Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.
I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again: In the age of the world wide web, when information from all around the globe is instantly accessible with the click of a button, part of what makes newspapers like ours so special is that we’re not worldwide. We’re not the internet.
Don’t get me wrong—we’re on the internet, obviously, but that’s not where we live. We live here in Reno. That’s where you’ll find us.
We’ve all lived here for years. Some of us were born here. The faces that appear in these pages also show up at the local grocery store. You find our words in local coffee shops, restaurants and bars. You’ll see our pages in local gutters, lining local bird cages, and burning up in local fireplaces. We live here. We’re not the world wide web. We’re the Reno News & Review.
So, we consider keeping it local a core value. We try to tell local stories, and comment about local events. This is our strength. And we try not to shy away from it. Usually. But every once in a while, we veer away from our myopic view, in which the Virginia Street Bridge is the center of the known universe, and tell stories that have a different kind of scope.
This week’s cover story is one of those “every once in a while” occasions. I’ve never met the author of this week’s story in person. She’s an acquaintance of my fiancee’s, but when I read some of the journal entries she had posted up to social media, they struck me as a great firsthand, boots-on-the-ground account of a humanitarian crisis that has not been covered well enough by national outlets and has become grotesquely politicized.
It’s a story that needs to be heard.