Twas the season ... a few items missed

The Christmas and New Year’s holidays were a complete whirlwind here at the offices of the Phillips County News. Besides all the advertisements, special inserts and early print deadlines, we found ourselves knee-deep in submissions from the county’s children …i.e. letters to Santa and New Year’s resolutions.

A total of 12,000 words were submitted from the area’s schools, each handwritten and one more entertaining than the next. I have heard from a few people that all the letters and resolutions were a bit of overkill. While I admit they were numerous – I transcribed each and every one, so I am in the know – it was a decision that everyone who wrote something would see it in the pages of this community newspaper in the last two weeks. I have looked in other Montana newspapers over this same span of time and noticed that those paper’s editors, in fact, did cherry-pick the letters and ran them, unedited, at their leisure.

Folks, to be honest, I didn’t want to be the one to say this letter was better than that or this resolution wasn’t fit for print. It is my job as editor of the PCN to decide what makes it into print and in a pinch, I decided that they would all make it.

That being said, at least one letter fell through the cracks at the weekly newspaper. A young man from Malta read the pages of last week’s paper and was excited to show his parents what he had planned for the New Year. We are not sure how this happened, but we are very sorry. His submission next year will undoubtedly be in next year’s edition.

Since there were so many submissions, other items – some weekly – also weren’t included in the past two weeks newspapers. Again, we are sorry for their omission. It didn’t happen on purpose or because we didn’t think it was news worthy.

Upward and onward.

We will do an even better job next year.

Thanks for reading and Aloha.