Some improvements coming to Sunday Trib

February 26, 2023

If you’re looking for this regular column in its usual spot in the A section of next Sunday’s newspaper, you won’t find it. Yes, I’ll still be writing my weekly column, it just won’t be in the A section — nor will be the other Opinion page features. Beginning Sunday, March 5, we are making some minor changes to the Sunday edition in order to expand our coverage in areas that we have found to be popular among readers. In order to ensure we have enough space, we will be relocating some regular features. They still will be here. They just might be in a different place. ...

Residents need answers now, not rhetoric

February 19, 2023

Cargo onboard the derailed Norfolk Southern train in East Palestine wasn’t classified as “hazardous,” but clearly it was. Trains hauling cargo designated as “high hazardous” require notice to Ohio’s office of Homeland Security and Department of Public Safety. So why was this derailed train that ignited rail cars full of toxic carcinogens not classified this way? Dan Tierney, spokesman for Gov. Mike DeWine, last week told me it simply was because not enough cars were hauling hazardous chemicals. The train did not have a high enough percentage of its freight cars ...

Many questions remain in reporter’s arrest

February 12, 2023

My newsroom staff and I spent much of last week working with our sister newspapers in Columbiana County covering the devastating train wreck in East Palestine that threatened people’s homes, health and even their lives. Every day — every hour, really — something new developed in what very likely someday could become the script for a blockbuster movie. We reported rapidly the developments, repeatedly adding new Breaking News posts at www.tribtoday.com. Like the entire community, we held our collective breath when crews worked to rid the twisted rail cars of deadly chemicals that ...

Use vast sources to stay most informed

February 5, 2023

Debate and discourse, as I’ve frequently noted in this very column, are critical to ensuring we are well educated on decisions involving our present and our future. I personally enjoy reading or hearing well framed arguments from those who feel passionately about their beliefs — but only when those arguments are researched, fact-based and attributed to reputable sources. I’d love to tell you this newspaper is all you need, but that’s simply not true. Rather, to be really educated, you information must come from varied sources. Some might even describe my demand for ...

What happened to robust and good debate?

January 29, 2023

I cringed the other day during a newsroom discussion. Primary election season is right around the corner. As if that’s not bad enough, somehow it’s about to be campaign season for — brace yourself — the next presidential election. That is what triggered the cringe. You see, with national elections emerge angry Americans, even uglier-than-usual social media posts and, yes, angry readers who soon will be firing off emails to the newsroom and ringing my office phone. They will insist this newspaper is far, far too left. Or others will argue we are way, way too far ...

Vaccine political divide not going away

January 22, 2023

At some point in history vaccinations became politically divisive. I’m not sure exactly when that happened, but it must have been sometime after American physician Jonas Salk invented the polio vaccine in the 1950s, because at that time, people seemed to have no qualms about lining up themselves and their children for injection. Salk so believed in his experimental creation that in 1953 he bravely tested the so-called “killed-virus vaccine” on himself and his family. Then just one year later he tested it on 1.6 million children in Canada, Finland and the United States. It ...