With midterm elections coming up in the U.S., many newspapers offer an online voter's guide. But I fear some of them may be missing the most important issues.
Information is available in lots of places -- print, online, television, etc. -- about the governor's race and the Senate race. There’s lots of material handy, too, about the candidates for state attorney general, chief financial officer and commissioner of agriculture.
But I have only one place to turn, my local newspaper, for information about such things as a county charter change; a ballot referendum on "disclosure of ownership interests for county land-use applications," and similar community initiatives. The supervisor of the soil and water conservation district isn't advertising on television or sending me direct mail -- only my local paper is likely to cover that race and provide me with the information I need to decide.
Sadly, my local paper let me down on all of the above. (Some candidates may set up sites or blogs, but they're hardly impartial. The paper is nominally expected at least provide a semblance of balanced information.)
While I'm whining: It would be helpful, too, if papers didn't wait until a few days before the election to issue endorsements. Election Day may officially be November 7, but early/absentee balloting opened this week. And I, like many other voters, want to cast my ballot early to avoid the crowd.
As I see it, one of the things a newspaper should -- must -- do to differentiate itself from just any old blog or local news site (television station, radio, citizen journalism, others) is to provide endorsements in plenty of time for me to consider them in my election analysis. And while endorsements for governor and senator are important, to me at least it's much more important to endorse early and cogently in local races like state senate, county referenda, soil conservation district positions, etc., since information about those is so tough to come by.
For this year's election, we took the local-local approach and...
