Passion for what you do

We met a guy at an event we attended recently who questioned if people even read newspapers anymore. He said he got his news “online.” We asked if he really trusted what he read online and he said, “mostly.”

Here is the beauty of newspapers, at least this one anyway. We are committed to you – the reader. We want to provide you with the information you need to make decisions in your personal life and work life. We speak truth into the pages of the paper – not our truth, your truth, the left truth or the right truth. It is fact-based journalism, and you decide what the information means to you and how you use it. We believe our readers are smart and don’t need to be told what to believe.

We stay in our lane; we don’t cover national issues – unless it is something that will directly affect the citizens of Crestview. We are interested in the story of you, your life and how you are affected by what happens in Crestview.

We attend the city council meetings on your behalf to give you the latest information on what the city government is doing. What projects are they working on to make life better for you? What decisions did they make that could have an impact on you?

We go to school board meetings for you, so you have the information of what is going on in your child’s classrooms. We cover your child’s sporting events – and we make them sports stars on the pages of our paper. We recognize students with high GPAs with our Student of the Week on the education page. We do the same for our athletes. Your children are future leaders, city council members, mayors, scholarship winners, doctors and more. They will hold the keys to the success of our community – and we are there every step of the way.

The greatest thing about newspapers is – they cannot be altered or changed. It is the written printed word. When stories only appear online, they can be modified, things can be changed or even deleted. History can be rewritten to suit agendas (sound familiar)?

Lastly, we will say this. The gentleman we met at the event didn’t like paying for the news or advertising. The media is not a government supplemented business, nor do you ever want it to be. It is not a free public service. We all get up in the mornings, excited about what the day will bring to our readers. We turn on the lights in the building, run high-speed fiber optic internet service with backups to ensure we can always get the information out. We pay our staff – the ones who go out to the street, sit in meetings, attend press conferences, interview our teachers and bring the stories to life in our paper. We pay the people who layout these pages, help with subscriptions, who send out the bills, and all who work very diligently to make sure our product is excellent.

We could not exist without our subscribers and advertisers. And we thank every single one of you. Just know that we are like every other small business; we employ people and we have bills to pay too. It would not be smart of us to give away our product that we work hard to produce. You wouldn’t walk into a small retail store (or large one for that matter) and say – I can’t believe you are going to make me pay for this. So the next time you see someone on our social media accounts say something like – you are going to make me pay to read this? Please enlighten them on what it takes to bring the news to you.