About two dozen people wrote to us after last Saturday’s Hands Off protest at Esther Short Park in downtown Vancouver who were upset that we didn’t cover it.
We hear you, we understand we should have covered it and we’re working on solutions to be able to cover similar large-scale weekend protests in the future. I want to explain a little more as to why we didn’t cover it because a few reasons piled up.
The first is economics: People have figured out how not to pay for news. On average, every month, we reach about 300,000 computers and phones. Roughly 14 percent of those are paying customers. Can you imagine a restaurant that had 75 percent of customers dining and dashing? It would go out of business. But we manage to stay afloat partly by being frugal.
A few years ago, we decided to stop having reporters and editors working on the weekends to save money. There were too many weekends when having a reporter, an editor and a photographer on staff was not producing news items important enough to justify that expense. Maybe three out of four weekends, they were sitting there with not enough to do. (I worked every Saturday for almost two years as a reporter at the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, and I have personal experience with being very bored on many Saturdays.) At The Columbian, if there is an event on the weekend, we have been finding a volunteer to work Saturday and have a free weekday in exchange.
