The Hermiston Herald and its related papers on this side of the state collaborated on a rather lengthy feature on the intersection of police work and social media. 

Five EO Media Group reporters talked to law enforcement in their communities about the role Facebook posts, for example, can have in daily police work.  

As we reported, generally when police learn about a report of a possible crime on a local Facebook post, they check it out. A lot of this has to do with harassment. Turns out, there’s not much police can do about it. Oregon doesn’t even have an applicable law for online harassment. 

The reporters — Bill Bradshaw, Dakota Castets-Didier, Isabella Crowley, Samantha O’conner and Neil Nisperos — wrote individual sections that we combined into a rather lengthy feature — almost 1,900 words.

Often, news stories that long don’t get a lot of traction online. Seems people take a look at something that’s longer than a five-minute read and skip over it. But this story has been on the Hermiston Herald website since Friday, July 7, and remains one of our most popular online story.

We’ll take that as a positive sign because we have plans for more collaboration with our newsrooms in Eastern Oregon for more enterprise reporting. There are a number of topics in our region of Oregon worth deeper digs, from energy production and natural resources to the challenges of housing and development. 

And if you have some ideas about topics, let us know.  

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As always, if you have comments or questions about the Hermiston Herald, or want to pass along a story idea, send me an email at this address: acutler@eomediagroup.com.

Finally, let me take this opportunity to once again thank the Hermiston Herald subscribers: We simply would be unable to do this vital work without your support.

Andrew Cutler is the publisher of the Hermiston Herald.