Someone has to tap on the window

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, April 15, 2026

The other day, I cut the entire Fauntleroy ferry line.

I drove straight to the tollbooth, convinced I was reading the situation correctly. Then a man tapped on my window. He told me, calmly, that I had it wrong — and then pointed out something that felt true the moment he said it: the setup itself isn’t always clear. Washington State Ferries acknowledges as much; Fauntleroy’s aging terminal, with its single holding lane serving two destinations, has intersection improvements finally set to begin in fall 2026.

“Are you new to Vashon?” he asked.

I laughed. “Not exactly.”

I pulled out, looped back, and got in the real line. Then he kept going, tapping on other windows, helping the next person figure it out too.

I’ve cut that line once before, years ago. That time, someone stormed up and made sure I understood not just that I was wrong, but that I was, in their view, some selfish, entitled person. It crushed me.

This time, on a bright Thursday afternoon with the windows rolled down and the sun out, I drove away embarrassed, yes — but also grateful. Grateful that being told you’re wrong doesn’t have to feel like being told you’re worthless.

I have been thinking about that a lot in relation to journalism. And honestly, about how hard it’s gotten.

I got into this work because I believed, fiercely, in the value of trying to be fair. Not performatively fair. Not falsely neutral. Not numb. Fair. I know all the arguments — that true objectivity doesn’t exist, that we carry histories and blind spots we can’t unzip ourselves from. Maybe that’s right. But that doesn’t make the effort fake.

It makes the effort a discipline: calling one more person, reading one more document, sitting longer with discomfort, staying curious enough to be corrected.

And yet. There are moments — and this feels like one of them — when the national and global picture is so destabilizing, so genuinely alarming, that the old posture of careful neutrality starts to feel not like fairness but like a performance of it.

When you watch institutions strain, when the news arrives faster than anyone can process it, when people you respect are frightened — it becomes harder to simply present both sides of every question as though they carry equal weight. Some things are not debates. Some things are emergencies.

I don’t have a clean answer to that tension. I don’t think anyone does. What I keep coming back to is this: the job isn’t to pretend you feel nothing. It’s to refuse to let your feelings do all the work. To still make the call. Read the document. Ask the hard question of the person you already disagree with. Let the facts land where they land.

The First Amendment protects a free press not because journalists are perfect, but because power should not be the only storyteller. And yet public trust in the press has fallen to 28%, the first time Gallup’s trendline has dropped below 30%. Local news is vanishing: Northwestern’s 2025 State of Local News report found 136 newspaper closures in the past year alone — more than two a week, 213 counties with no local outlet at all.

Those numbers describe what’s at stake when a newsroom keeps showing up anyway.

And here is what I keep returning to: we are a local paper. That is not a consolation prize. Right now, perhaps more than at any point in my lifetime, we live in an access economy — one where the loudest, most algorithmic, most nationalized voices get the most oxygen, and where the actual texture of daily life, the meeting that shaped your kid’s school, the zoning decision that will change your street, the neighbor who did something quietly remarkable — goes uncovered, or undercovered, or buried. Local journalism is, in some ways, the last place where access still means something different. Where a reporter can actually show up. Knock on the door. Sit in the room.

This week, Vashon showed up in force for Rep. Pramila Jayapal’s town hall. National politics is loud on our shoreline right now. We won’t pretend it isn’t.

And as Earth Day approaches — a moment that has always asked us to pay attention to what we’re quietly losing — it feels right to recommit to exactly that: paying attention. To the school board, the ferry dock, the park district, the arguments, the art, the losses, the small joys, and the very human mistakes.

We don’t always get it right. Neither does anyone else navigating a confusing system under pressure — and right now, the systems feel more confusing than ever. But someone has to tap on the window. Someone has to show up, tell the truth as plainly as they can, and trust that the person on the other side of the glass deserves to hear it.

— Aspen Anderson, editor