At the Community Newspapers, we are in the process of adopting document called "Standards and Ethical Practices," so these are issues very close to the surface for us.

In coming up with our document, we pored over ethics policies of newspapers from around the country, and that led to discussions among our editors about who we are and how we go about our business. Hand-wringing is exhausting. But it's a very healthy thing for a newspaper community.

Our ethics policy covers the bases from the use of confidential sources to the ethics of accepting free tickets. As a company that embraces a Civic Journalism approach to covering the news, we look far beyond official sources to learn about the community, and it is our goal to engage the community to solve its own problems. Together, our Civic Journalism approach and our ethics policy pretty much define who we are.

As someone who started with this company 11 years ago as a community editor, no one knows better than I do how far we've come.

When I first became an editor with this company, I knew precious little about putting out a newspaper.

We covered local news the tried and true way—by sending a reporter to meetings. The stories quoted council members and city staff. When we wanted to know what was going on, we called city hall.

Our local officials loved the paper. And why wouldn't they? They couldn't have had better press if they had written the stories themselves.

The first time I began rethinking the practice of calling city hall to find out what was going on was when I listened to some upstarts in the community who were unhappy with the way the local museum was being run. Our cover story pretty much said the management of the museum was a mess. Suddenly, I was not so loved in the community. Well, the fact is, the museum management was a mess, and eventually, the community dove in and began to make the changes which turned the museum around—but not before wailing about how unfair the newspaper was.

When we began to hear rumors that the local Chamber of Commerce was in trouble, our paper wrote that if the chamber didn't change course, it would sink. Many chamber members accused us of trying to ruin the organization, even though many of those same people were quite aware that the organization was on the brink of bankruptcy.

It was about that time—somewhere in between being accused of being unfair to the chamber and the actual meetings where the board officially declared itself out of business—that I began to develop a thick skin.

I also began to think about how the direction a story takes depends on how the story is framed. When we let officials—be it a chamber executive or a city council member—frame the story, we see what is happening from their perspective. And it's perilously easy for journalists to fall into this trap, as we spend a lot of time talking to officials. We learn to like and respect many of these official sources. And frankly, getting the official take on a story is a lot easier than pounding the pavement trying to see what other people think or getting blurry-eyed reading documents at city hall.

It is the combined years of experience of all our editors—all of whom have learned along the way to develop thick skin and to distrust official versions of stories—our combined enthusiasm for civic journalism and our hand-wringing over the impact of our stories in the community that inform our coverage of issues like the McKean Road sports complex.

So, when District 10 council member Pat Dando, asked us to meet with her last week, we wanted to know what she hoped the outcome of the meeting would be. Not surprisingly, she hoped that we would write a "positive" story.

At the meeting in our conference room, Dando showed us documents we had been trying to get our hands on for 14 weeks, and she wanted to give us information on documents that were not made available to us in the previous weeks, even after filing two Freedom of Information Act requests with the city and the Almaden Youth Association.

After waiting for 14 weeks for the documents, however, we were not going to throw together a "positive" story with just hours to go before our deadline.

Besides, the draft EIR had come out and we were focused on that. We decided to write about the documents this week. We are still trying to get some questions answered, however. So last week, we wrote about the draft EIR.

The issues brought out in the draft EIR—both those that are easily mitigated and those that simply cannot be mitigated—are now available for the community to study. Our job is to inform the community. Now it's up to the community to speak up and let the officials know what they want for their community.

Dale Bryant is the Executive Editor of Silicon Valley Community Newspapers which publishes the Almaden Resident. She is a longtime resident of Almaden Valley. Contact her at 408.200.1021 or dbryant@svcn.com.