By Gina Cuclis

It used to be unheard of for a daily newspaper to wait more than a day before publishing reports about actions taken by local government, such as city councils or boards of supervisors. If an editor thought a newsworthy decision was made at a city council meeting, and the paper had a reporter at the meeting, an article about the decision would be in the next day's paper. Not two or more days later. So what I saw in today's Santa Rosa Press Democrat surprised me.

News Three Days Late

Today's (Friday, Oct. 2) Santa Rosa newspaper has two articles about actions taken at Tuesday's Sonoma County Board of Supervisors' meeting. I was very surprised that one of these three-day-old stories is on the front page — "No bottled water for county workers." The other is on the front of the Empire News section — "Supervisors OK 20-year North Bay garbage contract." Both the articles appeared on the paper's website late yesterday afternoon — two days after the meeting.

This week's Board of Supervisors' agenda had more than the typical one or two items of high interest. An article about the most controversial action of meeting — a decision to sell the county landfill — ran on Wednesday's front page, and appeared on the Press Democrat's website Tuesday evening.

Why the Delay

I suspect this is another result of the Press Democrat's decline in staff and its number of printed pages. With fewer employees to cover local news, and less room to publish local stories, someone made a decision to run the two other board of supervisors stories later in the week. I believe this is also the result of the lack of competition. With no other daily news media covering the Board of Supervisors, the Press Democrat knows no one will beat it in reporting those stories. This illustrates the issue I raised in my inaugural blog post. Are we being well served in the North Bay when the number of news media covering county government, and Sonoma County in general, is declining?