[env-trinity] Goodbye/hello Bruce Ross

[Tom Stokely]

Redding.com editor Bruce Ross is moving on to work for Assemblyman Brian Dahle as his Redding district rep.  Nadine Bailey, who had that job, is moving on to head the Family Water Alliance.

Best wishes to both!

Tom

Bruce Ross: Don't let the conversation stop
Staff Reports
Saturday, February 22, 2014
The pay’s not impressive, as anyone who’s seen my car would guess, but I’ve never cared. As a job, journalism is hard to beat.
And my particular beat the past decade, editing the Opinion page of the Record Searchlight, has been an astonishing privilege — but not for the reason you might think.
Yeah, it’s been a great run. I’ve met governors and pioneer ranchers, business tycoons and preachers who lift up the least among us. I’ve had access to a powerful community megaphone to illuminate neglected truths, heckle the powerful, and rally the community. Time and experience have certainly given me cause to rethink various daily rushes to judgment. But I hope that, with the guidance of a couple of smart editors and brave publishers, I’ve managed a record at least as good as a decent baseball hitter’s over the past decade. Or at least given readers something to think about every morning.
But the best part of this job the past decade? It’s the astonishing array of friendships I’ve made with people who would otherwise be complete strangers — but who are part of my tribe. They’re members of the rag-tag army of people curious enough about the world to pay attention, and angry (or thrilled, or amused, or befuddled) enough to share their thoughts with the world. Yes, the letter writers.
You read the thoughts of your friends and neighbors, and you learn about them. Some are wry and philosophical. Some are full of heated passion. Some write with precision and polish. Some never quite absorbed the lessons of their high school English teachers’ red ink. Some want to share a word of Gospel or nutrition advice. Some have a decades-old grudge to get off their chest.
All of them care. And all of them contribute to making this space — the Opinion page — as well as the much-maligned (yet much-read) Redding.com comment boards the lively latter-day town squares that they are. Liberals and conservatives, loggers and tree huggers, hunters and PETA members, cat people and dog people — they have their disagreements. If they didn’t, there’d not be much to talk about.
But the zest for argument and the itch to be in the arena of discussion — they all share that. And by having those arguments, by hammering down the falsehoods and fallacies, they help themselves and everyone else inch a little closer to wisdom. None of us, after all, has a monopoly on the truth — not on this earth. At least, that’s what I think. I might be wrong about that.
I’m moving on to new challenges — going to work for Assemblyman Brian Dahle. I hope to be able to solve at least a few of the problems I’ve spent my career pointing out.
But as I write these, what might be the last words of mine that appear in the Record Searchlight after nearly 17 years working on Twin View Boulevard, I want to thank the dumb plumber and the good doctor, the cranky old conservatives and the earnest liberals, the Christians and the atheists, the tax fighters and union activists. Even the vaccine skeptics and Jefferson advocates, though I really wish we could have coffee and I could get one last chance to lay out the facts for y’all.
The best treat of my career has been accidentally meeting in “real life” the writers whose names I know so well I feel they’re like family. I’ve shed real tears when correspondents’ names have turned up tragically on the front page.
The media business is changing. The ways people trade thoughts have evolved and accelerated. But hashing out our differences peacefully will never be any less essential to the health of our democracy. I can’t say how grateful I am to have played the role of steward and moderator of that conversation for the North State, and to have gotten to know so many of its participants. Please carry on without me, because I’ll be reading as avidly as ever.
Bruce Ross left the Record Searchlight last week after serving as editorial page editor since 2003. He already misses it.
  © 2014 Scripps Newspaper Group — Online
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