This week, we’d like to invite you on a cruising ride alongside Nick Welsh, pictured above on his bike with Trixie the poodle hanging tight, an image drawn by his son Isaac Welsh. Read how Nick tackled this week’s cover story, and enjoy his exclusive new look.
What does it take to get through writing a huge story like this one about Sable Oil and bring it to the public in a timely manner?
Sable was a beast, because once the county settled its lawsuit with Sable earlier this summer, all the people at the county who had a rich and detailed professional knowledge of what an oil company should and could do to keep the community safe were effectively muzzled as a collateral consequence of the settlement. I get it that the county concluded it had no case, but I think the county supervisors should have stepped up to play the role of information portal for the community at large. As a result, the public — and the media — is forced to navigate a double-helix Rubik’s cube of weird acronyms and multiple state government agencies to find out what’s going on. Each of these agencies have very narrowly circumscribed areas of review and jurisdiction. None of them are really open to what we normally think of as the public process. As a result, the public process here has been oblique and opaque in the extreme.
How have news and media changed over the course of your career?
Most obviously, there’s a whole lot less of us. Once upon a time, criminal defense attorneys in town would complain about “the media circus” making a mockery of their clients’ criminal hearing. I think they were whining, but back then, there were enough reporters in the courtroom to numerically justify the term “circus.” Today, if there are two reporters in the same courtroom, that’s a news story in and of itself.
Who has been an inspiration to you?
Robert Caro and Taylor Branch and a whole bunch of sports writers who have either died or retired. But what’s really inspiring to me is getting to work with up-and-coming writers and reporters like Callie Fausey, Ryan P. Cruz, Margaux Lovely, and Christina McDermott. They demonstrate journalism still has a future, not just a past.
If you weren’t writing for the news, what would you be doing?
If I wasn’t a reporter, I think I’d be a groundwater geologist. Or maybe write super bad trashy thrillers. I am thinking of starting a new business teaching people how to write their own obituary. I’m thinking of calling it “Let ’er RIP.” And for whatever reason, I have been seized by a desire to take up the trombone. I have never played before, so I can’t say where this is coming from. Nowhere good. If I took up space on State Street, I think people might pay me a whole lot of money not to play. Given what Trump and Musk are doing in Washington, this might be how my resistance and subsistence intersect.
If you could be anyone for a day (dead or alive), who would you want to be?
Lester Young or Charlie Mingus.
