I was hanging out with some friends and people I just met recently discussing a wide variety of topics including Governor LePage, efficient use of taxpayer money, employee recruiting, newspapers, etc. Then someone suggested to me that the Journal Tribune write stories about some of these really important issues in the communities it serves.

The fellow that said this lived in Saco and owned a business in Biddeford, and thus had interests in both towns. I replied that we wrote about really important issues regularly and asked what particular story did he think we should pursue they we hadn’t. He suggested we write about the windmill that the City of Saco purchased to produce electricity that doesn’t produce electricity. Having been here only a few months I asked our editor, Dina Mendros, about it and she told me we had done several stories about that very issue.

On another day someone else suggested that we cover the Pate property sale to the City of Biddeford. I told them that we had actually done two stories on the issue recently asking the same probing questions he was asking me about it.

This has happened several times in my short six plus month tenure here and the result has been consistent. We had in fact covered the issue in each case. The folks who made these suggestions had something else in common, they either didn’t read the paper at all or they didn’t read it daily. They had missed those stories. They said the stories were important to them but they never saw them because they didn’t read the paper each day.

I understand that not everyone wants to read all the hard news that goes on locally. Some find it boring. Some find it hard to understand or to follow if it is an ongoing complicated story. But it doesn’t seem reasonable to me for someone to say that the paper isn’t covering the most important local stories and yet that person isn’t reading the paper each day to make that evaluation.

Of course, as a local paper, we also do uplifting stories about great things that folks in our community have accomplished or are working on. We do extensive coverage of local sports and even stories about road maintenance in winter. For some that may be boring but other readers find it valuable. We have local columnists like Bernard Reim who writes about many of the fascinating astronomical happenings in the sky once per month, or Rachel Lovejoy’s weekly column about nature, Zaffie Hadiaris’ column about whatever moves her and even our very own Jeff Lagasse’ views not to mention my own musings. We publish columns from journalists writing about national issues and letters from Senators and Representatives in our Maine state legislature so you have access to their words and thoughts. This is but a snippet of the information that we make available to you every single day in these pages. But we also do hard local news like the stories that guy requested we do.

But we are never satisfied. We will never rest on our accomplishments. We continue to serve the people of York County; residents and visitors, workers, business owners, retirees and children, by providing valuable information. That information is intended to fascinate, illuminate, amuse, incite and emote. We further aim to help citizens expand their appreciation of what is valuable about their own villages, as well as this area as a whole, in an effort to strengthen our local economy while simultaneously preserving what is remarkable about our region.

This is our local newspaper, yours and mine. So let’s work together. Help us help you. If you are aware of a story that you believe needs investigating, let us know about it. As hard as we try, we cannot be in all places at one time. Help us keep you informed. You can email us at jtcommunity@journaltribune.com or call us at 207-282-1535 and ask for someone in the newsroom. By the way, you can save quite a bit of money by ordering a subscription for a year and have it delivered to your door either at your business or your home. This is our local newspaper, yours and mine. Work with us to make it as valuable for you, for me, for our whole York County community as we want it to be.

Thanks for reading, please read every day and have a wicked great week!

— Bruce M. Hardina is the publisher of the Journal Tribune, a singer-songwriter, a philosopher, a student of life and the human experience, a columnist, an entrepreneur and a family man. To comment on his musings, email bhardina@journaltribune.com or mail a note to Journal Tribune, Attn: Bruce Hardina, 457 Alfred St., Biddeford, ME 04005.

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