Mailboxes at the Oysterville Post Office

It’s getting so I really don’t like picking up my mail on Wednesdays. It’s “paper day” here at the beach – the day that we used to get the ‘official’ spin on the local news, most of which was in the ‘good’ rather than the ‘bad’ or ‘ugly’ categories. And, of course, we always kept our eye out for the ‘quirky.’ In a small community there is always the quirky.

Not so much anymore. Maybe it’s that we have new reporters who are not home-grown. Maybe they have their sights set on eventual job opportunities with metropolitan newspapers (good luck with that, these days!) or maybe their experience and training didn’t cover what us country folk expect of a local paper.

Or maybe it’s more complicated than that. I know that our little Chinook Observer is part of a consortium that includes the Daily Astorian and several other small papers. And I know that the layout, among other things, is no longer done locally. So perhaps those, too, are factors. But it also seems to me that there are so many easy ways to get state, national and international news in our “media rich environment,” that our weekly newspaper could afford to err on the folksy, local side of things.

Wednesday’s Paper

I should probably exclude this week’s paper from my criticism. The front page headlines were, indeed, about local events. But there was nothing folksy or heart-warming about them. I guess I really don’t want to know how involved our local law enforcement entities are in acquiring free military surplus guns and vehicles. And I don’t really want to know that the county doesn’t have the money to do background checks on temporary workers – or even that they need to.   Those bits of information make me feel helpless and at the mercy of cultural attitudes and standards that I don’t fully understand and with which I disagree.

Reason tells me that it’s much too late to pretend that we are isolated enough from the greater world to be immune to its stresses and strains. Still, there is that illogical part of me – no doubt the biggest part – that says it doesn’t have to be that way. For starters, maybe we could just skip Wednesdays.