Margin Notes: Snow, Roundabouts, Media

The Ed Hendler ("Cable") Bridge between Kennewick and Pasco, Washington was observed as snow started to fall again on 31-December-2009

KENNEWICK, WASHINGTON - It may be winter, but I'm running into more snow than I really expected in my travels. Snow is not uncommon in the Tri-Cities, but I wasn't expecting to have to shovel the walk here three times in as many days. Rain has now washed the snow away (as would have been expected after the first snowfall), ending the winter wonderland but making everything a lot easier here, almost like a different world.

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When people say that eastern Washington state is a different world than western Washington, they are usually referring to the climate or the Perot-style politics of this side of the mountains. They could, however, be talking about transportation infrastructure. There are a lot more roundabouts in Kennewick than even in New England, and the biggest surprise to me was that two roundabouts have replaced a clover-leaf interchange at the junction between SR 240 and US 395, arguably the busiest location in Kennewick next to the Blue Bridge. Somehow, I have a hard time believing this is really an improvement, even at rush hour.

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Certainly not an improvement is the state of Tri-City Herald, the local paper here. Back in May, I blogged about the healthy state of the paper. By all accounts, it is still financially healthy and I have no complaints about the quality of its local coverage, but it's now a tiny paper. I've been here for two Sunday papers now, and I read both of them in less than twenty minutes, even taking time going through the employment ads. I guess that's better than no paper at all, but one almost has to buy a New York Times or go on-line to keep well-informed.

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Those who are well-informed probably pay little attention to my weekly pick of a quality radio program, but in compiling the year-end summary, I was surprised to find a four-way tie at four for number of picks in 2009 for CBC's The Sunday Edition, CBC's As It Happens, Wisconsin Public Radio's To The Best of Our Knowledge, and CBC's Age of Persuasion. That's right, a specialty show on advertising that ran for less than half the year tied for first place. The Age of Persuasion is back for another season, and the first show, on the impact of HIV on advertising, may well be the first pick of 2010. Check it out at 11:30 local time on Monday in Canada if you can; the audio file is not yet on the web site.

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A year-end feature that won't appear this year is my ranking of new popular music from the year. 2009 marked the year in which a combination of being inundated with programming podcasts and a lack of budget for purchasing new music led to complete neglect of popular music for the year. No wonder the music industry is reeling--I just don't have time for them anymore, even when unemployed!

Media: Hard to Call it the Tricycle Herald

KENNEWICK, WASHINGTON - I have an interesting relationship with the Tri-City Herald newspaper. It was the first newspaper to ever publish my picture in 1986--which was nice, except for the fact that the word "geeks" appeared in a headline immediately above my head. It was pretty hard to avoid the conclusion that the editors had decided I was a geek.

When I actually lived in this area for a summer in 1996, the Tri-City Herald was my daily paper, as it was for everyone else that rode our bus to work, and we talked about what was in it on a regular basis. Our bus driver regularly referred to it as "the Tricycle Herald" which just seemed the perfect moniker for a newspaper that felt less substantive than the stuffy big-city papers from the New York Times to the Spokane Spokesman-Review.

Fast forward more than a decade and a very different picture appears. The Tri-City Herald hasn't changed much. It still runs thorough stories on the local community, and in the Internet era has even become a national source on topics of elevated interest locally, such as nuclear waste storage (because of the local Hanford Nuclear Reservation) and the sport of unlimited hydroplane racing (because of the annual race held the last weekend of July). Furthermore, it runs a healthy dose of opinion and news stories from other McClatchy chain papers (the Herald was acquired by McClatchy in 1979) and gives substantial space to local letters to the editor.

In contrast, most bigger-city papers are badly struggling and many are mere shells of their former selves, with radically fewer employees and pages of printed matter available each day. The Tri-City Herald no longer seems like a borderline-juvenile operation, but compares favorably to newspapers serving much larger areas. The big city papers--those that still exist, anyway--are usually little larger than the Tri-City Herald and don't seem to have much more content.

So why is the Herald faring better than other papers? I presume the fact that the area is growing in population (not much over 100,000 in 1996 to more than 225,000 today) doesn't hurt, but I suspect it's a comparative lack of alternatives--Internet sites like Yelp are not as commonplace in Tri-Cities. In fact, in casual conversation, it seemed that the most popular web site with local information was the Tri-City Herald's. Likely, as the area grows, other sites will move in and the Herald will come under a similar stress to that faced in larger cities.

This outlook underscores that not all is well with the Tri-City Herald as it is under the same pressures to reduce costs and staff as other McClatchy chain papers. At least one staffer left to become a political spokesperson fearing layoffs. Still, in the current media landscape, I don't feel comfortable dismissing it as the "Tricycle Herald" anymore.