After 18 years, News Tribune opinion editor leaves to join another Tacoma institution

A father-daughter backpacking trip over Labor Day weekend gave me a chance to refresh, reflect and recalibrate in a place uniquely suited for such things: Mount Rainier National Park.

For me, there’s no better setting to refresh — to pump water from cold mountain creeks, exchange banter with fellow travelers on the Wonderland Trail, escape from politics and put away my anti-COVID mask for three days.

The loop trail around the Mountain-That-Should-Be-Called-Tacoma is also an ideal place to reflect on my career in the news business and how, in many ways, it’s come full circle.

I’ll always appreciate that The News Tribune gave me, a kid from Olympia and a journalism student at Pacific Lutheran University, my first internship back in 1988. And I’ll never forget the thrill of my first front-page byline: a story about surveyors readjusting the long-established height of Mount Rainier to just over 14,411 feet, marking the first time that GPS satellites were used to measure a mountain’s elevation.

This past weekend on the mountain also offered an opportunity to recalibrate, to take new measure of my career, as I step away from 30 years in journalism, including 18 cherished years at the TNT.

I have nothing but admiration for former colleagues young and old in communities such as Walla Walla, Washington, and Salem, Oregon — dozens of fellow ink-stained wretches, or whatever you call us in the digital age. One of my compatriots, Sean Robinson, who joined the TNT two years before me, wrote a column last weekend that sums up the challenge, and the hope, better than I could.

I’m grateful to the countless sources who entrusted me with their information and stories, and who put up with my snarky sniffles in the Nose column for several years.

But mostly I’m thankful for the readers who remain loyal, despite the seismic shifts in our industry and in your local paper. Keep holding the TNT to a high standard of delivering accurate South Sound news; keep demanding that the free press be a bulwark against those who would abuse power or withhold public information.

Soon I will join the executive team of another institution with deep local ties, Lutheran Community Services Northwest, where I’ll serve as director of communications. Founded in Tacoma in 1921, LCSNW this year celebrates 100 years of health, justice and hope.

It seems like yesterday, though it was actually 2008, when we at the TNT were celebrating a major anniversary: 125 years of publication.

My relatively short dash on that timeline began at the end of August 2003, when I was hired to be the local news team leader for suburban and military coverage. I arrived in the midst of Tacoma’s long reckoning after Police Chief David Brame fatally shot himself and his wife, Crystal, the previous spring.

I was here to help record our region’s heavy post-9/11 toll in Iraq and Afghanistan. I supervised five trips our reporters and photographers took to those countries between 2003 and 2012 to tag along with local troops. Wanting to see the war zone firsthand, I went to Northern Iraq for six weeks in 2005, embedding with a JBLM Stryker Brigade along with former TNT photographer Peter Haley.

In 2016, I became the newspaper’s opinion editor and ringleader of the TNT Editorial Board. From publisher’s conference room meetings to the new era of Zoom, we talked to more politicians and earnest office seekers than I can remember. If we didn’t move the needle of public policy, it wasn’t for lack of effort.

Today I leave the job in the capable hands of interim opinion editor Matt Driscoll. The TNT”s local columnist sits on the Editorial Board and will keep the opinion machine humming while the McClatchy company seeks candidates for the full-time position.

You can reach Driscoll at matt.driscoll@thenewstribune.com

Doing this work in Tacoma over the past 18 years has been a true honor fueled largely by a sense of purpose, occasionally by sheer adrenaline. Now it’s time to explore different mountains and bag new peaks.

This story was originally published September 8, 2021 at 3:00 PM.