Port Townsend is lucky to have a good little newspaper with a damn good staff - not perfect, but it deserves our appreciation, most recently for taking its fourth estate duties seriously and calling out City Hall’s apparent misstatement and secrecy around the hiring of a new city manager.

Consider, for instance, a letter The Leader published last month deriding the paper’s coverage of local events and for making minor mistakes. It read like a competitor’s effort to denigrate Port Townsend’s weekly by inflating inevitable and ever-fewer errors.

All papers of worth struggle to avoid errors, yet make a few. We’re lucky The Leader is put out by folks clearly striving for professionalism and generally succeeding. I hope readers tempted to adopt our era’s snarkiness will take a closer look, compare The Leader to papers anywhere, consider the challenges a small staff faces, and enjoy our good fortune.

It would be nice if the paper were flush enough to hire several copy editors. Perhaps with more ad revenue it will be able to. Meanwhile, this second-generation newspaperman, familiar with problems all newspapers face, admires efforts by our paper’s new owners and staff, amazed by the number and variety of stories written well each week with gratifying detail and accuracy.

Consider too that an editor running corrections of errors is expected but running that drive-by letter last month was impressive if not surprising. It was ostensibly a complaint about misspelling the name of a participant in a public meeting. The name was said to be Wojt. A harried reporter hearing that name pronounced aloud as “White” a time or two might be chastised but forgiven for spelling it like the color without double-checking. Rather than crumpling the nastygram and merely running a correction, The Leader’s editor ran the letter and gave his critic a wider voice.

Mistakes will continue, but probably fewer and fewer, some from human error, some due to modern electronics, none on purpose. I seriously doubt sloth is involved.

There’s a bright side to the current tough times for newspapers: They’ve brought massive layoffs, but readers of The Leader benefit because more conscientious journalists are available. The pay on weekly papers has always been awful, but any good paper is a plum of a place to work for the energetic harboring the higher principles of the news business.

I’ve only briefly met Editor Dean Miller but believe he’s a decent man with refined sense of responsibility to our community. The same applies for The Leader reporters. I doubt anyone deplores significant omissions, mistakes, or “fake news” more. Holding officials accountable to the public they’ve sworn to serve indicates this paper has taken its fourth estate - or “government’s cop” - duties seriously, too.

The Leader may never be perfect, but we could do a hell of a lot worse.

(Brooks Townes, raised by a prominent newspaper editor of several of America’s biggest newsrooms, was himself a reporter for metro dailies prior to becoming a maritime writer for national and international publications. He retired near Port Townsend.)