Bauer: Learning about Everett and more a word at a time

Published 1:30 am Saturday, March 14, 2026

“I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”

— Joan Didion, American journalist, essayist and novelist

By Jon Bauer / Herald Opinion Page Editor

Those who write routinely understand what Didion meant; that there is something in the process of writing — gathering information and thoughts, pondering, sitting with a pen or at a keyboard, building sentence upon sentence and paragraph upon paragraph, cutting, adding, revising and watching what unfolds — that can be revealing, even surprising, about what one thinks on a subject and about what one comes to understand.

Lately, I’ve been at the pondering stage, thinking about the writing I’ve done as The Herald’s opinion page editor for the last 12 years, part of a nearly 25 years at this paper, which is marking its own milestone of 125 years of publication this month. (If you wish to feel your years, work at an organization for at least a fifth of its long history.)

I’m still several dozen 401(k) contributions away from retirement, but I am leaving The Herald. I am not yet leaving the practice of journalism, however; I’ve taken a job as deputy editor with the Cascadia Daily News in Bellingham, where I will draw on talents I honed here on The Herald’s news desk as a copy editor for the first 13 years working with its reporters, but also assisting with its opinion pages.

It wasn’t a hasty decision, nor an easy one. Much has held me at The Herald through my time here. including personal ties to Everett and Snohomish County that started when my mom and dad moved here with two toddler boys so my father could move up the ranks at GTE from lineman duties in the Tri-Cities to a white-collar job at its office at 41st and Colby, a campus where some 40 years later I was able to work when The Herald offices moved from its longtime home at Grand and California in 2014.

I can’t claim to have had a Herald delivery route as “Scoop” Jackson did when he was a boy; my brother had the paper route, though I substituted a few times when he was ill. But The Herald was a part of our lives; as my mom would look to clip out her kids’ honor roll listings or other accomplishments. I still have a button I got from The Everett Herald’s booth at the Evergreen State Fair one year when I was nine or 10 years old that shows me with a goofy grin standing in front of a Herald front page.

A pride and fondness for Everett — built learning at its public schools, playing in its youth symphony and high school bands, taking photos at Howarth Park beach, working fast food jobs and attending classes at its community college — was what drew me back to Everett in 2001 when a position opened up on the news desk.

The news desk offered me a chance to work with reporters, among them Herald veterans Jim Haley and Julie Muhlstein; younger reporters, editors and photojournalists who went on to join the newsrooms of The Washington Post, The Seattle Times and the Houston Chronicle; and others who enjoyed and took pride in what was done here too much not to stick it out until retirement or, sadly, death.

My second half here as the opinion page editor allowed me, as Didion notes, to find out what I thinking about life, politics, problems and solutions; of policy making and public meetings, failures and successes of Snohomish County and its cities; the passions of those working for interest groups and civic organizations, the efforts of lawmakers and the concerns and wishes of residents and readers.

All that was presented on these pages with the voices of others devoted to public discourse, civil but determined to express their perspectives and arguments in columns, commentaries and letters to the editor. (The good news is that all that will continue on these pages.)

During my last week at The Herald, I have continued a project started last year with the eighth-grade English classes of John Johansen at Lakewood Middle School, who invited me to spend a couple of days with his students in advising them how to research and write persuasive essays that were then published last May in The Herald. Again this year, The Herald will publish selected essays from those students’ work this year. Work started Wednesday by dissecting a Herald editorial to discuss what was effective in its arguments, what was lacking and how they could begin to research their own essays and what they might want to tell our readers.

Should you ever doubt the brilliance of young minds now, spend a day — a single period if that’s all you have time for — in a classroom in any school in Snohomish County, listening to students discuss a few paragraphs of thought and what it tells them. These are kids — as they try out notions and opinions for a good fit — who demonstrate the comprehension and curiosity they need now and as adults to understand a world that is evolving around them at a pace quicker than anything their parents or grandparents experienced.

And as they write, with each keystroke, they will find out what they are thinking. As I did.

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