Our View: Hi-Line darts and laurels

Laurel and Dart — Chuck Johnson and Mike Dennison of Lee Newspapers have been the deans of the Helena press corps for a long time. The two will retire today Johnson started his career covering the 1972 Montana Constitutional Convention, He is unsurpassed in his knowledge of Montana politics. It was announced last week that their employer, Lee Enterprises, was nudging them out and closing the statehouse bureau. Republicans Democrats, fellow journalists, liberals, conservatives and mugwumps joined in expressing their outrage. The two are a unique mix of old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting and 2015-style Twitter reporting. Readers throughout Montana, including those of us who can follow their work via website and Twitter, will be the worse off without them.

Dart — Lee Enterprises publishes some fine newspapers, but their decision to sack Johnson and Dennison was boneheaded. Lee officials said they are going to have a different focus for their statehouse coverage. But from what they have said so far, the focus of their new focus is pretty unfocused. You can’t help but feel that during the next gubernatorial campaign, we won’t be quite as well informed. Lee will get new people to do the work, but with less experience, less insight and, we suspect, a far lighter paycheck.

Laurel — Havre showed its heart again this weekend, when people flocked to a benefit at Montana State University-Northern for three college students who were injured in a brutal break-in stabbing at the Highland Park apartment. The stabbings touched the hearts of Havreites. We consider our community a safe, welcoming place, and to think that someone stabbed these innocent young people sickens us. But our hearts grow warmer when we realize that our fellow residents are working to show the victims how sorry we are and how we are willing to help them in their long road to recovery. If you want to help out further, order some food from Pizza Hut today. The two-day fund drive ends tonight. If you tell the wait staff you want to donate to this fund, 20 percent of the receipt total will go to the drive to help the victims. Giving to a charity never tasted so good.

Laurel — Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., has reintroduced legislation that would encourage preservation of Native languages. Tester said there are 148 Native languages remaining in the United States. If nothing is done, they will all vanish within 50 years. Tester’s bill does on a nationwide basis what legislation introduced by State Sen. Jonathan Windy Boy, D-Box Elder, does in Montana. Around the world, native languages are disappearing. We must not allow that to happen to Native American languages in Montana and around the United States and Canada.