“Lori Tobias has given us the rare gift of opening up her reporter’s notebooks, and with wit, intimacy, and compassion, shows us what it’s like to be a part of the wild, raw and beautiful work of bearing witness.” —Inara Verzemnieks, author of Among the Living and the Dead
Journalist Lori Tobias arrived on the Oregon Coast in 2000. After freelancing from Newport for several years, she signed on to the Oregonian as a stringer covering the coast from Florence to Astoria; later she would be hired as a staff writer responsible for the entirety of the coast—one person for more than three hundred miles. The job meant long hours, being called out for storms in the middle of the night in dangerous conditions, and driving hundreds of miles in a day if stories called for it.
The Oregon Coast is a rugged, beautiful place. Separated from the state’s population centers by the Coast Range, it is a land of small towns reliant primarily on fishing and tourism, known for its dramatic landscapes and dramatic storms. Many of the stories Tobias covered were tragedies: car crashes, falls, drownings, capsizings. Those were just the accidents; Tobias covered plenty of violent crimes as well, such as the infamous Christian Longo murders of 2001, but her stories also include more lighthearted