Candidates for Attorney General are making plans for Oregon’s May primary. But there’s one local news outlet that won’t be covering the race – a Portland weekly paper that’s done extensive reporting on legal affairs.

Willamette Week publisher Richard Meeker and his wife Ellen Rosenblum have been married almost thirty years.

Meeker says Rosenblum had his full support when she told him she was going to run for state Attorney General this year.

“She was a federal prosecutor for the first 7 or 8 years of our marriage. She then became a district court judge and a circuit court judge and now has been on the court of appeals, and has handled all manner of important matters,” Meeker said.

To this point, Meeker says he’s never heard complaints about how their professional lives have intermingled. But he says, it wasn’t his responsibility to decide how Willamette Week would handle the election.

That, he says, fell to the paper’s editor, Mark Zusman.

“To be honest with you it didn’t require a whole lot of mental gymnastics, it was a fairly easy call to make,” Zusman claims.

Zusman describes Rosenblum as a very close friend. He says he had spoken with her in October, shortly after incumbent John Kroger said he wouldn’t run again. After that, Zusman said he’d thought about the consequences of a potential Rosenblum candidacy for the paper. But once she made her decision, Zusman says he took about two days to make his.

“Given that the ultimate obligation of this newspaper is to the reader, and given that our credibility is the most important currency that we have, it struck me that it was going to be very difficult for any sensible person to read anything that we might have to say about the Attorney General’s race with anything less than a jaundiced eye,” Zusman says.

He gave brief consideration to hiring someone from outside Willamette Week to cover the race, but decided against it.

“What we do here, we do here with a group of people who, in many respects share the same DNA. and the same commitment to quality journalism. And the notion of farming this out to people who have no connection with the paper. If I were an outsider as a reader of this paper, that wouldn’t satisfy me.”

Journalism observers say it’s extremely common for news outlets to face similar ethics dilemmas.

Jill Geisler heads the leadership faculty at the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists that advises reporters and editors. If you listen regularly at this time, you probably know exactly what she’s talking about.

“In the past year, Michele Norris stepped away from All Things Considered for a year, because her husband began to work as a senior advisor for Obama’s re-election campaign. At the Cleveland Plain Dealer, for example, Connie Schultz, when her husband, Sherrod Brown made his first run for the Senate, she took a leave for a few months.”

Schultz chose to leave the paper this year when Brown decided to run for re-election, although she kept her syndicated column.

But Geisler questions whether a coverage blackout best serves the interests of  readers.

“There are all kinds of possibilities. To build a firewall for the assignments, so that the people involved wouldn’t be giving out the assignements. You could put a firewall in the editing. In fact, you could actually run a camera on the  editing process if you wanted to – the conversation between the editor and the reporter could be live-streamed.”

That said, Geisler says not every news outlet can afford these approaches. But Geisler says she considers situations like this an opportunity to show the community how a news organization does its duty.

A much larger question lies ahead for Willamette Week. Rosenblum is one of three well-known names in the race.

Attorney Katherine Heekin and former federal prosecutor Dwight Holton are also candidates, and the race is in its earliest stages. But, hypothetically speaking, how would the paper handle Oregon’s legal affairs in the event that Rosenblum wins?

Again, Mark Zusman.

“I’ve been waiting for someone to ask that and that’s the issue that’s going to be far harder to wrestle with. Because I can’t see how we’re going to be able to ignore writing about an important state agency. And yet I haven’t quite wrapped my mind around how to do it.”

Zusman says he does think there’s a difference between covering a competitive political race and covering an institution. But at this point,  the paper will have to wrestle with that if it becomes a reality.

This story originally appeared on Oregon Public Broadcasting.