OPINION: Why elections -- and your opinion -- matter

Oct. 5—Elections are always important. As longtime Spokesman-Review political writer Jim Camden explained this past summer in an insightful : Our nation's history shows us that the current year's election won't be decided as important or not for decades.

What makes this difficult when you're a newspaper editor is that with each passing day, it becomes more and more obvious that the role of media is changing. And not always for the better.

In a world filled with disinformation and "alternative facts," we need to find ways to reach more people, give them better understanding of complicated and ever-changing topics, and be a hand in helping our community have discussions. Essentially: How do we help find solutions instead of just pointing out problems?

That's where what Camden wrote in August hit the hardest. It's history that gives us the perspective we often need to understand what we might need to do next. The one thing local newspapers have almost always done well is focus on our communities: tell the stories no other news organization might tell, because they're just too darn local.

For more than 140 years, The Spokesman-Review has weathered most of the changes we've seen in the world of media, and even followed some of the fads. But the biggest lesson learned since we published our first paper back in 1883 is that being too darn local is a feature, not a flaw.

Almost a year ago, we began to talk about how we might cover the upcoming election. We needed to do more than ever. But mostly we needed to be too darn local. A lot of those ideas are going to begin showing up in our newspaper over this next week. Heck, some started today.

We've been tweaking how we handle the Opinion pages for more than five years. Though most of the changes were rolled out iteratively, many were substantial as we tried to understand the role of editorial pages in a world where getting opinion is now much easier than it is to subscribe to your local paper.

Making that even more challenging was that, at least for most local newspapers, opinions were never the primary focus. Or at least certainly not their strength. News was. The mission was spelled out right there in the first four letters of what we are. We're a newspaper, not an opinionpaper.

The biggest of those changes happened four years ago when we decided it was no longer our place to offer unsigned editorials and endorsements. How we got there is a bit of a long story, but the best part was a renewed commitment to making our editorial pages much more about our community's thoughts — focusing on being a mirror that reflects itself — by emphasizing letters to the editor and trying to find ways to include much longer "letters" about local issues that came directly from our readers and community.

In the past year, we continued our efforts to keep the focus of our Opinion page on local issues and local voices by slightly changing our "letters to the editor" policy to emphasize those exact things.

Everyday, it feels like our world is getting more and more polarized. When you couple that with how technologies are evolving and how new publishing platforms seemingly pop up daily, it's obvious there is now a never-ending cycle of opinions out there. You don't even have to look for them. They find you ... whether you want them or not.

Over the last year, we wanted to find ways to make our newspaper's Opinion pages different by going all-in on being too darn local. Part of that meant we would scale back the amount of space on our pages given to standing, weekly columnists. Yes, that means we will no longer have weekly local columnists like Sue Lani Madsen, Kiantha Duncan or writers from the Washington Policy Center, though all of them have been asked to still be a part of our Opinion pages on more of a quarterly basis.

That's because we want more opinions. From more people. From all across our community. From you and your neighbors. And even the folks who are no longer on your Christmas card list.

While many regional newspapers across the nation have stopped publishing local Opinion pages altogether, that idea isn't even on our radar. Our focus will be on printing and posting even more varied voices and their thoughts in our pages and on our website, including many more point/counterpoint packages with two different local experts weighing in on a topic, explaining their thoughts and reasoning on issues.

That's exactly what you will see today when you turn to our Opinion pages. We have smart and passionate people explaining why they are either for or against Initiative 2024, a key issue on all of our ballots this year. As we saw with that pandemic we all went through a couple of years ago, few things get people as fired up as the government's role in health care.

We have several of these pro/con packages planned between now and the election. Why? Because our readers deserve a well-rounded discourse about the things central in our life. Just as important, we all deserve to hear what our community members think about those exact things.

Which leads to another change we're making to our Opinion pages.

If you even just show a little effort in staying within our limited rules for letters to the editor, your letter is going to get published. As it is, you have to almost try to not get your letter published in The Spokesman-Review, and even then you're likely to get an email from us saying that if you will please change just one part of the letter that is almost certainly an overly egregious violation of the rules, we'll still get it in the paper.

We publish nearly every local letter to the editor we receive. When people tell us that we aren't publishing enough letters from one side of an issue or from a particular political party, it's literally because we haven't had many, or any, letters of that type. We can't publish them if no one sends them.

Still, the hardest rule for most letter writers to follow is the 250-word limit. (Though a close second is that you can only have one letter published a month.) We've received some letters that are basically novels. Some are really thoughtful, well-written and smart. Others, not so much. Either way, we know there is no way this person, or even the most heavy-handed editor, is going to get that letter anywhere near the accepted word count.

So, starting today, we're making a slight modification to that rule. Every day, we will leave the option open for a single local letter to be 500 words. We might even allow up to 700 words, if the letter is a real humdinger, but don't push it. Please aim for 500. Also, a letter writer can only have one "super" letter published in our newspaper every quarter. These longer letters will be chosen at the discretion of the Opinion page's editor, Kimberly Lusk.

We also want to use these longer letters as an opportunity for us to publish timely analysis pieces from local professionals, leaders, academics, politicians and from voices not typically heard on newspaper Opinion pages.

Our changes related to the upcoming election go further than just finding ways to make our Opinion page more local.

Starting Tuesday, there will be a new page that runs five days a week that recaps everything you need to know about the elections when you only have a few minutes to take it all in. Or if you have limited patience when it comes to politics. Either reason is acceptable. Think of it as Cliff's Notes. Or if you're young and have no idea what Cliff's Notes are, think of it as something kind of like Twitter or TikTok, only written by people who know how to conjugate a verb.

It will be a daily look at elections at all levels: local, statewide and national.

Speaking of Twitter, our newspaper hasn't done as much with social media as we once did. There are a lot of reasons for that, but one of the biggest was when the new owner of that site, before he decided a consonant was an acceptable name, began suspending the accounts of legitimate journalists he didn't like. If you've wondered why we quit updating our Twitter account back in 2023, now you know.

Looking back at that, the reason we stopped posting on Twitter was absolutely correct at that time but is no longer right for this time. We need to be back on whatever Elon Musk is calling his social media site this week so that we can do what real news organizations do: publish the truth.

Social media is now filled with more disinformation than ever before. It's also where lots of people who don't read newspapers get their news. They deserve to get factual information instead of the half-truths and even no-truths that permeate social media. Especially during an election year.

We also thought a lot about how to make social media work in a way that truly tried to reach a different audience. Let's just say our postings won't simply be a headline and a link going forward. One of the valuable lessons we've all learned from social media is that's not how you fight disinformation.

Another change to our election coverage has been extended interviews and debates with candidates that we've recorded as long-form podcasts. These recordings have been finding their way to our website and YouTube channels, but we also will be using transcripts from them to help give our journalism even deeper context.

And, last, there are our candidate debates.

We began our Northwest Passages event series six years ago as a way to bring our community together to talk about important things. But one of the biggest reasons was so that more people would attend public debates with candidates during election years. We host debates at every level of government, but one of the most important debates we get to hold in Spokane this year is for the U.S. Senate seat held by Sen. Maria Cantwell.

Why is that one so important to us?

Incumbent senators rarely participate in public debates anymore — especially those held in front of a live audience. In 2022, when we hosted the debate between Sen. Patty Murray and Tiffany Smiley at Gonzaga University, it was one of only about 10 debates that year held across the entire country for a seat in the U.S. Senate. And one of the very few held in front of live audience.

Besides, when those debates do happen in Washington, they almost always just happen in the Seattle area. Not here.

Sen. Cantwell and Dr. Raul Garcia will debate twice this year, including on Tuesday, Oct. 8, at the Myrtle Woldson Performing Arts Center at Gonzaga. The other will be Oct. 17 in Seattle. Only one of those two debates will be in front of a live local audience.

Because being too darn local is how things are done in Spokane. Whether it is an important election year or not.