It’s been a month since our 47th President was elected. Whatever your political persuasion, the pace of changes being rolled out by the administration is staggering.
When the pace of news feels exhausting, it’s okay (and probably healthy!) to take breaks from the news and even fully step away at times. When you are ready to return to the news after stepping back from national and even state news, we hope you come back to local news with The Gazette.
We’re here each week with stories about your neighbors, upcoming community events and reviews of entertainment that your friends, children and grandchildren were in. That includes what locally elected, apolitical select boards are doing to keep the streets plowed and the town’s business environment hospitable.
Here at The Gazette we view our work as hyper-local, meaning it starts with what happens within the towns we cover. Within that sphere, we cover everything we are able to with limited time and resources.
We devote some of our news gathering attention to what’s happening in the state and nation to understand how activities there affect people in our area. Last week, when we heard federal funding was being curtailed in many areas, one of our interns wrote about how that affected Sterling College students and the administration there. When we learned the governor has proposed changes to how the state manages education, we began asking local school boards and teachers unions for their perspectives. Stories about that have already appeared and there will likely be more when we have accurate information to share. Meanwhile our opinion section has carried comments on the topic from community members.
In general, we don’t cover statewide stories, except for their impact on the local area. That will often take the form of a sidebar localizing a story from one of our statewide partners.
Often we learn about things that we need to gather more facts about. We will take the time and care needed over rushing out information. Our small team works hard to separate fact from rumor to get you information you can trust. We want to be scrupulously accurate, balanced and fair.
As we come toward the end of the second month of our second nonprofit year, we have lots of questions the community can help us answer. Chief among them is: What do you wish the community knew more about? We’ll take guidance from your answers to help us shape the news we share in The Gazette’s pages.
The Hardwick Gazette strives to provide nuanced perspectives from the most authoritative sources. We are on the lookout for biases or assumptions in our own work. We invite you to point out any we may have missed. Contact us on our Contact page.
Paul Fixx, editor
Paul Fixx is editor of The Hardwick Gazette and lives in Hardwick.
