I sometimes forget normal people don’t always understand how this crazy process works. When someone asks us for news coverage, my first question is usually, “is this newsworthy?” Newsworthy means true, interesting and relevant. Generally (particularly at this time of year when everyone is hibernating, on vacation or trying to[Read More…]
Columns
Editor’s Column: Moderation is key, even at Christmas
Moderation has been the word of the week here at the office. Moderation in diet, moderation in speech, moderation in all things. Moderation is beneficial and excess is destructive. Even drinking too much water can kill you. This, of course, is the season of excessive excess: America’s hyper-commercialized “Christmas” celebration.[Read More…]
Editor’s Column: Random thoughts this week
I should know better. Whenever I find myself falling into a cranky, judgmental, critical mindset about other people’s mistakes or bad attitudes I should know I am in imminent danger of making grave errors myself. Sometimes I catch myself in time, sometimes I don’t. The last two weeks were a[Read More…]
Editor’s Column: Halloween costumes for grown-ups aren’t fair
As a small child my Halloween costume consisted of a pillowcase with two eyes rimmed in purple marker for several years. (I wasreally short.) In third grade I dressed up as “Bad Sandy” from the “Grease” movie. (My mother would probably say that was the beginning of the end.) As[Read More…]
Editor’s Column: A little cognitive dissonance goes a very long way
I hear a sound in the ether. It’s kind of a cross between fingernails scraped across a chalkboard and the “I’m trying to blow up my engine” wail of my neighbor’s pickup truck. What is it? I think it’s a pandemic of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is defined as “the[Read More…]
Editor’s Column: News, or melodrama?
Between the fires in the western half of the U.S. that have clogged the atmosphere with smoke, the hurricanes flooding the southern states, and word that North Korea has amped up its nuclear weapons tests and has America in a bullseye, it’s starting to feel like a particularly sketchy season[Read More…]
Editor’s Column: Oh, the errors we make…
Chalk it up to “eclipse energy,” or Mercury in retrograde, or summer exhaustion, or back to school madness, but last week was a rough one for errors. My logical brain knows that’s going to happen from time to time. Major newspapers devote entire sections to corrections every day. There are[Read More…]
Editor’s Column: How about an indoor beach?
With all the turmoil surrounding the Meeker Adventure Center, I think I’ve stumbled across an alternative that might appeal to everyone. Well, everyone who craves the beach during our nine months of winter. Which is everyone, right? (We only have three months when it doesn’t snow, if we’re lucky, so[Read More…]
Editor’s Column: Crowdfunding our health
I’m waiting for permission from the Daily Sentinel to share an article about Savannah Edinger, who has lots of Meeker connections, and her recovery from a traumatic accident on I-70 that left her with serious burns and killed two of her beloved horses. Our thoughts and prayers are with her[Read More…]
Editor’s Column: What color is your news?
When I was little, I hated the nightly news, and much preferred the comics section to the front page in the newspaper. I was a kid, that’s how it’s supposed to be. News—real news—isn’t entertainment. It’s not supposed to be “clickbait.” Headlines shouldn’t be embellished just to get you to read[Read More…]
Editor’s Column: Pedestrians have rights, too
Most days I walk to and from the office. Traffic is usually a moot point, but Tuesday there was traffic. I started to cross the street at a stop sign only to have oncoming traffic pull halfway through the intersection before I’d made it across. Either they were bleeding to[Read More…]
Editor’s Column: Lemon juice is not an invisibility cloak
The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.” —Touchstone, in As You Like It by William Shakespeare. In the 1990s two Cornell scientists were inspired by a would-be thief who believed that by covering his face in lemon juice he’d be[Read More…]