Musings – on the editor’s mind

Is the editor of the La Conner Weekly News a crank and a scold? Does he – me – criticize the town council unfairly, randomly or casually, without cause? Do I have an agenda or a vendetta?

I do, actually. Let me propose that I am just doing my job, sometimes more aware and sometimes less. My failure to pay attention earlier to all the details and the players around the sale of the Hedlin ballfield property has sharpened my focus. Then I was not on top of the issue, as your local newspaper editor has to be.

What does the newspaper’s editor need to be doing at government meetings? Show up, having read the agenda and supporting documents ahead of time. Watch. Listen. Take notes. Go back to the office. Reflect. Connect past and present dots. Think. Present the facts. Report. Share the connected dots in an analysis.

Just paying attention and taking those steps is doing my duty, as in the old days, when the press was called the community’s watchdog, I almost never think about my dad, but he came to mind after the last council meeting. He was a career journalist, the last 20-plus years as editor of the Toledo Union Journal, a labor weekly published by the Jeep local of the United Auto Workers.

He chose to cover city council, keeping the 10,000 members and their families current with local government.

In the 1960s Toledo was a union town with primarily Democratic Party elected officials. One day my dad’s boss, the regional UAW director, told him to stop covering council. Maybe the issue was fair housing. Maybe it wasn’t. What was certain was that my dad’s critical reporting of council meetings did not sit well with council members.

I don’t know who told me that. Not my dad. He never shared anything. I was 15 in 1970. I probably heard that story years later.

My dad had a strong integrity. He took pride in his work. He probably paid attention to details and connected the dots, because that is the job of the press. Over time facts create a pattern and from that there is perspective and actions come into focus.

It is not a matter of council members being good people or bad people or kind of unkind. It is matter of reporting what they say and do, meeting after meeting and month after month. It is a matter of paying attention.