This coming summer, I’ll have been a journalist for a decade.

I haven’t been at the Courier-Herald that long (yet), so I am including the two years I was a reporter-then-editor at The Evergreen State’s student newspaper, The Cooper Point Journal (yes, I am a Geoduck — that little tidbit of biographical information shouldn’t come as a surprise to many).

And as with many things in life, how I’ve viewed my career has changed since I was 20 years old.

For example, my opinion on “journalistic objectivity” has certainly evolved.

In college, my journalism instructor was old school — she expected us to hit the pavement when it came to researching our stories, almost exclusively do in-person interviews, and be completely objective when it came to our reporting.

That last point is certainly a worthy goal — the gold standard, if you will — and we at The Courier-Herald do our best to keep our personal opinions out of our news reporting.

But in general, I have learned that “the news” is, and never has been, wholly neutral, and anyone who claims so is wearing rose-colored glasses; while journalists may strive to remove their biases from their work, the news process — selecting what stories to report, who to interview and get information from, how to connect relevant facts and add context, even where articles are placed in the paper or slotted in a radio show or television program — is completely subjective, and ultimately adds bias.

So if the news can never be entirely impartial, what is it?

For large outlets like the New York Times, NPR, or Fox News, the answer is obvious — the news is partisan, albeit at various levels of severity; all consumers can do, really, is take the information they absorb with a grain of salt (and more savvy consumers make sure they expose themselves to multiple sources of information to better sift opinion from fact).

But for The Courier-Herald and other hyper-local papers across the country, the answer is less concrete, and more nuanced.

Down here, the news is a conversation.

This is why we are trying to make the Courier-Herald as accessable as possible for people who want to get to know us on a personal level, learn how we do our jobs, pitch story ideas, criticize our work, or even just talk shop. A great opportunity to do all that is at our Brewskis with a Newsie event, which is held the first Wednesday of every month, 5 to 6 p.m., at Cole Street Brewery. So far, we’ve discussed everything from local politics and pandemic mandates, objective journalism and unconscious biases, the infamous Seattle Times editorial about Enumclaw, and so much more.

Last month, we also had an online poll asking readers what they would like to see more of in the coming year. More than 200 people responded — a fairly large number compared to previous polls — which hopefully gives us a good idea of what direction people want their local newspaper to go in.

The top result, with nearly a quarter respondents, said they wanted to see more/better community features; this was followed up by more than 18 percent of folks wanting to see more/better investigative news articles.

With those results in mind, the Courier-Herald is going to come up with a plan to give readers what they want — and, of course, if you have any ideas about what to feature or investigate, we would welcome you contacting us or stopping by our office to chat.

That same poll also allowed people to submit their own answers; close to 9 percent of respondents (19 people) did so.

A few people want us to stop charging for the paper, or remove the website paywall; another wanted more Buckley news; and someone else wanted us to focus more on travel.

The majority of these respondents, though, specifically asked us to replace columnist Rich Elfers.

This doesn’t surprise me, as these requests may be the most common I’ve received over my tenure here.

So for those folks who asked us to “fire Elfers”, and those that harbor similar sentiments, I’d like to explain why I will continue to print his columns.

One of my major goals for the Courier-Herald is to keep it local — not just in the news that we report, but also in the voices and opinions being shared on this page.

And, let me tell you, that is hard work; it would be far easier to pay a random political cartoonist, or consistently run columns from Federal Way’s Bob Roegner or Auburn’s Robert Whale, to fill up the opinion page than to find Plateau residents who have the time, inclination, and skill to take complicated issues and distill them down to 800 words on a weekly basis.

But that would take away what I believe helps make the Courier-Herald a strong newspaper.

So you don’t have to agree with Elfers (heck, he knows I don’t agree with him all of the time) but you have to recognize that the work he does — expressing and challenging various viewpoints and opinions — is in service of his community through our pages.

And you, too, can be a part of that. Most people choose to participate through Letters to the Editor, but several brave residents over the last year and a half have chosen to step up and be a community columnist, publishing their thoughts once a month for a whole year.

The time to pick new columnists for next year is fast approaching. If you’d like to apply to be one:

■ Come up with a theme. What are you going to write about? And more importantly, can you write 12 columns, each being between 800 and 1,000 words, on that topic?

■ Complete a finished draft of a column. No matter what your topic is, make sure you list your sources by including them in the body of the piece (not at the bottom, like a bibliography) where relevant. Applicants who do not use or cite sources will not be considered.

■ List out the other 10 potential columns you want to write about. This will be easier to do for some topics than others, but what I want most is to see that you have thought this through for an entire year.

■ Put together an introduction column, which will be published first. Who are you? What’s your history on the Plateau? What does your topic mean to you, and what sort of expertise do you bring to the table? What is your goal for writing a column, and what do you want your readers to get out of it?

■ Email all the above to me (rstill@courierherald.com, subject line: “Columnist Application”) by June 30, 2022, and set up an appointment to meet in person. If you don’t receive a response, call me (360-802-8220) to ensure I received the email.

You are free to write about whatever strikes your fancy — but this time around, I will be specifically looking for people who want to focus on local news, politics, and features, rather than state- or national-topics.

All in all, the Courier-Herald is not an island — we want to be in touch with the community, like we have been since before Enumclaw was incorporated as a city. Give us ideas, call out our mistakes, and lend us your voice; we are here to listen, observe, and, of course, report.

I’ll see you around.