TO THE EDITOR:
I’d like to take a moment to commend the Daily Press editorial staff on the amount of local content they have provided in recent months. In the years I spent as a reporter there, I can assure your readers that the job of a reporter and/or editor is not easy and it’s not for the faint of heart!
While I understand most jobs come with drawbacks and difficulties, that of a writer is particularly tough. If you don’t have thick skin, you are forced to do one of two things: quickly develop thick skin, or just quit the business altogether. A writer’s work (as well as editor and advertising designer’s) is scrutinized by thousands of people on a daily basis. Readers pick through your words, almost as if they are looking for mistakes, misspellings, grammatical errors and so forth. Of course all the scrutinizing comes after you have spent countless hours scouring the community for newsworthy or enlightening or entertaining or informative stories and then taken the time – but not too much time – to put said story together before deadline.
And don’t even get me started on being a crime reporter in a small town where you know and/or are related to almost everyone! God forbid you do your job of reporting on something that Aunt Suzie or Cousin Johnny or Friend Timmy “doesn’t want you to report on.” It’s often a thankless job, but on a rare occasion, you’ll receive an email or see someone at the grocery store and they’ll compliment you on a piece you wrote, and in that moment, it’s all worth it. Those little words, though seemingly insignificant to the person saying them, bear more weight than you can imagine.
I can still recall just about every single compliment I received in my time at the Press, whether in person or in an email, letter, phone call or website comment. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, words have power – both positive and negative.
I hope our community realizes how fortunate we are to still have a local, daily newspaper that is not corporate-owned. There are very few papers like ours left. Many small-town papers have either closed their doors, sold to larger corporations, or they scale down their printing to a weekly or even a monthly run. While I have no personal beef with corporate-owned newspapers, there’s something distinguishably different about one that is locally-owned. It has its own flavor, so to speak, and it has a better way of reflecting the community in which it is published.
The people that write and edit, sell ads, print, package and deliver the Artesia Daily Press are local people who care about our community. So before you cancel your subscription or stop running your ad, I hope you will bear this in mind. Before you complain about a “lack of local stories” or the fact that “it’s a black and white paper,” I hope you’ll keep this in mind. They are a small, locally-owned newspaper that is trying their best to keep up with our ever-changing world. They compete with corporate papers with corporate budgets, online sources and 24-hour news channels, and quite honestly, it’s a tough competition to be in!
Thank you Daily Press for continuing to provide us with local news stories, feature stories, public records, photos and so much more! Your work is appreciated!
Most sincerely,
Staci Guy
