You may have noticed recent format and content changes on the East Oregonian’s records pages.

We’re working to make the records information more reader friendly with a simpler, more unified look. That means using more of the same fonts, using more indentations or bullet points and not having as much text in all caps. We’re also implementing The Associated Press style when it comes to dates and street addresses, which is the same style we use in news articles and briefs.

In the meetings sections, we are replacing long and complicated Zoom meeting web addresses with shorter addresses via bitly.com, the website link shortening platform. Not only does that look better, but shorter addresses are easier to copy.

The content we run in records also is changing.

We’ve moved away from running all civil claims that credit companies and banks make against locals. The majority of the U.S. population carries some sort of debt, and it’s all too easy to fall behind. We also are taking that route when it comes to publishing monetary judgments stemming from credit debt. That situation is newsworthy, but running in print each week the names of everyone in Umatilla County facing a small claim from a credit card company is not.

We’re making similar changes to what we run in court sentences.

We will continue to run most felonies, but we’re going to run fewer misdemeanors. Some of this stems from the news industry reexamining its reporting of criminal cases and outcomes and some stems from changes in Oregon law. With Oregon voters approving the decriminalization of small amounts of certain drugs, which went into effect in February 2021, running the sentencing of someone arrested in 2018 on a drug charge that now amounts to a traffic ticket does not seem a fair practice.

For that reason, we’re also noting the year of the original criminal charges. Sometimes a case can take years to conclude. Publishing names, crimes and sentences without a reference to when the case began can imply all the cases are recent.

We recognize some readers value these records, but as with much else during the past year-and-a-half, the EO also had to question if gathering and collating all the records we were running was the best use of our staff’s time and providing real value to our readers. Collecting information from Oregon’s electronic court system, which is where we obtain state court records, is time consuming.

Cutting out records that have little value allows a better use of our staff’s time and means we can add court records from Morrow County. Sentences and lawsuits also matter there, and with Umatilla County makes up Oregon’s 6th Judicial District.

You also will see fewer mugshots throughout the paper. The EO, like much of the news industry, is changing its stance on running photos of people in jail. Sometimes a photo can imply guilt, sometimes it just shows someone on the worst day of their life, and too often we and other news outlets lack the resources to check on the outcome of every case we initially report on.

Plus a new Oregon law will make it more difficult for news media to run booking photos.

House Bill 3273 goes into effect Jan. 1, 2022, and prohibits law enforcement agencies from releasing booking photos except in specified circumstances. That law also requires publish-for-pay publications to remove and destroy booking photos upon request within a specified period. Newspapers and the like will not be able to charge for removing and destroying certain booking photos. And the bill provides publications are liable for fees, costs and statutory damages for failing to remove and destroy photos as required.

The EO’s website, www.eastoregonian.com, also is a place to find more records. In the menu that opens on the left side of the page, we have our Data Center. There, you can find building permits, food inspections and property transactions.

For us, this distills down to one objective: making the East Oregonian the best provider of news it can be. Getting there, however, means balancing journalist integrity, our resources and reader interests. We think these changes to records reporting achieve that balance.