Dear readers,
Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 5, and our newsrooms are prepping for covering local elections.
Grant County has a contested race for sheriff, the 6th Judicial District encompassing Umatilla and Morrow counties has a contested race for the bench, the incumbent mayor of Island City in Union County faces a challenger, Wallowa County voters are deciding who succeeds Todd Nash on the county board of commissioners because Nash is aiming to fill the seat Bill Hansell left open in the Oregon Senate.
And we plan to place our election night reporting in front of our website paywalls.
This election was the first in which our newsrooms covering six counties in Eastern Oregon had just one print edition a week to report on political campaigns and publish election letters to the editor. We learned some lessons during this cycle.
The EO has allowed letters of up to 400 words, and we did not have a limit on how man letters for or against a candidate or measure we would publish. But with letters coming from so many parts of Eastern Oregon, we found we had to publish some letters only online.
Some campaigns generated a significant number of letters of support with few if any letters in opposition. So if made more sense to run just a couple of those support letters, then, so we could have room for letters related to other races.
The web portal that is available to provide letters to the editor caps submissions at 250 words. But if you emailed a letter, you could write 400. In print, a letter that long takes up about 13 column inches. After this election, we’re capping letters at 250 words no matter how they come in.
In future elections, we’re likely to limit election letters to no more than two in favor or opposition of a candidate or measure. Outside of that, campaigns and their supporters or detractors can buy as many election ads as the paper can hold.
Come election night, please tune into our websites and follow our newsrooms on social media for local election reporting. And we’ll have follow-up reports on the outcomes as well after all the votes come in.
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Phil Wright is the managing editor of the East Oregonian.
