By Staff
Our View
A little while ago, we asked you, the readers, in our online poll, would you rather see the Atmore Advance provide more local reaction and perspective on national and world news, or keep our local focus.
Well, 66 percent of the people who responded told us to stay local in our news and feature coverage, and that's exactly what we plan to do.
In fact, that's the whole reason for being a community newspaper.
Some have described the nature of community newspapering as having an "intensely local focus."
In short, the community newspaper is the coverage of the life of a community. It is the close connection to its roots, its readers, its town, that make the community newspaper what it is.
If all people wanted to read was national and world news with the occasional small snippet of local news, most small-town newspapers would have dried up long ago.
But people want to read about what's going on in their town; see the names and faces of their neighbors. Most community newspapers, like the Atmore Advance, don't have the resources to provide that world and national news coverage. We'll leave that to the big papers, like the Mobile Register, where the newsroom staff alone is close to 20 times larger than the entire full-time staff of the Atmore Advance.
They do what they do well. But they don't live here. They don't live through the same things as our readers like we do. They're not focused on their community.
Not that is wasn't clear before, but now we have the numbers to prove it.
We're going to keep fulfilling that role of bringing you as much local, community news as we possibly can. It's not easy. It's not a 40-hour per week job. It's not for the thin-skinned, but it's what we do. And we'll make a promise to you to keep doing it as well as we can.