Bays Family Irish Musicians – Sunday!

It used to be, around here anyway, that when you began a conversation, “Did you see that article in the paper….” you needed to specify which paper. Was it the local weekly (and, years ago, which local weekly) or was it a daily paper from Portland or Longview or Seattle. In recent years the possibilities may even include the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

But once you narrowed down the paper you were talking about, the conversation continued in a more-or-less predictable fashion. Now… not so much. Enter the e-editions! Suddenly, it is possible to go online to read the latest edition of many papers and sometimes that is more confusing than illuminating.

Jim Sayce

Take this week and the Chinook Observer. For us, the paper arrives in our mailbox first thing Wednesday morning – “first thing” being around nine or nine-thirty when Steve-the-Postmaster gets all the mail distributed. We may or may not pick ours up in a timely manner. Meanwhile, I sometimes check out the local news on the Observer’s e-edition. This week I was looking to see if ‘they’ used my story about Vespers with its accompanying photograph of the Bays Family. And, yes, there it all was!

Imagine my surprise when I got the hard copy of the newspaper and found that, while part (but not all) of my Vespers article was there, the picture was not. And, as I looked further, I found that the news about Tiffany Turner and Jim Sayce throwing their respective hats in the ring for Rep. Dean Takko’s seat (if it comes up) was not in the hard copy either.

Tiffany Oakes Turner

I double-checked the online version, just to see if I was hallucinating and realized that what I had seen in the early morning hours was an updated version of the newspaper that would soon be in my mailbox. I guess in days gone by there would have been a newsboy on every corner yelling “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!”

I do actually know people who do not have computers. More common, though, are people with computers who do not go online to read their newspapers. Come to think of it, neither do I most of the time. So, here we have yet another example of the uneven playing field in this fast moving, high tech world in which we live. It’s really hard to keep up…  especially considering all the bumps along the way!