This week, The Chronicle celebrated its new digs, and I was happy to be there to celebrate vibrant local family ownership and its support that gives our community a now-rare example of a thriving small-town paper.
This comes at a big anniversary for me. This year marks a quarter century since I started working at my hometown paper.
I should clarify that I don’t currently work at The Chronicle. My full-time employment for The Chronicle ended a dozen years ago, in 2013. Still, I’ve kept connected to the paper and I returned in 2015 as a regular weekly columnist covering community news, history, profiles, celebrations and general ruminations.
If I’m doing the calculations correctly (and journalists famously aren’t good at math), The Chronicle, founded in 1889, has had me pecking away at a keyboard in its service, in one form or another, for 18 percent of the years it’s been around. Incidentally, that’s also been pretty much exactly half of my lifetime.
It was in the blustery autumn of 2000 when I started as a cub reporter behind a battleship of a pastel-colored desk with a transparent technicolor plastic iMac computer. The big national news at the time was the disputed presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore, hinging on a few “dimpled chads” on ballots in Florida.
Locally, we had just elected Eric Johnson, a rural Centralia Democrat, as county commissioner. We didn’t know at the time, but he would be the last. After he won reelection in 2004, no Democrat has again won a countywide race in Lewis County.
I wasn’t here for the typewriter and hot-lead type era, but I was one of the last reporters handed a film camera to take with me on assignment. No immediate digital feedback back then: we developed those pictures in a darkroom a few dozen steps from my desk.
When our two full-time photojournalists were out of town for state sports in early 2001, and the Nisqually Earthquake shook our region, I was the one who took the photo that ran on the front page the next day. I was pretty proud of that. It showed toppled bottles and other items scattered across the floor at the old Rite-Aid drug store in the Lewis County Mall.
I have chronicled strange things, like the creation of the “Gospodor Monuments” along I-5 in Toledo and the coming of the “Autonomous Mutant Festival” to the Gifford Pinchot National Forest.
I’ve been able to help document some milestones, like the end of the horse-mounted ranger era in the national forest and the devastating 2007 flood (when we published a book of our coverage, I wrote the introduction before dawn with our 2-day-old baby daughter sleeping on my chest.)
It’s been a great run in my hometown. I hope to continue it for another 25 years at least.
Will we still have newspapers in 2050? The big technologies of the last decade or two will be ancient history by then. Smartphones and social media sites will have been eclipsed by many newer and zootier products. Eric Schwartz and Aaron VanTuyl will be grayer in beard then, but will no doubt still be energetically crabby on their podcast, if such a thing exists.
The economics of newspapers, once dominant, will probably continue to erode. Or perhaps they’ll be revitalized as people’s natural curiosity and love for their physical locale takes the fore. As technologies like generative artificial intelligence make it child’s play to create picture-perfect falsehoods, perhaps people will be drawn all the more to the gloriously flawed reality around them, and institutions like The Chronicle that try (imperfectly, but earnestly) to tell it to us straight.
What I know is that people will still have neighbors and will still want to know what’s going on around them. They will still crave connection, still want to keep up with folks they have known, still want to know the latest on the people, places and activities they value.
It’s been a privilege, a delight and sometimes a harrowing battle to tell those stories for half of my life. It’s time to turn the calendar page and start the next quarter century of news, discussion, dissension and cooperation.
Onward.
Brian Mittge is a community enthusiast who has written for The Chronicle since 2000 as a reporter, editor and columnist. He can be reached at brianmittge@hotmail.com.
