Candidate endorsements from the Weekly’s editorial board are not a way to make friends.

Sara Rubin here, wondering what tools you use to decide how to vote. Maybe you’ve followed a candidate’s political career to date and paid attention to their stance on the issues that matter to you. Maybe you’ve attended a candidate forum or read their campaign ads. In relatively small communities like ours, you may know a candidate personally (leading to supporting or opposing them). 

If you’re reading this newsletter, my guess is that you might also rely on local news coverage to decide on how to vote. Our editorial team does their best to cover the candidates through the campaign and beyond, holding them accountable after they are elected to see whether they fulfill their promises. Reporters are tasked with documenting their big ideas and their frivolous ideas, successes and challenges. 

Various decisions by city councils (and school boards, water boards, etc.) get reported in our news section all year long, well beyond election season. Our editorial board—that’s me, along with Founder & CEO Bradley Zeve and Publisher Erik Cushman—use that reporting, along with candidate interviews and email questionnaires, to make endorsements at election season. Our candidate endorsements appear as this week’s cover story. 

The tradition of news organizations making political endorsements is an old one, with widespread adoption during Abraham Lincoln’s presidential campaign in 1860. The practice has raised eyebrows ever since, including this week since our endorsements were published. 

There is a lot of academic and industry discussion about the fundamental question of whether news organizations should publish endorsements. I found one 2022 paper from the University of South Florida’s School of Advertising and Mass Communications particularly interesting because it covers the difference between local, nonpartisan races (like those for city council) from national, partisan races. 

The authors interviewed 64 political journalists in 2020, and their takeaway was that journalists were comfortable with it, but doubted that their readers were (although they thought local papers could better maintain trust than national outlets). “Most of the journalists we interviewed didn’t question their newsrooms’ ability to uphold the metaphorical wall between the editorial and reporting sides, with one reporter referring to it as ‘a pretty strict firewall.’”

That firewall is a big part of our practice here at the Monterey County Weekly. Our reporters may not agree with our three-person editorial board—our three-person editorial board doesn’t even always agree, though we do our best to reach consensus. 

We adhere to the Society of Professional Journalists’ code of ethics, and they address political endorsements similarly. “Although some readers think these endorsements signal a bias in the publication’s news coverage, SPJ encourages editorial pages to promote thoughtful debate on candidates and politics; letting readers know through endorsements which candidates share the newspaper’s vision is part of that discussion. Part of an editorial page’s responsibility, though, to take every appropriate opportunity to explain the firewall between news and opinion.”

Wherever you land, agreeing or disagreeing with our endorsements, I thought this would be a good opportunity to remind our readers about that firewall—and also, as always, to urge you to vote. Election Day is Nov. 3.