Let me start by saying I don’t know Jon Ammons at the state Public Disclosure Commission. Never met him. But however much  they’re paying this guy, it’s not enough.

Here’s why. At 3:47 p.m. today I e-mailed the PDC asking for the personal financial statements filed by 18 holders of public office in North Central Washington, everybody from judges to commissioners. It’s an election thing. I want a window into our politicians’ financial situations.

After I was sending the e-mail, I did a little guessing on how long it would take to get a response from a state bureacracy after sending an e-mail to a general address. The images of a note, bottle and the ocean crossed my mind. The agency is in Olympia, I’m in Wenatchee. Nobody there knows me.

I figure it would be great to get a first e-mail back by Wednesday acknowledging my existence. If I received the filings by the end of the week, I’d be pretty darn pleased.

At 4:21 p.m., Ammons, PDC office assistant,  writes back. He says he’s working on the requests — and hopes to have them to me by 5 p.m.

!

By 4:36 p.m. I had them all.

Now if Ammons would only crack open these documents and note possible interesting figures that could turn into news reports …

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As a kid, I loved the stories about Johnny Appleseed. It wasn’t so much because he planted apple trees. To me, the apple tree thing always seemed like the thinnest of covers for the real business at hand: a long getting out.

These days, I still follow long distance hikers. Lately, I’ve been paying attention to Nimblewill Nomad, an almost 70-year-old man hiking toward North Central Washington and Chelan County’s high country on the Pacific Crest Trail.

I first came across Nimblewill in 2007 while following the online postings of uber long-distance hiker Andrew Skurka.
Skurka and Nimblewill (that’s his trail nickname) crossed paths and
Skurka mentioned the older hiker in his journal.

So, I tracked down Nimblewell’s journal and back-read the entries as he wrapped up his hike.

Nimblewill’s journal entries were charming.

Day in and day out, despite long hours on the trail, he was able to find something to like.

Here’s a video Skurka shot of Nimblewill at that trail meeting in New Mexico’s Gila Wilderness. I think it gets across something of Nimblewill’s character.

Nimblewell’s sked, like that of many PCT through-hikers, has him passing through NCW late this summer, at Snoqualmie Pass on Aug. 28 and at Stehekin on Sept. 6.

It’s not a hike, but I’ve also been following Roz Savage as she tries to row across the Pacific Ocean. As you read this, she’s somewhere between California and Hawaii, all by her lonesome, rowing her way west. Oh yeah, and the machine that produces her drinking water just died. You can follow her at her Web site and through podcasts. There’s a good bit of stuff on Youtube, too. There’s even an Ocean Rowing Society keeping tabs on Savage and other big water rowers.

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To get ready for the coming local elections, we’ll be collecting filings with the state Public Disclosure Commission. We’ll see who’s raising how much and what sorts of financial interests candidates are declaring.

We’ll also spend some time checking court records, online records and our own archives. Will any of the checks produce a story? I don’t know, but the checks come with the territory, both for reporters and candidates.

Meanwhile, over at the Chelan County’s elections office, work has been completed that will let observers watch the counting of ballots without violating security. Visitors will be able to walk around the elections office and see the whole process through glass partitions.

Over at the Public Disclosure Commission, there’s a nifty map that breaks out contributions by county to Gregoire and Rossi.

Gregoire has reported raising more than $7 million while Rossi has about $5.6 million, through Tuesday afternoon. King County, of course, is at the top of the list for both candidates.

In Chelan County, Rossi has about $57,000 in donations and Gregoire, about $19,000. it’s pretty much the same sort of picture for the other NCW counties.

And somewhere in Garfield County, way over in southeast Washington, Gregoire has attracted a total of $10 in donations.
Rossi’s ruling there with $578.

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I’ve been back to Travis “Applesauce” Hay’s blog a couple of times recently to take a few looks at a photo from the movie “All the President’s Men.” It was, as they used to say in the day, a blast from the past. Travis reports that he recently saw the film for the first time.

There are a couple of years separating Travis and I, enough that I remember Watergate as it unfolded. In the years after Nixon waved goodbye from the helicopter, I joined the surge of students heading to journalism schools where we could learn to pursue the cool, big story, bang out our reports on typewriters and dress really badly, kinda like those guys in the movie photo.

Travis, well, Travis is soon to leave the city halls beat at The Wenatchee World to become our online journalist, one who also happens to connect with dressing up like a Teletubby and dancing on stage. Things do change.

But if you want strange, sometimes reality helps you out, and so we’ll circle back to Nixon and end this post with a publicity shot of a different sort. This is from the National Archives collection “When Elvis Met Nixon”:

(A footnote: I showed my college freshman son this photo. He named Elvis in a heartbeat, but he wasn’t so sure who the other guy was.)

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If you remember the big eruption of Mount St. Helens, this foto may look familiar to you.

This is a NASA pic of Chaitén Volcano in Chile, erupting on the green side of that country, its ash-filled plume blown to the much-drier countryside to the west. Click here to check out more NASA fotos of the volcano.

And here’s a link to a U.S. Geological Survey Web site with a wealth of information, links and photos on Mount St. Helens, which has been quiet lately.

And here’s a column by Tracy Warner, editorial page editor of The Wenatchee World, looking back on the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption 20 years later.

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The World has begun an internal debate over what sorts of photos we should publish.
It all started with a new online feature: Seen@.
This is a feature where journalists shoot photos of people at events — faces in the crowd at festivals, graduations, games — and post them online.

The photos are among the most popular features at the Web site. Readers have clicked thousands of times through these collections of photos.
So, if people like these online, why not run some of them in the paper, too?
The debate in the newsroom is over whether those photos have a place in the printed newspaper. Questions that come up include: What value do they add for a reader? What information do those photos give? Is it journalism?

Here’s a little background.
One way to look at staff-produced photos in a traditional newspaper like The World is to break them into two categories:
Candid — This is the preferred photo because it strives to capture the subject while they are essentially oblivious to the photographer’s presence and, perhaps, reveal an insight into the person or the event at that moment. Think: photograph of a basketball player fighting hard for a rebound during a game.
This purity of this approach breaks down a little in many situations because most people find it somewhat difficult to 100 percent ignore a person pointing a big camera at them as they go about their daily business. Is it really a natural shot? But that’s a debate for another day.
Posed — Usually these are small mug shots. Sometimes we use posed shots called “environmental portraits” for profile stories. The person photographed will be looking at the camera, so you know it was posed. Generally, I think it’s fair to say these photos are pics of a last resort.
Now enter: Seen@
They’re not mug shots. They’re not candid shots. They’re something different.

Should we use them in the paper? What do you think?

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That place in Tuesday’s blog: Chelan Gorge, downstream from Lake Chelan.

And from a posting too long back, that was the Ninth Street Trailer Park in Wenatchee, near the Columbia River. All of the homes you see in the photo will soon be removed.

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We’re running a short report Thursday listing some awards Wenatchee World journalists won. The brief will report World journalists won awards in the 2007 Society of Professional Journalists Excellence in Journalism competition.

The awards cover SPJ’s Region 10, which includes entries from Montana, Oregon, Washington, Idaho and Alaska. The World staffers competed with other papers with a circulation of 25,001 to 65,000.
The brief will list all the winners, but I wanted to focus on three:

• Rachel Schleif, first place in education reporting for a report on autism that focused on the stories of local people and schools struggling to find a way — and the money — to reach and teach their autistic kids. Rachel proposed this story and I was skeptical at first because so much has been written about autism. But Rachel worked hard over many weeks to land this fine report. Click here to read it.

• Jefferson Robbins, first place in special report and enterprise reporting. This is an in-depth report that lives on at The World’s Web site.

Click here to check it out. Former features editor and news pal Andy Wahl saw creating projects like this as a way of establishing The World as the place to go for information about all things North Central Washington.

• Christine Pratt, first place in business reporting for a report on a successful mom-and-pop bank in Winthrop, Farmers State Bank.

Chris has a keen eye for the good yarn and a way of making the difficult easy to understand. Click here to check out her take on a remarkable small-town institution.

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A hint: You’re looking at two photos, one that shows water in the riverbed on July 24, 2006, and and one, taken April 25, 2006, that shows no water.

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A few years ago, most people probably couldn’t name Chelan County’s assessor. Thanks to property values, those days are long past for Russ Griffith.

On Monday, Griffith was front and center in Chelan as he was peppered with questions from a crowd of 300 about their soon-to-be increased property tax bills.
Griffith’s office also recently published the county’s levy book for 2008. (Click here and then look on the right side of the page for levy books.) There’s an interesting, and I think, broken down, set of examples of what a $100,000 house would cost you in property tax.
In Chelan, it’d be $1,163.80. In 2007, it was $1,252.46 bill in 2007.
Of course, the trick is finding a $100,000 house.

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