I want to tell others your business

No, I’m not a gossip as the headline may imply – but since I have your attention, I hope you will stick with reading this column long enough to understand what I mean.

I made a promise when I returned roughly three months ago as Editor of Holmes County Times-Advertiser and Washington County News, a promise that you would see a return to locally focused news reporting, features, and highlights of the communities of those respective publications.

If youÂ’ve been following the progress after the end of the transition away from the former corporate owner in April, I hope youÂ’ve noticed that return. ThereÂ’s still a lot of moving parts as we continue to build new systems and add resources to better serve you, but that local coverage also continues to grow.

Here is where you come in. 

I would like to reiterate that these are your newspapers. The News and Times-Advertiser are the scrapbooks of our community, the keepers of milestones, and the sharers of both our greatest sorrows and joys. This is the reason one of my favorite pastimes is reading through the archives and finding those milestones from years ago. It is also the reason the “Reflections” page (see Page 7A) is one of the most popular features we publish each week. Each and every archive – some dating back more than 100 years – contains thousands of stories, each a memory created by someone in our community.

So, while we appreciate your readership, we want to remind you that with the return to a local focus also comes a return to something else with which the corporate world seemed to have lost touch: YOU.

Amid the new websites and other advances we are still bringing to the newspapers, we want to revive that hometown tradition of posting engagements, births and birthdays, anniversaries, church events, and personal and professional achievements – all those seemingly ordinary things which, when looking back, we find were actually the biggest and best moments of our lives.

From upcoming community and school events to pictures from an event you recently hosted, we invite you to help us share those moments with your community, moments that someone who holds you dear may one day find while flipping through the pages of what will then be “an old edition from back in 2021”.

Truly, we are creating tomorrow’s Reflections today – but you are the ones creating both the memories and the mirror.

Carol Kent Wyatt is Editor of Washington County News and Holmes County Times-Advertiser. Email her at: [email protected]