Life on the Outside

Life in Cannon Beach!

Even the wildlife here have expensive tastes.
This baby squirrel was seen busily gorging on a chocolate-covered strawberry at a recent business event.

(Click on the image to view full size)

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I’ve been working in Cannon Beach and Seaside for the past few months now and am glad to say that — for the most part — I really enjoy being there. Aside from some insanely long days, which I hope not to repeat any time soon, I’ve enjoyed helping the staff learn new skills, become better writers and photographers and helping to guide our papers to be a newspaper people look forward to reading. Goddess knows I’ve learned a lot over these past months as well. And all of the feedback I’ve received from the community has been extremely positive too.

But I find myself in a bit of a conundrum. Knowing that each of these cities depends heavily on tourism to support  their economy, how much of our “news” should be focused on those things visitors will be interested in and how much should be focused on more traditional news. While I’ve been wrestling with this since first taking on the managing role at the two papers, it recently became more of an issue.

Last week, there was an attempted rape at one of the local hotels. I tasked our editor with covering the story — not in terms of reporting on the attack, but how often attacks at local hotels happen (maybe this was just a one time event or does it happen more often than we think), what are hotel owners doing to ensure the safety of the guests and what are local authorities doing — if anything — in light of the attack, should hotel owners and authorities be doing anything more than they already are, or are they already doing everything they can, etc.

Knowing that rape is one of the most under-reported crimes again women, I felt very strongly that our paper should cover this story. Image my surprise, and maybe even a little disappointed, when I was cautioned against running the story for fear of scarring off those genuinely important visitors. Keep in mine, we weren’t told not to run the story, but just to be cautious of how it’s covered. But this got me to thinking (always a scary thing).

When you are visiting some place on vacation and you pick up the local newspaper, do you expect that paper to have a mix of coverage, coverage that is only for the local residents or coverage specifically geared to visitors to the area.  I know when I’m on vacation, I don’t want to read that kind of bad news but does the local newspaper still have a responsibility to cover ALL of the news, good or bad?

Rather than covering the whole community, should newspapers instead only try to cover one segment of the total market? Just like magazines are specific to fashion, health, photography, cars or any other of myriad of interest, should small community newspapers take that same market-specific approach? This isn’t exactly a new idea. Segment-specific newspapers have been around as long as newspapers have. But it typically hasn’t been that way with community newspapers, which have been the vanguard of covering all of the community news the larger dailies couldn’t – or wouldn’t – cover.

What kind of newspaper do you want for your community?