It’s still dark out. The sun isn’t due up for an hour yet, but I’m already sitting in my front window watching Elk Valley Road slowly awaken. The occasional logging truck screams by in the growing light, bypassing Crescent City on the way down the hill from last year’s fire scars. In the trees all around the house – it’s called The Swamp – there are dozens, maybe hundreds of people stirring. Soon, the long slog to the recycling center or the showers at Open Door or whatever will begin. Across the street, a lone bachelor elk pauses beside the nursery, eyeing the fulgid, fertilized bounty just beyond the chain link. It looks like any other day just about to begin in the Heart of the Meth District. But I know the truth: Today, everything changes.
There’s a little room tucked back under the stairs at the Historical Society downtown. I don’t know what the purpose of the little space behind the heavy door was back when the building on H Street was the jail, but today it’s the Historical Society’s archive. In it, on shelves between the file cabinets, you’ll find some large books, as big as an old-fashioned newspaper, that contain, well, old-fashioned newspapers, going all the way back, back before The Triplicate, the Crescent City News, the Herald, the Courier. Yellowed column inches on delicate paper, flashbulb photos of grey-haired women’s auxiliaries, grocery ads that make you question Capitalism’s ineluctable course. It’s an interesting parallax, leafing carefully through the papers, each page lined with what was once immediate; the breaking news, the rancorous debates of politicians and pundits, so insightful at the time; the parochial concerns and prejudices that divided or united or condemned – all the messy, fleshy aliveness of a community captured in the measured columns of page of newsprint.
At the same time, the tiny room under the stairs is silent. It is in a museum, after all. All the sturm und drang of the immediate creased and folded and filed away in the tall leather-bound books. So much for the Age of the Newspaper.
Yesterday, KFUG Community Radio hired Jessica Cejnar-Andrews as Senior Writer/Supervising Editor for Redwood Voice Community News. Jessica has nearly twenty years of experience as a working-stiff journalist, most of it spent here in Del Norte, first at The Triplicate and then online with the Wild Rivers Outpost. We all know Jessica and her work; we know she’s the only real journalist covering Del Norte, and to a lesser extent, Curry counties. We know she is ethical, competent, and fair. We can count on her to jump into all that sturm and help us understand (and survive) the resulting drang.
A new role for Jessica will be the Supervising Editor part of her job. As she continues to cover Del Norte from afar (she’s lived over the hill in Oregon for a number of years and will move shortly to Big Island to be with her husband), Redwood Voice will become her boots (and eyes and ears and probably some fingers, too) on the ground in Del Norte. Along the way, Jessica will impart her knowledge and expertise to an ever-expanding gyre of local youth reporters, seeding future generations of community journalists and Pulitzer Prize-winners. She’s already begun doing this. At our first staff meeting yesterday, Jessica outlined some basic approaches to covering contentious governmental meetings. Shout out, Harbor Commission!
Jessica’s articles will continue to appear online, posted and shared from redwoodvoice.org now. She’ll assign stories to the youth reporters and make sure they have the skills necessary to deliver the quality journalism our community deserves.
I don’t know how the Historical Society is planning to remember all this. Radio broadcasts and webpages tend to slip too easily out of the tall leather books in the archive. But it should be remembered. Because, even though it isn’t visible along trash-strewn Elk Valley Road yet, today everything changed.
