For someone who grew up to be a journalist, when I was a kid I was terrible at writing letters. As in, I didn’t write any besides the obligatory thank-you notes after my birthday and at Christmas. At least my parents raised me that well.
Now after leading The Columbian’s newsroom for a year, I realize I haven’t been much better. In fact, I think maybe I have written one column. I like to leave the writing to my old boss, Lou Brancaccio, who has retired but still writes his popular Press Talk column on the first Saturday of every month.
But I am not sure that’s the right thing to do. One of the ideas that is currently making the rounds in journalism is that journalists need to be more transparent about what they do. This makes sense to me. I think there is a lot of confusion about who we are, what we do, and why we do it. So I’ll try to write about it regularly. With any luck it will read more like “winemaker’s notes” and less like “what they put in the sausage,” but please give me some feedback. My contact information is at the bottom of the column and on Page A2 of every print edition.
So, here goes:
The samurai incident
After working in the news business for — gasp — more than 30 years now, I can pretty much predict when a story is going to get a lot of attention. So it was with a March 3 incident in Camas where a young hairdresser, Emily Javier, called police to say that she had stabbed her live-in boyfriend repeatedly with a samurai sword she bought at the mall. She claimed she found the Tinder app on his phone and was convinced he was cheating on her. After the younger reporters explained to me that Tinder was a dating app, I was able to make the connection. The fact this involved social media, a samurai sword and an alleged crime of passion was going to make this story explode.
