It’s election day, sort of

Election Day has lost much of its importance with an all-mail ballot. Turnout is expected to be low. We’ve documented confusion over the different ballots. It’s unclear whether enough ballots will be counted tonight that the outcomes of the contested primary races will be evident.

No matter. We’ve ordered pizza for the newsroom. Lots of pizza. Pizza on election night is kind of a newsroom tradition. We have extra crews of reporters, editors, photographers, copy editors and designers working late into the night to bring the most up-to-date results in tomorrow’s newspaper.

We’ll also have the results updated continuously online tonight.

Fish, the fair and watchdog journalism

What’s a kokanee? It’s a small, trout-sized landlocked sockeye salmon. It would have been nice to have an explainer graphic with today’s story about kokanee fishing being stopped on Lake Coeur d’Alene.

The graphic accompanying the story about Spokane Interstate Fair attendance would have been dramatically different had it shown the steep decline in the past 17-or-so years, instead of just the past five years. While fair attendance is up significantly this year from last year, it’s still far below the record attendance in 1989.

Finally, Steve Smith pointed out the results of our watchdog journalism: the audit of the University of Idaho’s research park shows some problems. The audit, completed in 2005, was released publicly only because the newspaper filed a public records request.