A familiar face is back with The Astorian.

Erick Bengel, who worked as a reporter and the Coast Weekend editor for the paper from 2015 to 2019, will cover criminal justice, social services and county government this time around.

“I’ve always envied the person who occupied this beat,” he said. “It always seemed like an essential challenge … I like that it is a serious beat and has very sharp edges to it.”

Bengel filled in for reporters over the years and dabbled in the beat during his two years at the Cannon Beach Gazette.

“But this is the first time I’ve been able to own it,” he said.

When Bengel left The Astorian in 2019, he moved to New York to get a master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University.

With a bachelor’s degree from Portland State University in philosophy and political science, he had never formally studied journalism outside of a few high school classes.

“I wanted to study it in a serious and systematic way,” Bengel said.

Journalism first came on Bengel’s radar at Portland State, where he was a news writer, the arts and culture editor and eventually the editor-in-chief at the university’s student newspaper, The Vanguard.

Bengel first joined The Astorian through the Snowden internship program in 2011, where he first saw the service that local journalism fills.

“We give people the information they need to navigate their day-to-day lives and communities,” he said. “It has an immediacy that oftentimes large-scale reporting fails to capture because you are reading about your neighbors, you are reading about locations you know well — an immediacy and an intimacy. Insofar as you think anything local is important — local elections, local services — local journalism is incredibly important.”

As for Bengel’s long-term goals, he hopes to keep broadening his horizons within journalism.

“At this point, I am trying to get good at different modes and forms of journalism and that is what excited me about this beat,” he said.