Shawn Vestal: So long, and thanks for reading

I wrote my first newspaper column when I was 14 years old.

One of my hometown’s two weekly newspapers – The Enterprise, not the Gooding County Leader – published my musings on everything from JV football to Jimmy Carter to drinking beer at Mormon holiday parades.

The columns were due Monday mornings. I would write them by hand on Sunday nights – lying on the living room floor, buzzing with deadline anxiety – and drop them off the next day at the tiny, crowded office. All these years later, I can still smell the place: metallic ink, dust and cigarettes. The editor was named – no kidding – Ma Brown, and she was always at her desk marking something up.

The paper came out on Thursdays. If you never lived in a small town like Gooding, Idaho, and read newspapers like the Enterprise and the Leader, it’s hard to convey how minutely they reported on the life of the town. Every club or organization, from the Rebekahs to the Grange to Bethel 15, had their own report. The news from surrounding towns was summarized under alliterative headlines: Wendell Words, Hagerman Happenings, Fairfield Flickers.

When my eighth-grade basketball team won the conference title, it was front-page news. Above the fold.

The personal columns all had names: Mary’s Message, Tell it Like it Is, Batt’n the Breeze with Phil Batt. Mine was called Our Side of the Story, ostensibly to convey that it was the voice of Gooding’s youth.

I thought I was Gooding’s Mike Royko.

I had a lot more confidence than knowledge.

The Enterprise, of course, is no more. The Gooding County Leader is no more. And my days of writing columns for newspapers – which I’ve been so wildly fortunate to do for more than a decade at The Spokesman-Review – are coming to an end, as well. At least for now.

Twenty-five years ago, there was nothing I wanted more than to work at The Spokesman-Review. I had fallen into journalism as a profession, somewhat accidentally, while taking a break from college that turned into dropping out of college. I moved from town to town in the West – from Burley, Idaho, to Coeur d’Alene, to Roseburg, Oregon, to Bozeman – working as a reporter and city editor.

I often wrote columns along the way, but the main work was basic community journalism: finding and reporting the truth, holding the powerful to account, serving citizens, and helping communities know themselves.

During these years, The Spokesman-Review was the place that many of us in the trenches of small-town Northwest newspapers wanted to go. A regional paper with an ambitious reach. National-caliber reporting and photography. The Spokesman punched way above its weight. In 1999, not long before I was hired, the Columbia Journalism Review named it one of the nation’s top 25 newspapers.

I thought I’d won the lottery. I still do. The business has changed, the paper has evolved, and I continue to feel that my greatest fortune as a journalist came when I walked into the fourth-floor offices of this newspaper on Dec. 7, 1999.

Since then, I have done most of the things there are to do in the newsroom. I was an assistant editor supervising teams of reporters. I was a reporter covering higher ed and other subjects.

I became a metro columnist in 2012, and I had in mind something along the lines of what I had seen in those Royko pieces I had tried to imitate all those years earlier: Speaking plainly about what seemed important to me in the city I love. Telling interesting stories about the people who live here. Taking the side of those without power – the poor and dispossessed, the hungry and thirsty, the stranger – and refusing to bend the knee to those with it.

I wrote hundreds of columns. Three a week (or so), year after year. How often I hit the mark is a matter of opinion. Your results may vary. But I loved doing it. It was the very best job – a dream job – but even the very best job has a shelf life, and I’ve felt the need for a change.

That change will come when I go to work for InvestigateWest as an editor. InvestigateWest is an independent nonprofit organization that focuses on long-form investigative journalism in the Northwest, and I’m beyond excited about the prospects of doing deep, probing journalism at a time when it’s more important than ever.

But it’s a bittersweet parting, for sure. The Spokesman-Review and the people who read it have been very good to me. I hope that people here appreciate this newspaper and understand how strong it remains as so many others have shrunk to almost nothing – or gone the way of the Enterprise.

The newsroom is full of excellent young reporters, and the future of the institution is bright.

I know I’ll still be reading it every day.

I’m grateful to the editors who took the heat and let me keep plowing; most recently that has been Editor Rob Curley, whose MacGyvering of resources has kept the paper strong in a tough era for newspapers. I’m grateful to Publisher Stacey Cowles for resisting the calls for my head.

I’m beyond thankful to have worked with the duo of editors I call the Johns: metro editor John Stucke and government editor Jon Brunt, the unsung newsroom MVPs who guide the paper’s journalism with such care and expertise. I’m grateful to the many other journalists – too many to mention – who have done such excellent journalism here and who continue to do so, day in and day out. I owe a debt to those who took my calls, answered my questions or allowed me into their lives to share their stories.

Mostly, though, I’m grateful for you. If you’re reading these words, at the end of this column, at the end of so many others: Thank you.

See you around town.