From the editor’s desk
Published 8:30 am Monday, August 21, 2023
This is the 32nd anniversary of my becoming editor of the Chinook Observer. It’s still a great time and I hope to continue a good while longer.
The years do fly by — a cliche that is nevertheless strikingly true. As I observed to former county Commissioner Dan Markham during a beach walk with others this Sunday, I certainly had no idea in August 1991 that running the Observer would become the centerpiece of my professional life. I also had little idea about the details of what I was doing, and owe a great debt to the newspaper’s staffers at that time for keeping me afloat.
I did have a solid concept of how to pursue powerful news gathering and reporting, being the proud nephew of one of the West’s most revered journalists, Tom Bell, founder of still-strong High Country News that has expanded to cover environmental, tribal and other key issues throughout the western United States. Whereas HCN takes a telescopic view of a vast area, at the Observer, I aim for an ambitious microscopic focus on every aspect of our small but intensely interesting rural seashore county.
Around my 20th anniversary as editor, I wrote a series of articles looking at how the county had changed in those two decades. Thirty years came and went during peak pandemic, and the same observational exercise might have yielded a distorted view of longer trends. We’ll have to see if I’m still around to do a retrospective at 40 years.
Markham and I did share a few thoughts about where the county is now. Continued population growth and home building here would have been quite surprising to me at the 20-year mark, when the county’s population had stagnated for a long time. I imagine this growth will continue. Although they probably don’t think of themselves as “climate refugees,” our benign temperatures and ordinarily ample water will be a draw for generations of new residents to come. It will be interesting to see.
We also remarked on how Long Beach has prospered, in part due to the foresight of town leaders like David Campiche, who pushed for development of adequate water storage at a time when most others hadn’t yet realized the importance of having plenty in what was then a more-intensely summer-oriented resort community. We talked of the county’s periodic financial struggles, and how possible layoffs could impact an array of county services.
Ocean Park and surrounding north peninsula communities, we decided, could benefit from similar planning in light of growth. I recently tapped my economics background for an article on the vitality of the county unincorporated areas:
Looking ahead and acting on reasonable expectations are vital to any community’s success. At the Observer, it’s a key part of our mission to provide citizens with the information they need to make informed decisions about current conditions and how local leaders are responding.
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