Election day

It's election day here in Seattle -- local city and county council races, school board, some money measures -- and so according to longstanding tradition I got together with my friend Simon.

Jim Simon and I were reporting (and later editing) partners for years at the Seattle Times, first in the state capital bureau and then in the main office, and we must have worked a couple dozen elections together. Since you start work late on election night, we always got together in the late afternoon and caught a movie or something to eat before work (it wasn't as romantic as it sounds).

These days Jim is metro editor -- or maybe an assistant managing editor now, I'm not sure of his title -- and although he still works on election night he doesn't have the time he used to. So today we just got together for coffee. It was good to see him; he's one of the all-time great guys, and we've been friends for 20 years. I was at his daughter Masayo's second birthday party; now she's a sophomore at University of Oregon.

No big headlines, just chit-chat. But it got me thinking about this season's election coverage in the local papers. With the exception of a stray story or two, it hasn't been so good, I've thought. Today I clicked around several local news sites looking at election guides and again I wasn't very impressed. What I found, mostly, were lists of previous stories, not organized, comprehensive, informative guides to the issues and races on the ballot.

This doesn't seem to me like it should be that hard to do. It makes me want to play around with creating a site to organize local political coverage. Maybe I'll do that in my spare time.