I can't count how many times my journalism school professors informed us students that a reporter's responsibility is to "give voice to the voiceless."
"Of course," we reporters-in-training thought, our minds full of the soaring journalistic achievements of our century, which we'd just been studying -the investigative coups, such as Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovering the Watergate scandal; the stunning sociological exposés such as Joan Didion's account of the hippie movement in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district in 1967. "Done and done."
Then, with our diplomas stamped and signed, we rookies hit newsrooms.
And there, somewhere in the adrenaline rush that comes from pages (or broadcast minutes) to fill and deadlines to meet, we made an unsettling discovery: the "voiceless" are bloody hard to find.
Which is why, to reporters' and editors' chagrin, newsrooms - like governments - find themselves reacting to what's dead easy to find: squeaky wheels.
Squeaky wheels can take on all manner of forms, from the communications people who dispatch media releases and convene press conferences, to local politicians touting pet issues, to the keen citizen-lobbyists who keep our email boxes full and our phones ringing.
And many good stories come from those sources.
But they're rarely the stories of the so-called "voiceless."
Since coming to the Coast, I've been aware of whole segments of the population whose stories we rarely hear - and thus can rarely tell -here at the paper: blue collar workers, the Sechelt Indian Band, young people in our schools.
To name just a few.
So at the risk of opening the floodgates, and with the caveat that we're a small newsroom and can only run so fast, here's my plea to the Coast: tell us when we're missing something important. Particularly if we haven't heard from you before.
To be upfront, there are things we don't meddle in. Neighbour disputes, for example. Also, even now we are forced to forego some stories as we battle to best use limited hours and space. But where there's a story worth telling, we'll endeavour to tell it.
I want to make a particular appeal to the Coast's teens. Over the past few weeks I've twice had occasion to chat with local high school students -once, speaking to students at Elphinstone who've been lobbying to keep a favourite teacher in the district staffing shuffle, and again, speaking to students at Chatelech who've started a Gay-Straight Alliance to create safety and acceptance in school hallways. Both times, I was struck by the students' smarts, energy, and idealism.
And yet, from what I've seen and heard, there's a prevailing sense on the Coast that our teens are solely bent on boozing on the beach and vandalizing things.
And, not to whitewash those issues, there are problems there; our crime reports track it. But from what I've seen in the schools and heard from teachers, those crime reports paint a wildly skewed picture of what our teens are about.
So to the high school students out there - and other "voiceless" people in our community: come to us with those missing stories. Don't let the public record paint you wrong or worse, forget you entirely.
