Improving business coverage

Courtney Sherwood, the business editor of The Columbian in Vancouver, Wash., writes Sunday about how the paper is trying to improve its business coverage.

Sherwood writes, “Example one: The Columbian serves all of Clark County, not just Vancouver. Yet 78 percent of the stories we’ve run about businesses or events since Aug. 1 have been based in Vancouver. That’s disproportionate. We need to do a better job of covering the economic, financial and business activities of northern and eastern Clark County. Now that we’ve identified this shortcoming, we will try harder to cover all of Clark County.

“Example two: For more than 20 years, The Columbian has run a weekly feature called ‘Clark County at Work,’ which provides a quick snapshot of a local business. Starting with Saturday’s story, we’re making a few small changes to the feature.

“Too many of these companies have been small one-person shops who nominate themselves in an effort to try to drum up publicity and sales. I don’t blame them, but the result is that we get a distorted view of Clark County’s business community. To include a broader range of local businesses, we are now using a small-business database to help identify folks we might have overlooked.”

Read more here.