Question: Why don’t you print more information on the Downing Street memo? This is a huge story. – Richard Emerick

Answer: Good point, although this is one of those continuing stories that’s been a bit difficult to follow. However, as a result of your question, one of our wire news editors took another look at the stories available from our wire services and found one that we were able to publish in Thursday’s paper. We won’t promise that we’ll publish a story every day on this issue, but we’ll keep an eye out for significant developments.

We receive scores of stories about Iraq each day and probably could fill every page of the first section with news and analysis about Iraq, but that simply isn’t practical. – Gary Graham, managing editor

Can you expand coverage?

Question: There is nothing sweeter than facing the morning with a good cup of coffee and a newspaper. Unfortunately, I finish The Spokane Review paper well before I finish my coffee. Can you please consider expanding your coverage?

As I was reading the Calgary paper last week, I was wishing our paper had such complete coverage. How about a restaurant review? How about book reviews? How about more world coverage? How about some independent investigation into national politics? How about some strong liberal and conservative viewpoint articles? (I am a liberal Democrat) How about revealing the truth in government, like you did with the Spokane mayor’s office?

How about investigating consumer rips, like cellular phones contracts and new phones that must be purchased with new service, as each company has its own equipment technology. Wasn’t newspaper reporting once called muckraking? Helping to fix the wrongs in our society? Getting to the meat of things? I dream on and on. – Sally Giannini

Answer: I wish we had the space and staff of the Calgary paper, too. I’d take either Seattle paper, the Oregonian or the Philadelphia Inquirer, for that matter. But the reality is that we’re a small metro newspaper in a small market, far smaller than Calgary, which supports a major regional newspaper substantially larger than ours.

As a 100,000 circulation daily, our news hole (that is, the amount of space on the page devoted to news content as opposed to advertising) is right in line with national norms. Our news hole for national and international news is somewhat larger than the norm. Our news hole for sports is about average. The news hole for local news, given our three editions and the “swaps” between editions, is substantially above the norm.

Our staff size is somewhat larger than most papers our size, even after the downsizing of recent years. A newspaper’s size, staff and news hole is determined primarily by advertising revenue, which is a function of market size. The larger the market, the greater the revenue, so the larger the paper. That’s why papers in places like the Tri-Cities, Wenatchee or Walla Walla are substantially smaller than The Spokesman-Review.

Now, we do have some of the features you ask about – perhaps you haven’t found them. Restaurant reviews and news run in the 7 section on Friday. Book reviews run in the In Life section on Sundays. Books writer Dan Webster runs a popular local book club and his books coverage is widely read.

We increased our news hole for national/international news about the time the Iraq war launched, but I don’t see additional expansion any time soon.

On the editorial pages, you will find the strong liberal and conservative columns you crave. You can’t get much more extreme than Thomas Sowell and Molly Ivins and both are published regularly. My favorite is Leonard Pitts, one of the best middle-of-the-road columnists in the business.

The Spokesman-Review is a local paper, and you won’t see us take the lead – except in really rare circumstances – on national investigations. Our staff must stay focused on our region and local issues of immediate importance to our readers.

In recent months, you might have seen good muckraking reports on Mayor West, on the BNSF fiasco in Rathdrum, on asbestos contamination in Libby, Mont., on the Kootenai County Drug Court mini-scandal and a variety of other topics big and small, stories you would not have seen anywhere else.

Those stories mark, I hope, resurgence in investigative and light-in-dark-corners reporting for this newspaper. But our attentions almost always will be local. – Steve Smith, editor