We have a small but talented reporting staff but we can’t always get all the news, all the time, every waking hour of the day. Yes, we do follow Facebook posts where people post immediate news as it happens but lots of times, they are just photos without much information – without the truth.

Most of the time, when accidents happen, we must depend on official reports from law enforcement or fire officials to get the “official” report on what happened. We can’t just make up a story based on hearsay.

First, we must contact the investigating organization and sometimes that takes various steps – either the request for information gets sidetracked, the report isn’t completed, or the person doing the report either has the next day or days off and “it won’t be done” for a couple of days.

Secondly, we not only cover accidents and fires, we also cover government proceedings (selectboards, school committees), feature stories, school happenings, business stories, etc., etc. We would love to have a larger staff to cover special areas of interest, like accidents and fires, investigative reports, education, business profiles and more, but we are handcuffed because we must watch our costs.

We offer news for free on our websites but we must pay our employees who get that news … and our small group of employees do their best each and every week. We don’t sit around and wait for news to come to us. Sometimes we have to wait for the news on accidents and fires but our reporters keep working on other stories while they wait for official word on accidents and/or fires.

We live in a world of instant gratification – the fast food generation – but sometimes news gathering takes time and we always strive to get the truth.