Inside UDJ by Editor K.C. Meadows

The past week I have gotten feedback from a number of people about our stories delving into what may have been going on up in Covelo that may help us to understand the suicides of two sheriff's deputies who worked there.
Some of the feedback has come as phone messages, some emails and some letters.
Except for one or two letters to the editor for publication, all these communications were either anonymous or not for attribution.
There are two opinions that have come across that I want to address.
First: Why haven't we gotten to the real bottom of the story? This theory goes that everyone in Covelo knows what was going on, why haven't we published it?
Well, I've heard a lot about what people believe was going on up there too, but that doesn't mean I can just publish it. There are people who are still alive involved in these stories and we have to be careful about publishing what our investigations turn up. Good sources make good stories, but even with good sources, we have to watch what we print. To the extent that we can find out things that we are certain are true, that are corroborated by more than one person or which have the added benefit of being told to us by participants or witnesses, we can go forward.
But simply "knowing" what happened and publishing it are two very different things.

The second problem of perception is that we somehow delight in publishing bad things about Covelo, that we should now go our of our way to publish something nice about Covelo in return for the not-nice things we published last week.
Well, we don't make this stuff up. What is coming out about what may have been going on in Covelo is news and important to the community at large - especially since two deputies are now dead. As for good news, I remember we did stories last summer on Covelo's organic meat ranch, and also on a Covelo vegetable coop. We don't get out to Covelo too often because of its remoteness and I would be happy to have a Covelo resident who would like to write a regular column about good news from Covelo writing for us. Anyone out there?

Finally, and I guess this harks back to the first thing, about knowing versus publishing, I got a phone message from a woman who said I was in some way responsible for Deputy Eric Gore's suicide, since had we published some of these stories earlier, after Deputy Brett White's suicide, perhaps Gore would have been able to come forward with whatever he knew and been relieved of carrying the burden. All I can say is that these kinds of situations are tricky for us, for the people involved, and for people who think they know what's going on. It takes a combination of people willing to come forward on the record to get at these problems. There are families and careers involved in stories like these and we can't force people to step out on those limbs. We are always grateful when they do, and it usually ends up providing an opening that gives us a good wedge to keep widening it.