What do we see in the mirror?

Published 5:00 am Saturday, September 30, 2006

“Tell me,” our caller demanded, “how long you’ve lived on Bainbridge Island.”

“Fourteen years,” we replied.

“That tells me all I need to know. You’re not a true islander. You’re all about the money.”

Click.

And that was that – voted off the island after so many years, because we happened to put a story on a new Botox practice on Wednesday’s front page, instead of such topics as (the caller’s list) the shortage of body armor among troops serving in Iraq, the number of Bainbridge women battling breast cancer, or the blight of toxins in our air.

Our caller wasn’t the only indignant reader; we also took some lumps at our monthly community luncheon that afternoon.

Wrinkles? Where’s the news?

First, let’s get one thing straight: There are many reasons one might get into community journalism, but money isn’t among them. (We have the overdraft slips to prove it.) And we’re not sure it’s our fault that we weren’t born here; if the test of a “true” islander is third- or fourth-generation roots, sorry, few among us pass.

Second, among the “pegs” on which one hangs a news story – timeliness, proximity, prominence, drama, et. al. – “unusualness” is fair game. We put the Botox story on the front page precisely because the image of a subcutaneous injection of “Botulinum Toxin Type A” seemed catchy, something that would make people talk. (Did it ever.) Put the same story on the business page, and it would have sat comfortably among profiles of our downtown’s latest “concept” boutiques and their seemingly limitless inventories of outré antiques, household bric-a-brac and $200 bluejeans.

Yes, you could take the Botox story at (ahem) face value, and dismiss it as fluff, mind candy for a slow news week. Fair enough. Or you could read a little further between the lines and ask what it says about our community. We didn’t create the market for cosmetic injections, but some of you did; the fact that two new practices are starting up in Winslow within weeks of each other is something readers ought to know. Some may not like it; they may conclude that their island neighbors are shallow, vain, narcissistic, valueless, stupid and/or too wealthy for their own good. (Feel free to go next door and tell them.)

But some of the folks who are paying $250 a pop to blur the lines of age may well be the same ones who last year raised their own taxes to pay for new school computers, who last week raised $70,000 in a single evening for the Kids Discovery Museum, or who’ll be bidding high at tonight’s Auction for the Arts fund-raiser. One thing you can say for an increasingly affluent community: folks find a lot of things to spend their money on besides themselves.

Is “Botox on Bainbridge” front page news? Probably not. But holding up a mirror to the community is an imprecise art, and folks will have different reactions to what they see. The press does enjoy a certain power to define the issues of the day through enterprise stories, but journalism is also a largely reactive practice – people do things, we write about them.

Sometimes those things may seem silly to “true” islanders, whoever they may be. But we’d like to believe the island still has a little room for silliness.