Weekly Briefings

Sample Idaho Weekly Briefing

Don’t miss the gorilla.

As in the old college psych experiment. Participants were shown a basketball film and asked to count how many times the ball was passed. Many of them did that successfully, but they drew a blank when asked if they saw the man in the gorilla suit who walked casually across the scene in the middle of the film. Every viewer had missed it.

As you try to keep track of what’s happening in your state and community, how much time are you being distracted by the ephemera – the car crashes, house fires, cute animal stories, puffery and the like that contribute nothing to your understanding of what’s going on? More than that: How much of the really important stuff are you missing?

Don’t miss the gorilla.

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The Weekly Digest – we publish Idaho, Oregon and Washington editions – keeps your eye on the ball. Drawing from hundreds of sources of information around the Northwest, we distill the critical information, the things you ought to know. We use many original documents and reports as well as our own reporting, giving you an unmatched multi-perspective blend of information.

Digests run 25-35 pages each week, packed with what you need to know about the region.

Our approach is balanced, drawing from a broad range of sources and partisan perspectives, nonpartisan, non-ideological, and neutral. The pdf electronic format also means we can – and do – include loads of hot links giving you access to much more information about the scores of topics covered each week.

For about $1 a week, we cover the waterfront for you.

We follow the key political races and developments. At any given time, you’re up to date with who’s running, what kind of money they’re raising and what they’re up to.

We watch the congressional delegation, track what they’re saying and doing – and watch the fedeeral agencies and their activities in-state as well.

We keep tabs on state government, on the legislature and even on those administrative regulations no one else reports on.

And local government as well, of course.

The legal system gets a look over in every weekly issue, including state Supreme Court and other key court decisions – including central excerpts, so you get an idea of what’s at stake and what the judicial logic is.

Business and the economy getys a close look in every issue, scanning business and economic changes large and small, down to changes in stock prices – and even the high and low gasoline prices in the state, every week.

Environmental, health, social and cultural developments are all noted as well – including some recurring perspective you might not expect.

We let you know who’s coming and going in our section on People.

And our detailed state Calendar lets you know what’s coming up in public affairs.

Throughout, our goal is get to you

We started back in 1990 as a tracer of Idaho state administrative regulations, but as you can tell we’ve expanded a great deal since then. Oregon and Washington editions were added about a decade later.

We’ve been doing this a while. In 2010 we moved from a monthly print publication to weekly digital delivery, arriving in subscribers’ email early every Monday morning (or, to be more precise, late Sunday night).

Randy Stapilus, a veteran of writing about government, politics, economics and the Northwest generally since the mid-70s – currently a columnist for a string of daily newspapers in the region – has been the editor since the beginning.

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