The best story ideas are often ones that someone tells you about. A recent example of this is a story on Lia Ditton, a rower who recently took her rowboat from the Mouth of the Columbia River to San Francisco.

She is training to make the arduous trek across the Pacific Ocean from Japan to San Francisco next spring. This story, reported by The Astorian’s Lucy Kleiner, came from a tip by one of my friend’s dad who said Ditton was docked in the Hammond Marina. Ditton’s arrival near San Francisco was also covered in the Bay area’s newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, and made the front page of its Saturday paper on Sept. 28.

Coast Weekend is looking for exciting tales of local artists, musicians, writers and makers doing interesting things in our community, too.

Much of Coast Weekend’s coverage centers on what is happening each week, but one of our goals for the coming months involves putting an increased spotlight on local people.

These stories can take many forms. They can be Q&As, profiles or full features.

Coast Weekend wants to cover people locals don’t know about yet but should as well as people who have called our coast home for years but haven’t had a chance to be featured.

Possible story ideas could include local musicians who play in restaurants, gallery owners and artists, musicians who play in local ensembles, writers with new works and others who are part of our vibrant artistic and cultural community.

Coast Weekend hopes to highlight a local each week starting at the end of October.

Please send story ideas for consideration to jwilliams@dailyastorian.com and explain what makes the person interesting as well as any new projects or events they are doing.