OSBURN — Thoughts and musings while wrapping up the week with a sun-splashed trip through the Silver Valley...

ITEM: Every single journalist, no matter how experienced, should do a stint at a newspaper like the Shoshone News-Press.

This is not the Chicago Tribune or the Los Angeles Times, where armies of reporters, photographers, columnists and paid experts by the hundreds contribute to a massive “thing” that can’t even be read in a single day.

No, at the News-Press, there are two key newsroom hands: Chanse Watson and Josh McDonald.

They’re the critical reporters in the paper’s day-to-day operations because they ARE the newsroom.

All of it.

News, sports, opinion, weddings, anniversaries, police beat (there were two brawls outside the same bar recently), you name it.

Watson, who carries the amusing title of managing editor, supervises his pal McDonald, who represents his “staff.”

They work about 5 feet apart, but only when they aren’t chasing stories through Kellogg, Mullan, Wallace and every other hamlet in the valley.

And here’s the thing: Just because the towns they cover are small and the paper’s circulation seems tiny, things around here are every bit as important as what we consider hot news in Kootenai County.

The current Hecla mine strike affects the local economy and people’s tempers, as well.

“Could there be violence before it’s over?” said McDonald, who grew up in Kellogg. “Absolutely, it could happen.”

This might seem funny in Coeur d’Alene, but it’s not humorous to the two run-ragged reporters that both of them are in tough positions geographically.

McDonald is in a bind BECAUSE he was raised in the area and faces friends, rivals and expectations; and Post Falls native Watson catches heat because he ISN’T a native, and therefore rouses suspicion among the natives.

These guys do the job the hard way, like salmon swimming upstream.

Everyone in the business ought to “borrow” their jobs for a month — just to truly understand the newspaper business, right down to its soul.

ITEM: Thank you, Megan Frison.

There’s an explanation for that little courtesy, and it starts with the fact that we’re putting together a story for Sunday’s paper that’s, well, pretty darn important.

It’s about reading, and specifically whether young people — who statistically are reading less and less — can be lured back to the written word by dedicated and innovative teachers, librarians and parents.

In the course of doing interviews for this piece, I ran across Frison, who teaches sophomore English at Post Falls High.

We don’t want to give away too much of the clever stuff that teachers at Post Falls and elsewhere are doing to get kids into the habit of reading — heck, we want you hooked completely on Sunday — but while discussing one particular program, Frison mentioned some kids in her class were reading “Watership Down.”

The book is nothing less than a classic, though at first blush it seems to be a child’s adventure tale, the story of some rabbits who find their way across a patch of southern England — hoping for survival at their new warren on Watership Down (hence the title).

But this is no toddler’s storybook.

Written by the previously unknown Richard Adams and published in 1972, the book — a lot like J.K. Rowling’s first Harry Potter novel — could easily have died at birth.

Adams said these rabbits came from stories he made up, on the fly, to entertain his daughters on long car trips.

The Adams girls clearly were a bit smarter than a lot of publishers, because they talked Dad into turning the stories into a book — which was promptly rejected seven times before catching on with a tiny publisher.

All 2,500 copies — yes, that’s correct — sold out, and a giant American publishing company got involved.

The rest is history.

But the great thing here is that because Megan Frison brought up this particular book, I decided to read it for maybe the 10th or 12th time.

Fans of Hazel, Fiver, Bigwig and the other rabbits can’t get enough, even knowing that the book has several layers of meaning and enough allegory to fill a college curriculum.

We begin to use Lapine words (that’s the rabbits’ language, as devised by Adams) and they really make a lot of sense.

For instance, there is a Lapine word called “tharn.” It means to be paralyzed with fear, unable to move or act.

The rabbits are routinely warning each other not to “go tharn,” a type of trance which, when you think about it, affects humans in a different way.

But brother, can we ever “go tharn” in some tough spots?

There are so many good things about this book that you’ll be locked in suspense — I once read a review in which the reader said he sometimes had to jump a page to see if things turned out well, because he couldn’t stand the fright of finishing the page he was reading.

From there you experience deep sentiment, and everyone cries (or at least sniffs) at the end.

You come to root for Hazel and his band of rabbits who are far, far out of their comfort zone and face danger everywhere from “The Thousands.”

Rabbits, you see, cannot count past four – so any number of predators, or anything, beyond four becomes “a thousand.”

But if you’re already a fan, you know this.

And you will forever, however long you live, admire Bigwig for his heroism defending a run (into a burrow) in the face of death against a seemingly impossible enemy.

“My Chief Rabbit has told me to stay and defend this run,” Bigwig says, as we all tear up, “and until he says otherwise, I shall stay here.”

If you aren’t nodding along by now, wanting to read that entire passage again, then go find a copy of “Watership Down.”

Please.

You’ll never think of rabbits — or perhaps anything — the same way again.

ITEM: We ran a story on Wednesday about the flap involving the Kootenai County clerk’s office and the Voter Participation Center — a nonprofit group based in Washington, D.C., that is dedicated to increasing voter registration everywhere in America.

As such, the VPC sent a mailing, a prepared registration form, to potential voters here whom their lists — some obviously outdated — suggested were eligible to vote.

The Kootenai response was fast and furious.

County Clerk Jim Brannon fired out a press release noting the county had been flooded with complaints (80-plus was the figure provided) from citizens who got VPC forms intended for relatives who had died, or never lived in Idaho, and so on.

The idea was that the VPC had carelessly badgered ordinary people for no reason at all.

Pat Raffee, Brannon’s assistant, went even further. She could barely contain her anger at the mailings — which the VPC always has stated are aimed at under-represented groups like African Americans and Latinos (along with millennials and unmarried women).

“African-Americans and Latinos,” Raffee said, barely skirting outright racism. “Look around. Do you see many of those people here?”

One thing The Press tries its best to do is treat any issue, and the people involved in it, as fairly as possible — giving equal treatment to both sides.

So while investigating the VPC nationally, we turned up a press release issued this week by California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, who also was addressing complaints about some inaccurate targeting by the VPC, and urging all mail-out groups to try using the most current information available.

If you’re thinking that little slice of information seems to make the Kootenai County outburst a bit more understandable, however, let’s wrap up this discussion with a couple of numbers — one of which did not make it into print.

If we take the county’s figures as accurate, more than 80 people complained — to the point that Brannon used the words “possible scam” in his press release.

Kootenai County’s population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, is just over 150,000.

The state of California, where Padilla noted his office received “about 100” complaints about VPC, is home to more than 39 million people.

Kootenai County had roughly 80 percent as many complaints as all of California?

Seriously?

A hundred complaints from 39 MILLION residents — does that scream out “scam” to you?

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Steve Cameron is a special assignment reporter for The Press. Reach Steve at scameron@cdapress.com.