Mike McInally

It’s the time of year when newspapers go deep into their archives — well, OK, about 12 months into their archives — and put together their annual batch of “year-end” stories.

If you’ve worked at a newspaper, you also know that this is the time of year when Associated Press editors send out ballots listing dozens of Oregon, national and world stories. Voters at news operations around the world decide which was No. 1, which was No. 2 and so forth. AP writers dutifully turn the results into long stories. We are very serious about this important work.

But it is, of course, a silly pastime at heart. Nevertheless, it also seems to satisfy our deep-seated longing to produce ranked lists, and in this way, produce some sort of artificial order out of a series of essentially random events. Now, I’m a sucker for lists (don’t get me started on the day that issue of Entertainment Weekly came in the mail with a list of the 100 best albums ever), and I bet you are too.

Gazette-Times reporters are at work now going through their clips for 2009, with the idea being to provide some updates on some of the year’s biggest stories in Corvallis and Benton County. We’ll run those stories in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day. (The other reason newspapers prepare these stories, of course, is that they fill space in a period when the news is pretty slow.)

But I started thinking: Why not open the doors to readers? What would you say were the biggest stories of 2009 in Corvallis and Benton County?

Take a couple of minutes, if you’d like, to think about it — and then e-mail me with your answers. Click here to send me an e-mail.  If you’d like, include some details about what the biggest stories of the year were in your life: New job? New kid? New pet? Did you get to see Wilson the cougar?

I don’t know yet what we’ll do with the information we gather: If we get enough responses, I’ll put together a list from readers that we’ll run on the Web and in the print edition. If we don’t get enough responses, I’ll report on that as well, but probably contain it to the blog.

Your nominations should be to me by noon on Dec. 24. That will give me something to do on Christmas Eve.

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