Unrelenting: Steadfast team keeps focus on real news

Over the past few days, we have published a series of stories recapping the year-that-was in the aftermath of Hurricane Matthew.

We also managed to slip in a special section centered around cancer awareness -- covering all cancers, not just breast cancer -- which included personal stories told by the survivors, the caretakers and the medical professionals who battle cancer day in and day out.

And we put these packages together over the last week or more, all while bringing you complete, daily coverage of the Wayne Regional Agricultural Fair as well as all the daily news ---- local, state and national ---- that we could pack into our pages.

This was an amazing feat by our reporters, editors and staff in juggling assignments, managing their time, chasing down leads and retracing the steps they've taken over the last year, to bring forth the most clear and accurate assessment of where the city, townships and county are as a whole after record flooding and loss. And it is not lost on us as we persevere through our daily lives and tasks, that you, our readers, are mustering all you can much the same to do so also.

These days, whether at the national or local level, when journalists and journalism are assailed constantly with the stigma of "fake news," we are often put on the spot in the course of doing our jobs to have to justify our existence.

But just looking at our "Hurricane Matthew: One Year Later" series, we can tell you that these reporters have gone and continue to go to great lengths, day in and day out, to bring to you the most timely, accurate and unbiased information as is humanly possible.

Now, the military and first responder communities aside, we are the most self-deprecating bunch there is. You cannot make a joke about us or our writing that we haven't already made or been subjected to by our colleagues.

But again, we are human. We misspell words, we misplace commas, we dangle our participles and depending on how much coffee we have had or haven't on any given day, we sometimes even get our own names wrong in the paper.  

So, when we take calls accusing this paper of being either too conservative or not conservative enough, of giving either too little or too much attention to minorities, of playing up crime or ignoring it, well, we just politely say "thank you."

But given the workload they had to contend with and the quality of the work they produced, the editors here can honestly say there isn't a harder working bunch of newsmen and newswomen in any other newsroom around, this size or bigger.

And while we know them each to be good people, unbiased in their efforts and critical in their thinking, we hope that the level of attention to detail, the quality of writing, the networking of sources employed by each of them to get to the heart of every story, has illustrated to this community just how much we do indeed care about the news we deliver to it. And that alone -- it sure isn't the money or the notoriety -- is why we do this job.

Published in Editorials on October 9, 2017 10:29 PM