Change is Good!

With 2017 half over (yes, that’s right!) and summer in full swing, here at The Times we’re giving our newspaper a bit of a fresh look, as experienced readers will notice. Maybe it was the Fourth of July, or because we’re proud to be a small-town American paper, but we’ve added some red to our formerly blue theme. I hope you like it.

Some other changes are underway, especially here on Page 4. For the past many months, we’ve featured a range of political commentary from the Washington Post news and opinion service. For a combination of cost reasons and what I feel like is an overload of political pontificating in the press, we’ve decided to offer some new, less political content starting this week from King Features Syndicate.

We’ll include a wide variety of fun stuff: cartoons, puzzles, helpful hints and other odds and ends. If you run across something you particularly like, let us know.

We’re also making some more fundamental editorial changes starting this month. Our Waitsburg reporter, Dena Martin (formerly Wood) has now gained the title of Editor. Dena will oversee the gathering of content throughout the paper, as well as continue her outstanding reporting of what’s going on in Waitsburg and around the Touchet Valley.

We’re joined for a second summer by WSU journalism student Ian Smay. Ian is a 2015 graduate of Dayton High School and is providing articles on various topics – especially sports and recreation related. He hopes to get into broadcast journalism after graduating. Ian heads back to Pullman at the end of this month. We wish him well!

Michele Smith continues to do a great job covering government in Dayton and Columbia County for The Times, along with many other subjects. And Teeny McMunn is doing a great job, as well, keeping our business afloat: selling ads, managing the books, and watching lots of other little details that I struggle with – like payroll taxes.

So what does that leave for me to do? Well, along with more puzzles and games, you will hopefully start seeing more writing from me in these pages. After all, I got into this line of work partly because I like to write. Now I’ll have more time to search for inspiration.

And, in Other News…

There’s some news going on in Columbia County that involves newspapers. It affects readers and other taxpayers in the county, so I feel like we should report on it, even though it’s partly about us:

A couple of months ago, the Columbia County Commissioners made the decision to award the annual contract for “official county newspaper” to The Times. This means that all of the legal notices the county is required to run will run here. The contract period began July 1.

The Times was approved to run legal notices in Columbia County over five years ago, but this is the first time in generations that the county government has awarded its contract to a paper other than the Dayton Chronicle.

The award was based on a bidding process, the result of which was that cost to run legal notices in The Times will be more than 40% less than in the Chronicle. My estimate is that the savings to Columbia County taxpayers will be in the neighborhood of $5,000 over the coming year.

After they lost the bid, the Chronicle’s publishers took legal action against the county, claiming that The Times does not qualify to be an “official newspaper” in Columbia County, per state law, because we are not “published” in the county.

There is no legal definition of that term, and we have argued that we are published in both counties, since we have offices and workers in both. And by the way, neither The Times nor The Chronicle is printed in the county.

Anyway, the lawyers for the Chronicle and the county are busy making their cases to Columbia County Superior Court, and a decision should be handed down soon. For the sake of the taxpayers, as well as ours, hopefully the court will uphold the county’s decision.