We'd either written stories about the various candidates that told us and others about them in a few tight paragraphs or we'd learned about their antics from City Council meetings, legal proceedings or business forays.
We kind of took it for granted that when voting day rolled around, we'd be in the loop.
(Marc was the editor of the weekly paper and I was an intrepid reporter.)
Now we're clueless.
We're voting uninformed.
We searched the papers and the news broadcasts for mention of the candidates running in American Fork.
We found little.
The only one we knew anything about was the mayor and he gets our vote because he came down and let us take a picture of him for the "Geek the Library" campaign.
But the people running for City Council are unknowns.
We don't know who or what we're voting for.
I called up a friend of mine who's been serving on the council and she said she wasn't voting for any of them but one.
"They haven't earned my vote. They haven't even campaigned," she said.
That explains some of the mystery.
It isn't just me or Marc who is in the dark.
Apparently it isn't worth it to spend much money before the primary election.
So I only voted for the one guy because I figured there's someone out there who knows why and who he's voting for and I didn't want to cancel out a valid vote.
But I've spent the day mourning — once again — the loss of the Citizen and its input.
The pesky election stories that we all complained about writing served a purpose.
People now have to function without good information.
I realize anew...that when you lose a community newspaper, you lose big time.
We all do.
This is what happens when a rag like the Provo Daily Herald gets a hold of a respectable weekly newspaper like the Citizen and runs into the ground. I will never read the Herald's online version of the Citizen.
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