disclose addresses

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