We recently heard that some parents of young athletes were complaining that write-ups about their kids’ teams were not published in the paper. The complaining parents were under the impression that we have a staff of reporters who can cover each team, including providing multiple photos and stories.

The reality is that we do not have a large staff. We do aim to cover all of the “hard news” in the community - the actions of the school and village board, important meetings of the property owners associations, and some feature stories about interesting people in the community. But the vast majority of the 70-100 pages we publish each week are created from items sent in by our readers.

In fact, many community newspapers only contain articles that are written by professional reporters and editors. We have discussed the pros and cons of this model with other publishers from time to time. However, the downside of the model is that newspapers which send reporters to events only have the resources to cover perhaps three or four games in a week, usually just the “premiere” high school teams.

We prefer to use the “people’s paper” model. Every kid who plays sports and whatever level has a chance to appear in our sports pages. Usually teams have parents or coaches who are happy to write a few paragraphs and send off a few photos to us, and we in turn are happy to print them in the paper.

We use the same model for other types of news, too. Feel free to send us your bridge scores, your club news, your recent awards and we’ll find them a spot in the paper. There’s no barriers to publication here.

Meg Morgan Norris

Publisher