National Newspaper Week: CGN reporters share experiences

Nathan Wilson

Reporter

The first time I started thinking about problems outside of my own was during my junior year of high school. Back in Chicago, I took Mr. Hancock’s class on environmental science. At first, I dreaded trudging up six flights of stairs every other day, but I learned how the natural world functions and how humans have thrown it off balance. The fear, helplessness and anger that I felt because of climate change — because of the greed driving it, often leading to disparate impacts — catalyzed my career trajectory.

In 2020, I began my time at the University of Oregon as an environmental studies major. I loved it, but I also didn’t see a clear path forward. I believed, and still do, that climate change requires radical action, and I didn’t know how to contribute. After nearly switching to philosophy, I decided to double-major in journalism my sophomore year. My mom made a conscious effort to bombard me with complex words throughout my childhood, so I told myself I’d have a knack for stringing them together and building awareness.

I’ve learned, grown and developed other interests since then, but I haven’t wavered in my commitment to what journalism should be. Journalism should give a voice to the powerless, it should inspire progress, it should enforce accountability and it should serve as a bastion against injustice. I’m still fixated on climate and the environment, but all injustice intersects. Exposing injustice, and the solutions to those problems, is what motivates me as a reporter.

Kelsie Cowart

Reporter

My favorite part of the work that we do here is feeling like I am helping my community, at least in small ways. One example of that is when I interview new business owners, many of them giddy at the opportunity to offer their services to the community and excited about doing something they love in a place they love. It feels great to be able to spread the word about their passion, to tell people about something they maybe haven’t seen here before or have new options explore, and to see my hometown growing in new ways.

There are the more daunting parts of the job as well. It’s never escaped me that people from all over the region are looking to our paper, our writing, to learn about (and then form opinions on) so many different things that go on here. It’s our responsibility as journalists to provide accurate, fair and truthful information to our readers, because we know they are going to go forward with that information and make decisions, have conversations and take action (whether that’s making comments on social media, asking questions at local government or school board meetings, or simply deciding to go shop at a new local business). I, nor does anyone at Columbia Gorge News, take that responsibility lightly. Sometimes to do that, it means having to learn about some very complicated topics very quickly to be able to write about them in an accurate but understandable way (as a local education reporter, my first time writing about the annual school district budgeting process made my head spin a bit — I was an English major in school for a reason).

At the heart of it, what we do here is about the community. It’s the community who we write for and who we represent. And that will always be important to me, because it’s the community I’ve spent my entire life calling home.

Noah Noteboom

Sports editor

I always thought I would play sports in college. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. My passion for it never went away and I have always been drawn to the court, field, arena or any other athletics venue. It felt comfortable being around athletics. I couldn’t play and didn’t have the qualifications — or time — in college to coach, so I wondered what was the next best thing to get me close to the action. I found a position at Lane Community College’s The Torch, the student run newspaper on campus. I was the sole sports reporter and I covered all the home athletic events. I interviewed coaches, athletes, students and reported scores and statistics. That is where it all got started.

As time went on I continued to write different types of news articles. When I got a job at Columbia Gorge News in 2021, I became more of a general news reporter. I enjoy storytelling and Columbia Gorge News has given me a platform. Today, I manage the sports pages in the newspaper and have come to learn the power of a sports photo. Many of us conjure up our own image of what we are reading, but when you actually see an image of the athlete scoring a goal or high-fiving a teammate, it adds another layer of depth and personality. The “characters” in the story come alive and you begin to realize these athletes are more than just numbers on the back of a jersey. High school athletes do not get paid, and schools do not draw large revenue streams from athletics events. High school sports is about passion and every athlete has a different story about how they ended up on the field or court.

Aileen Hymas

Freelance reporter

When I was 11 years old my parents gave me a tape recorder for my birthday.

I think I was supposed to use it for piano, but instead, I mostly recorded broadcasts of myself interviewing my siblings on the slow setting so the normal playback speed made our voices sound like squeaky mice reporting the news.

Imagine me that fall starting sixth grade: A quirky, Tolkien-quoting kid with wacky curls that stood on end. While my peers sported sleek looks from Abercrombie and Fitch I was still pretending my beloved turtleneck and leggings in matching leopard velour weren’t an inch too short on my wrists and ankles.

Them: Reading Teen Vogue, discussing the Jonas Brothers, applying eyeshadow.

Me: Making mouse broadcasts, too attached to my albatrosses to give them up for the new rules of tween society.

In the end, it wasn’t the tape recorder that saved me, but how the format of the interview reframed my world. I learned that people love talking about themselves. I didn’t have to look like them or be like them at all. Everyone has a story, and with a few questions, the story can bridge the space between me and them.

Chelsea Marr

Publisher / owner

I’ve always grown up with newspapers in the household. Maybe be it’s a generational thing, but it is sad that our news is not shared among families the way it once was —  a family meal where adults and children nourished their bodies and their minds with the news of the day.

Today, many people, my son included, consume news on a smartphone. Yes, we have instant by the minute updates, and I agree this is amazing. However, news on the smart phone, let’s just say Google, is widely generated from hometown newspapers. We do the work, but they get the bite.

The fate of our newspaper industry relies on community support by subscribing to your local newspaper. And like many local shops who compete with big box and online stores, we too compete for our share of revenue.  We are local, we promote local and we rely on local support.

I regularly wonder why I chose the newspaper industry for a career, but I was sucked in the moment I started. I started in advertising and although other jobs came along, I constantly found myself loyal to the industry. Maybe it’s the unknown of what happens next? Perhaps is the pivot of our industry and the ability to make our work valuable to those we serve. Our work is hard and difficult, but it is also rewarding. This industry is not for everyone, but it allows us to serve our communities the way a public official would. It is why we work to make the towns we serve, the towns we love a better place to live.

Flora Gibson

Reporter

As a teenager, I didn’t plan to become a journalist. I was devouring thrift store ecology textbooks and planning a career in field biology. But in 2022, I decided a journalism internship sounded like more fun than anything else in town, and that was that.

To be fair, my parents were a reporter, photojournalist and editor; and a reporter, poet and novelist, so storytelling was probably my fate. I happen think that’s wonderful luck.

I don’t know of any other career where “holding power accountable” is a pretty common shorthand job description. Or where I might speak to the world expert on Vaux’s Swifts, port staff, senators, fire chiefs, police officers, local craftspeople and artists — and, of course, my local ecologists and field biologists — week after week.

I started out to have fun, and stayed because I learned the oak forests I grew up in have lost all but an estimated 10% of their extraordinary, floriferous understory to fire suppression and grazing; read about fires growing to scorching intensity in the degraded land; met local activists fighting for causes I’d never even heard of; and heard stories of local history that were never written down before, and might have been lost within decades.

I also learned that environmental injustice intersects with every other form of human pain in our community.

I try to hold space for all these voices and stories. I believe we often destroy what we fear or misunderstand, and to understand an issue we often need its full story. You can read all the information I’ve found, hear what I’ve heard, and make your own decisions about what to believe and where to take it.

Stories can open the world to us all, for better or worse. I’m an idealist, I’m guess, but I’m here for that.