I've gained a greater appreciation for the difficulty of news writing lately as I have "covered" a few local events and written up news articles on Westwood Blog about the local politics around a liquor license fight.

It is challenging to report the facts without interjecting my own opinion--and yet still have the writing be interesting. You can read my account of the public hearing then compare to local media coverage of that same meeting if you wish. I did not know if the meeting would be covered...but after that Daily News Transcript article was published a few hours after mine, I really had to question the value of my playing reporter since I could have simply linked to their story.

I think my coverage of the Selectmen's meeting earlier this month was better--the Daily News Tribune article is virtually identical.

I'm not their competition. But in a small community, it is hard to blog about issues without doing a little research yourself. If I waited on news stories to be published, I wouldn't have much to talk about. But I am not a journalist. My goal is to get conversations started and sometimes you need to prime the pump with information, not just opinion.

It is easy to write an opinionated essay...and relatively easy to write hypertext when you have material to link to throughout your post. But so much of the material in this town is oral/unwritten still--so someone must tell the stories first and cover what regional media cannot afford to go deep into. I have a great advantage too in that I'm not "real" news media--I try to maintain objectivity to preserve my credibility, but I don't have to play be the same rules as a newspaper. And I don't have to keep advertisers happy or pay a staff.

For me personally, the more I write, the more I learn--both about writing and about the issues I'm interested in in this town.