Behind the Scenes: Community input needed for thorough news coverage

So maybe this is a good time to remind everyone that we cover Klickitat, Hood River and Wasco counties — the regions the White Salmon Enterprise, Hood River News and The Dalles Chronicle used to cover separately — as well as some of Skamania and Sherman counties.

How do we do it with a staff of five and a half? Put simply, we have help. We have readers like you who send in news items, press releases, photographs and event listings. It’s always fun to get class reunion, anniversary, theatrical and musical performance notes. I’m particularly fond of news tips that involve neighbors helping each other. And I’m grateful for our columnists Scott McKay (Senior Living), Mary Pierce (Glenwood News), Jeff Olson (Kegler’s Corner) and Jim Tindall (City Council serial).

We need more help. Particularly on the columnist front.

I’ve put out this call before and didn’t get so much as a whisper of acknowledgment. I do, however, often get complaints about the lack of coverage in some areas — but still, no one wants to take such a project on.

Maybe I made it sound too hard in the past. Really, all a local columnist would need to do would be report on the goings on of that community — periodically. You could do once a month. You could do once every two months. Or every two weeks. Maybe it’s a one-off similar to a press release. It can be written by one person or a group of people, like a civic group or club. When I was the Odell columnist, I wrote a lot (like, a lot) about what was happening at Mid Valley Elementary and Wy’east Middle School, as those are the hubs of our community here.

The great thing about writing a column is that it can be whatever you want. (Case in point: This one.) Mary’s Glenwood column is a great example of local coverage — she gets in a lot of names while talking about those organizations that are important in her community: School happenings, rodeo and club news, fundraising efforts, deaths and births, and church news, for example. Sometimes with photos!

Ideally, we would have columnists in every corner of the Gorge. So once again, I am inviting interested persons to contact me (info at the end of this column) for details, or to talk about what such a column would entail. (Please! I promise it’s fun.)

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This next part really has nothing to do with the first — I’m veering wildly off topic is what I’m saying — but is something we’ve run into lately. And as we have established, I can make this column whatever I want, so veering wildly is perfectly acceptable:

There are many, many times when we are writing a story and we contact someone for comment. And what we end up with is a simple, “No comment.”

Friends, “no comment” is the worst comment.

You absolutely have every right not to comment. We’re not arguing that point. But instead of “no comment,” explain why you cannot comment. Maybe something like, “We are not able to comment on this issue at this time due to (insert here: An ongoing investigation / this being a personnel matter / I don’t want to).”

Because when you say “no comment,” the public makes up a comment for you. And that’s how rumors start.

(I think there’s this general idea that a newspaper can make someone comment. Or that we didn’t reach out in the first place. We always reach out. We can be obnoxious about it sometimes — usually when we’re up against a deadline and we need to hear back ASAP. But like leading a horse to water, we cannot make them drink. I mean comment.)

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Contact me at 541-386-1234 ext. 109 or trishaw@gorgenews.com (you’d be surprised how many people think my last name is Shaw, incidentally) to learn more about submitting a community column, news release or event notice, or to chat about cats.