News never stops and it doesn’t neatly fit into newspaper printing schedules. This is one of the main things that makes online publishing so helpful.

A good example of this happened last week when — just as we wrapped up the print edition — our western Wahkiakum County correspondent Nick Nikkila reached out to let us know there was a dramatic water rescue in the nearby community of Grays River.

Nick couldn’t leave his own house in Deep River and I turned to our news-driven north Pacific County freelancer Jeff Clemens to dive into the story. His efforts, greatly aided by an on-scene witness/videographer, joined our online news package starting just as the printing press in Astoria was rolling out the Dec. 6 edition.

As with all breaking-news content, a simple initial report was added to throughout the afternoon, culminating in this story:

www.chinookobserver.com/news/local/videos-coast-guard-makes-flood-rescues-in-wahkiakum-county/article_bf65bdc8-93b7-11ee-8e94-33a8ba988c8b.html

In the interest of getting news of this localized disaster out to a wider audience, I shared with Seattle and Portland news broadcasters, and it became part of overall coverage of extensive flooding in western Washington and Oregon.

The story still leads our top-10 list online as of early this Monday morning.

Cooperation between news organizations is an important and growing part of our industry’s constant efforts to maximize our usefulness to the public. We’ll have another example of this in the Dec. 13 edition — an excellent High Country News story about conflicting public views of the Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission.

We’re excited about news and do everything we can to provide readers with unique, useful and entertaining coverage specific to local interests. The Chinook Observer is a 123-year-old community asset that remains accountable to you. Thank you for your support!