Why WyoFile published its first-ever election guide

Few if any decisions that we make at WyoFile are as difficult, or as impactful, as choosing what we cover and what we don’t.

As veteran journalist and former WyoFile Trustee Geoff O’Gara put it to me nearly a decade ago, “In New York or D.C. or L.A. there are 100 reporters on every story. In Wyoming, there’s 100 stories for every reporter.” That adds up to difficult math for our editors and reporters every day. 

Yes, we’ve more than tripled our newsroom in recent years — from three to 10 journalists — but our community’s information needs still outstrip what we and our colleagues in the Wyoming press corps can supply, and that equation grows more lopsided each year. Knowing that the stories we choose not to pursue are likely to remain forever unreported makes every “one that got away” all the more agonizing. 

Fortunately, we’ve got a ready-made and reliable litmus-test to help us make the tough calls: Does this story serve our mission “to inform and engage Wyoming through in-depth reporting in the public interest”? 

By that metric, our decision to invest in producing WyoFile’s first-ever election guide was a no brainer. We read our mission as a mandate to provide all Wyomingites — regardless of political persuasion, personal identity or ability to pay — with the information they need to participate effectively in civic life. Clearly, no form of participation is more fundamental than voting. 

Yet, basic, substantive information about candidates for Wyoming office, what they stand for and what they hope to accomplish has been in dangerously short supply. We’ve all grown wearily familiar with the result: us-vs-them, with-us-or-against-us campaigns supplanting affirmative, what-we-can-accomplish-together candidacies; oversimplified, nationalized sloganeering crowding out productive debate of local issues; and the accelerating erosion of Wyoming’s once-vaunted political civility (to name just a few lowlights).

So, invest we did. Led by intrepid Deputy Managing Editor Tennessee Watson, WyoFile staff spent something in the neighborhood of 200 hours crafting questions, identifying candidates, gathering contact information, sending correspondence, making follow-up calls, organizing responses, drafting graphics, formatting portraits, penning copy, cross referencing coverage and entering data… oh, so much data. We’d surely have spent twice as much time if not for the generosity of our good friends and colleagues at the Montana Free Press whose exceptional election guide we cribbed from liberally. Even still, we had to hire a professional developer, Laramie’s own Thomas Musselman, to help make it all work on our website.

Throughout the development process, we emphasized transparency, balance and nonpartisan fairness. We honed a selection of questions designed to evoke substantive responses about the big issues facing Wyoming while also giving candidates the wiggle room to share whatever message they deemed important. That’s a trickier needle to thread than one might think. From the outset, we were clear with candidates about how their responses would and would not be handled: Answers, for example, would be presented exactly as they were submitted, without any editing for clarity, grammar or even spelling. We reserved the right to omit any direct rhetorical attacks on opponents. Fortunately, we never needed to do so. 

Likewise, we strove to be transparent with candidates and readers alike about our aims for the guide. With this project, as in all of our work, we were not motivated by profit, political position or personal ideology, but rather by the simple belief that facts matter. In producing and publishing this election guide, we’ve aimed to bring more facts to the surface where anyone and everyone — regardless of party, perspective or preferred outcome — can use them when they exercise their most hallowed of American rights at the polls.

All told, the guide proved an expensive and time-consuming endeavor, but one that embodies the mission WyoFile’s board and staff work to accomplish every day, and our more than 2,000 members volunteer their hard-earned cash to support. If you too value this type of work, we invite you to join the effort with a membership contribution today.

In the meantime, we’ll keep doing our best to chase the stories that matter, and keep finding ways to pursue more and more of them. Thanks for making that possible.

Sincerely,

Matthew Copeland

WyoFile chief executive and editor