There are challenges to publishing a weekly newspaper, but there are also advantages
This is one of those weeks that publishing a weekly newspaper is more difficult than usual. While we love a good Fourth of July celebration, it wreaked havoc on our printing schedule for this edition since the holiday fell on a Tuesday — the day that our four Plumas County weekly newspapers usually roll off the press. This newspaper that you are reading was actually printed Saturday, July 1, so it means that all of the Fourth of July festivities and other news that happened over the long holiday weekend, aren’t included in this issue, but will appear in print in the July 12 edition. As news people who want to provide the latest news as soon as possible, it’s a frustrating situation.
That said, publishing a weekly newspaper is always a bit challenging in terms of providing timely news, especially now when people are accustomed to a 24/7 news cycle. Thankfully, we can rely on our website plumasnews.com when it’s essential to provide information to our readers as soon as possible. This past winter’s floods are a good example of that resource, when we could provide real time notification of which roads and highways were closed and when they reopened.
While some of our reporting might be delayed, we make up for it by providing what our readers can’t find anywhere else — coverage of Plumas County government, community utility and recreation districts, the schools, local entertainment and fundraising events, crime, features on local personalities, and the list goes on. We devote a great deal of newsprint to events that are important to our communities. For example, when it’s graduation season around the county, our newspapers print the senior portraits of all of the high school graduates and devote a considerable amount of space to photos of the big night. That level of coverage isn’t found everywhere.
We also provide a forum for people to express their opinions. We run every letter to the editor that’s fit to print, and we offer our elected officials and local experts ample space to share their thoughts on topics of importance to them in the “Where I Stand” section of the newspaper. It’s the perfect place for our local leaders to share their thoughts in their own words with our readers.
Our staff writers, who are dispersed throughout the county write the bulk of our content, but we also publish press releases and photos submitted by community organizations and individuals. Our advertising reps work closely with local businesses and organizations to ensure that their goods, services and fundraisers are professionally marketed.
So while sometimes it’s challenging to bring you all of the news as soon as we would like, we are able to bring you a quality product that’s full of news that we hope matters to our readers.
