Would you take a flight out of Victoria?

By ChrisCobler in Your Advocate: an editor's blog

When you fly Sun Air's twin-engine Piper Chieftan, you get a close-up view of everything, including the cockpit. I sat a row behind the pilot. ------------------------------------ With some trepidation, I prepared Thursday to fly Sun Air out of Victoria. We ...

When should we publish a photo of a car crash?

By ChrisCobler in Your Advocate: an editor's blog

Advocate journalists hate going to the scene a car crash. The carnage is tough to see, report on and photograph, but we recognize residents have a keen interest in traffic safety. The most common incidents readers contact us about via ...

How would you handle a Catch-22?

By ChrisCobler in Your Advocate: an editor's blog

We always prefer tidy packages, black-and-white answers, clear-cut policies. However, the world is a messy, interesting place. That's why your Advocate has an ethics board trying to bring some cadence to the cacophony. At this week's board meeting, though, we ...

How much more can our web traffic grow?

By ChrisCobler in Your Advocate: an editor's blog

As I monitored all of the online updates about Monday afternoon's shooting in Victoria, I also reviewed our web traffic numbers for 2012. The growth in our online readership is impressive. We know about the strong reach of the printed ...

What do you think when you see a related ad near a news story?

By ChrisCobler in Your Advocate: an editor's blog

Our copy editors alerted me late Saturday night to the inadvertent placement of a news story about DeTar Hospital near the hospital's front-page ad. They were concerned the juxtaposition might give some readers the wrong idea. I didn't consider the ...