Look sharp

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

Couple thoughts in my head today. I’ll see if I can string them together in a logical sequence. If not, I’ll take the ADHD way out and cobble together disparate ideas with a couple of asterisks.

First, I think we’re going to pick our new columnists this week. I believe I’ll make initial selections in the beginning of the week and pass around finals to the editorial staff—hopefully before the weekend.

I got a lot of feedback as to what we should do with that space back from the community. There were basically three schools of thought on the matter: Either have a single independent columnist (sort of like Bruce Van Dyke in the back of the paper), a left and a right columnist (as we’ve had in the recent past), or only have a liberal columnist (as there is so much conservative commentary in the other media). The bottom line is that the vast, vast majority want us to continue with the way we’ve been doing it—only better.

Speaking of feedback, I got a bunch of it this week over a restaurant review we ran last week. Let me say this clearly: There are all kinds of newspapers, pamphlets and magazines in this area that posture their advertising as articles and stories. We don’t do that. It is never my job, other editors’ jobs or freelance writers’ jobs to promote any business, be it local, big or small. It’s not our job to pretend objectivity or balance or that we can be absolutely comprehensive. It is our job to write about our experiences from our idiosyncratic and independent points of view and to be honest as possible. If we have conflicts of interest, we avoid or disclose them. We write for our readers and nobody else. I don’t know how else to say this: We put out the best newspaper we can with the knowledge and resources we have.

On the other hand, sometimes we just want to look at pretty pictures.

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Afterthought. (Just kidding.)