Beth Stone of Tacoma wrote to complain that we haven't written about the 6th Congressional District race (Norm Dicks' seat) in the news section yet.

I encourage the News Tribune to cover the 6th Congressional district race. The voters deserve to know what each of the candidates stand for.

To my knowledge, the News Tribune has mentioned the names of the 6th District challengers twice in the past two months – on June 8, on the listing of filers, and in the July 25, endorsement of the incumbent.

If the News Tribune has the privilege of telling us how to vote, shouldn’t it also assume the responsibility of informing us about the candidates’ views?

She goes on to tout the merits of one of the challengers.

I thought I'd share this with a broader audience since other readers might be wondering the same thing. Here's my reply to her:

Your concern about our congressional coverage got forwarded to me (I’m the news editor in charge of local political coverage). You’re right that not much has appeared in print yet. But that’s not to say we haven’t been busy.

We have four congressional districts in our circulation area (plus 11 legislative districts, the governor, the Supreme Court and county races). We can’t do it all, and we definitely can’t do it all right this minute. A reporter is working on a roundup of the races in the four congressional districts that will probably run this weekend.

Secondly, we just published our online voter guide over the weekend (it’ll stay there through the primary). Here’s a link.

Check out the 6th District page. It’s a lot of information – too much for us to get in the print edition before the primary. So we’ll refer readers to the online guide as often as possible.

Here is why it’s online only: After Filing Week in July June, we send questionnaires to more than 130 candidates. It takes two months to prepare the questionnaires, send them out and collect and publish the responses. It's an incredible amount of work. Until a couple of years ago, we just saved all of the responses for the 32-page guide we publish in October for the general election because of the amount of work involved in organizing and publishing it. But we managed to streamline and automate some of the work (thanks to Web programmer Aaron Ritchey), so now I can get it done right around the first of August, just in time for the primary. We figure online only is better than not at all.

Is it enough? No, of course not. It’ll never be enough. I just wanted you to know there’s a lot more going on than you can see.