Happy to be back at the paper; proud to provide an important service to you

By STEVE CHRISTENSEN

    I ran into an old friend coming out of Walmart the other day. Yes, I hate myself every time I go in, but I do occasionally shop at Walmart.
    Of course, it’s no better than Amazon; they both get way too much of my money. The only benefit to Amazon is that I can shop in my underwear.
    It’s the multi-national corporation that I object to. It would be nice if I could give my money to a local business, but sometimes that just isn’t possible. I try to. I really do.
    Anyway, I stopped to have a conversation with this old friend of mine. Old meaning I’ve known him for a long time, but come to think about it, we are both pretty old.
    He asked me if I liked working at the Sun Advocate again. For those of you who don’t know, I was editor of the Sun Advocate in the late 1980s. I took a brief break from the paper for 25 years to work for Carbon County. I’ve been back at the Sun Advocate for going on four years. For most of that time I just contributed an occasional feature article on some past adventure or some recent travel experience.
    For the past couple of months I’ve been doing some reporting. The paper has a new editor and he seems to like me, or at least like that I know what I’m doing.  I think.
    It’s difficult to find qualified reporters in a rural community.
    That’s what the old friend was asking about. “How is it to do something that isn’t fluff?” he asked.
    He is calling feature stories “fluff.” That’s different than hard news. Hard news is something like taxes (that you have to pay) or government projects (that you will probably never benefit from).
    To answer his question, I like it. It’s nice to be back in the middle of things. While we most likely won’t have something as exciting as Watergate, occasionally there is something that gets pretty exciting.
    For example, the mammoth was found in Huntington Canyon the same day I started working for the paper, back in 1988. Then we had an earthquake. Wow, I thought to myself, this is really going to be a great place for news. Other than having a sheriff resign in the middle of his term, those were probably the two biggest events during my tenure as editor.
    Even so, the newspaper is an historical record. When someone wants information about some event, the only place to find that is usually the newspaper. For many people it’s the only way of keeping up on what’s happening in town or with the government entities. Even when an article is only worth a few paragraphs, it’s still part of the historical record of the community. We take our charge seriously. With limited resources, we cover everything we possibly can.
    Yeah, I like being part of the newspaper and part of that process. I can’t go to coffee without someone wanting to talk about something I’ve written, or something that’s going on at the paper.
    I don’t know how many times I’ve explained about the recent publisher changes and about the new editor.
    Everyone wants to know what happened to John Serfustini. Nothing. He just got tired. He’ll be back. Probably in a different capacity, but he’ll be back. You haven’t heard the last from Serfutini.