Newspaper editor Mark Bowder has unimpeachable small-town journalism credentials. Back in my days of covering city hall for the Chico News & Review Bowder was reporting for the Red Bluff Daily News, where he also shot and developed photos. Red Bluff was that rare spot that I could look down upon from my Chico, California vantage point and say, Now that is a nowhere burgh.
The U of O grad’s soup-to-nuts knowledge served him well as he worked his way to Southern California’s Riverside Press-Enterprise and then back up to the Pacific Northwest. For 18 years Bowder helped run news at the august Vancouver Columbian. The Columbian turns 135 years old in October and remains a state factor, unlike most small-town American dailies, which are husks of their old selves if they exist at all.
To the undeniable detriment of society.
‘If you have a community news, you know what's going on. It can help build community. newspapers of the glue that can hold communities together. And I think that's one of the strengths of Vancouver because it has the Colombian, which does a really good job of serving the community and tries mightily to provide that glue, to keep the conversation going and to try to make it a better place.’
The Columbian, however, let Bowder and his veteran’s salary go at the end of 2023. The metro editor was stunned, but only momentarily. It’s fair to say that Bowder got stunned again when, within weeks, the same job title was offered to him in an exponentially more intense news town.
And he would have to get up to speed in time for the Super Bowl that was weeks away from coming to town.
As the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s metro editor, Bowder, 61, now works at a performance pace that’s compressed in a way most Oregon and Washington civilians cannot begin to understand. Tally up the Vegas sports teams and breaking national news stories and the gaming industry coverage that’s supposed to be the R-J’s bread and butter and you a have one of The West’s most challenging journalism environments.
Never mind the media competition and the expectation that the big daily always break news first and accurately so.
Small-town journalism fetishist that I am, I do still wonder whether Review-Journal gig is actually tougher than being a one-man band in Red Bluff.
Open talk of diversity and other transgressions
A companion to Friday’s 100th-consecutive weekly newsletter, today’s post consists of highlights from a handful of my favorite West Coast Sojourn podcast conversations. Consider it a thank you for all of the eyeball and earhole access.
Minute for minute, this might just be the most informative Sojourn podcast yet. (Bowder is almost certainly the only Eagle Scout to appear on the podcast!) Obviously we discussed the impact of tariffs on the new town’s tourism. Of course the red state-blue state ICE raids disparity got some run. But this podcast dwells in the two Clark Counties. Vancouver’s history, for example, receives as thorough a going-over as i’ts bound to get on the Internet today.
Significantly, co-host Lev Anderson supplies a Portland-savvy perspective that allows a deeper conversation about the region.
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