We need your help.
Everyday we try we reach out on social media, websites, by phone and while attending local events for information on what’s going on. This can be challenging with only five staff members covering an entire county.
There are parts of the county that share information continuously — making it much easier to follow up and stay on top of what’s happening. Other areas in the county believe we are neglecting them as a result. Not the case — here’s some light on our situation.
Challenges to the economy have caused everyone to tighten their belt. Many school districts and organizations have done away with public relations staff — these were resources that continually fed the newspaper information. Teachers, principals, organization leaders are now expected to be public relations reps on top of their regular duties.
The newsroom has changed too. There are no longer individual lifestyle, sports or news departments with large staffs. There is no one who just proofreads everything. There are no more feature editors or just photographers. Now its five people doing all those jobs for three newspapers in Greene County — Xenia Daily Gazette, Fairborn Daily Herald and the Beavercreek News-Current.
This county has eight schools (including the Greene County Career Center) and at least four private schools. Our county has six universities and at least two more colleges with branches in our county. There are cities of all sizes, villages and townships that all should have news coming out of them. There are annual and regular events like graduations, open houses, ribbon cuttings, meetings that also direct our attention. This is one busy county!
There are parts of this very diverse county that sometimes just don’t get as much attention — that’s not because we don’t want to — it’s because we need to know.
Another challenge is that we think in this busy fast-paced world, informing the newspaper is just something else to add to your long list to do. But we don’t want you to forget and we’d love to have plenty of time to prepare, preview and follow up on your events. That takes notice ahead of time. So as you plan your event don’t forget to think of us too.
As your community news source, our focus is Greene County and that’s why you will not see large amounts of national/wire news in our newspapers. We want the local content to get in first. That’s our priority. We want to know what residents, former residents, students, businesses and organizations are doing.
What are we looking for from all areas in the county is for you to inform us when a county resident receives an award, a local business employee received a promotion or an award, your organization is doing a fundraiser, a student achieves honor roll or is doing something unique in our local schools or colleges.
With so much going on don’t forget to pick up the phone and call us, email us, send us your announcement, flyer or story idea. If it’s in Greene County we will do our best to get it covered. If for some reason there is a conflict and we can’t be there — please take photos and share those with us afterwards. We love it when folks send us photos and information via email and we will get it in.
In a nutshell please don’t assume we don’t care — maybe we don’t know or we are out covering something else — so we enlist you to inform us today!
News releases and information may be sent for any of our papers at any time to [email protected], call us at 937-372-4444 – leave a message if we are out covering something.
