Even as a growing Wasatch Back knits together as one, three distinct regions remain. The koan, the puzzle, our news mission is figuring out how to best serve them together as well as on their own. My own puzzling began before I began at The Park Record in August 2023, both a blink and an eternit y ago. Greater Park City, sure, I knew the core, at least a little. But what’s this East Side and how about Wasatch County, where all the growth seems focused of late? I arrived just in time for Deer Valley Resort’s grand announcement to more than double its terrain above the huge East Village portal nearest Heber City and Midway. This will change those communities in much the same way as Park City, like it or not. Deer Valley had new plans. The Park Record had new owners. I was fortunate to have a new challenge after helping another ski town paper weather a crisis that threatened to collapse it. We solved the main problem, and then the work became the more usual keeping a tippy canoe afloat in whitewater. Can’t downplay that, however, as more and more of these proud crafts are overturning, going under. Alas, including The Wasatch Wave, which closed last summer. Since 2005, this has been the fate of over 3,000 papers, leaving expansive vacuums across the country empty of community news and views. This is not for lack of interest in local journalism. The underpinning of funding for the work has been kicked out from beneath primarily by Big Tech, which has next to zero genuine inclination collectively to support the Fourth Estate. Society may need independent journalism, that turtle named Mack. But that’s hardly the direction we’re going with 60% of the number of journalists working in 2000 now gone. It’s ironic to hear citizens complain about the quality of reporting when the actual journalists have been supplanted by influencers, pundits, propagandists and outright nuts and bots filling the vacuum with, well, utter crap. This utter crap, by the way, is eroding the mental health of adolescent girls and their mothers, as well as males young, middle-aged and old. My approval of electrified gossip, cotton candy, is hardly required, though. And, of course, the ordinary glimpses we in the local news media offer of vetted reality lack whiz bang by comparison. Our service is for people mature enough to know they need to eat their peas for the sake of civic health. I know we nourish and sustain but require a certain discipline of mind, ability to focus, and a basic literacy not unlike the learning curve for skiing and snowboarding. And yet I admit being pretty encouraged right now with our progress at The Park Record. I see our coverage taking on a little more depth as well as breadth, along with more humor, creativity in the best sense of nonfiction, real life relevance, and even some bite. Our slow burn has us on a trajectory transforming deep skepticism to acceptance, even enthusiasm for our work. At least I think I hear this when out and about. More people are more willing to tell me how much they like what we are doing, anyway. And the reader metrics support this. The quality of criticism fits, too. I mean, we’re going to piss people off if doing our jobs honestly and well. Anger is a sure sign of engagement, I used to tell my publishers until I became one. But we’re the one business that thrives shooting itself in the foot on a regular basis. You just want the right people irked or mad for the right reasons, which boils down to telling the evenhanded truth free of fear or favor. Not everyone will understand. In our latest step toward improvement, solving our koan, we recently began the Wasatch Record, a page one remake of The Park Record focused on news in Park City and Summit County’s neighboring communities across the county line. I’ve done what we call zoned editions before, most prominently while news editor at the now-gone North County Times in northern San Diego County. We customized nine editions to specific communities, and I was responsible for keeping all that on track with three copy desks up to 30 miles apart and two three-story presses, one in Oceanside and the other in Escondido. Everything after that experience has been simple, if not necessarily easy. We’re starting with page one and a jump page where stories continue. The basic idea is putting local news in Wasatch County right up front. Wasatch communities are represented as well inside, serving the part of the mission that recognizes the Wasatch Back’s ever-increasing interconnection. Would we consider a similar edition focused on the East Side? Someday, maybe. We’d need to add staffing, which means expense and weighing return, all that. Meantime, Petr Herink and others have worked hard to keep up with the Kamas Valley and Coalville communities as well as Summit County as a whole. The Wasatch Record is the last on my original list for largish news initiatives. Our big rapids ahead lie in operations, made a little easier, I hope, with the progress so far in news. There’s plenty of paddling left to go. Don Rogers is the editor and publisher of The Park Record. He can be reached at [email protected] or (970) 376-0745. The post Journalism Matters: How The Wasatch Record fits the puzzle appeared first on Park Record. ...read more read less