Back in the saddle

Welcome to this week's Reno News & Review.

Those people on the Daily Show are going to drive me crazy. Anyway, first they told me last Thursday, Sept. 25 (but that that could change) and then they told me this Thursday, Oct. 2 (but that could change, they'd let me know), so I still won't know by the time this paper is on the streets. They could elect to portray me as a fool, a genius, or just not run the segment at all. I recorded the whole interview with Samantha Bee, and I took pictures, so you know I'll be telling the whole story from my point of view in coming weeks. It was one of the more surreal episodes in my life.

School and work in the meantime are going full bore. I'm taking two awesome and challenging classes, Narrative Journalism and Entrepreneurial Journalism.

And now we have an election coming up. Is anyone paying attention yet? I'm sending out surveys to the candidates today, and I hope to have our election page up before the start of early voting. It's as much about assisting voters to make up their own minds as it is about informing our coverage. I'm constantly conflicted and mutable in my feelings about how much impact I want this newspaper to have in elections. On the one hand, I'm often told that we're the only local media people care about. I want us to be the best at what we do, but I have no illusion, and I don't want our readers to, either, that we're in any way comprehensive.

We're a generally 40-page paper, and if we tried to be one of those weekly daily-style papers you see in the cow counties, we'd be losing readers instead of increasing them by 35 percent over the last year.

On the other hand, if we don't express ourselves from our obviously biased but informed point of view, our readers are left to totally fend for themselves. And to be honest, even with our immersive news existence, sometimes we're left shrugging our shoulders when both candidates are uniformly good or uniformly bad. But what's a little alt-weekly to do?