Seven years ago, I was walking the streets of downtown Renton, about to lose the roof over my head and a dry place to keep my Mac.
The walking paid off and the Renton Reporter set up shop in the basement of the old Renton City Hall next to the downtown library. I was lucky; I got the only window. We shared our space with our server, so there was a constant hum.
And we perpetuated the stories about what once was the city jail.
We went about building upon the Renton Reporter’s reputation as an award-winning newspaper. The photo taken in 2009 when the Renton Reporter won a Business Excellence Award from the Renton Chamber of Commerce hangs in the newsroom in Kent. The award itself sits proudly in Publisher Ellen Morrison’s office upstairs. Ellen has been with the Renton Reporter since 1996, the year after it was founded.
Some of the faces in that 2009 photo have changed, but not the Renton Reporter’s commitment to serving the Renton community. We are particularly proud of the Community Service Award we received last year from the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association for our series, “Taking Care of Those who Serve,” about veterans and services available to them.
In those seven years, our news staff has covered some monumental stories and our advertising staff has worked diligently to help Renton’s businesses tell their stories.
• Renton opted to join the King County Library System, but in the end kept its beloved library over the Cedar River.
• Valley Medical Center is in a “strategic alliance” with UW Medicine, a story that is still unfolding, perhaps before the state Supreme Court.
• Fairwood opted twice not to become a city and once to not annex to Renton. West Hill will have to wait – who knows how long – to decide whether it wants to become part of Renton.
• The sky’s the limit for 737 production in Renton.
• Renton became the home of the Seattle Seahawks.
• Our high schools have won state championships, including the Lindbergh boys tennis team this spring.
• And always in the background or at the fore was the Great Recession.
The economic hardships that led to the closing of the daily King County Journal in January 2007 (and thus my search in downtown Renton) where I had worked for more than a quarter century just got worse.
But, notice the hyper-local Renton Reporter is still here, positioned to take advantage of some of those forces that are dooming daily newspapers, including the flight to the internet for news. That’s true of all the Reporter newspapers in South King County that carry on the tradition of community journalism that goes back more than a century.
For me, my time as editor of the Renton Reporter is coming to an end. I’ll still write a bit for Renton, but I will concentrate on my other editorship, that of the Tukwila Reporter, starting this month.
You’ve had a chance to get to know my replacement, Brian Beckley, an experienced journalist who will do an outstanding job as editor of the Renton Reporter. He’s had a chance to get to know what makes Renton tick, but he also has in mind a bunch of fresh ways to tell Renton’s story.
