NEWSPAPER PROVIDES A DAILY CHRONICLE OF YOUR WORLD

The daily pages of the Southeast Missourian chronicle the dynamic life of a city and a region. Day after day, year after year, these pages of ink and newsprint are transformed into a history book of Southeast Missouri.

As National Newspaper Week draws to a close, it's a good time to reflect on your daily newspaper and the role we fill in the community. "Newspapers -- Covering America with Sunshine" is the week's theme.

We realize that many of our international and national headlines could be found elsewhere, through the sights and sounds of broadcast news. But the images don't last. And where else can you find the ordinary alongside the dramatic? We care just as much about your death notices, birth reports, weddings and police news, as we do the top stories on the page. When people recall the Great Flood of 1993, hopefully they will bring out our special flood edition to show disbelievers just how high the water reached. We well realize our job as historian and take the job seriously.

Getting the news isn't always easy. We live, and sometimes die, by the deadline, each and every day. Various divisions of the company pretty much work around the clock to deliver the product to your door. The news staff works until midnight seven days a week, and our pressmen, inserters and carriers see the sunrise most mornings. And then the cycle starts anew.

As you well know these last few months have been filled with change at the Southeast Missourian.

But our new look was not carried out for the sake of change. We endeavored to create an improved product with daily color and many new features. And we've tried to be responsive to your suggestions. The changes have not come cheaply, nor without sacrifice. We have plowed a considerable investment in new people and equipment to carry out this vision. And the reason is fundamental: To better serve our readers.

People feel strongly about their newspaper, and we appreciate that loyalty. Many readers are adjusting well to the changes, and we're welcoming many new subscribers on board. We want your input. We'll be the first to admit we're not perfect. Sometimes misspellings and faulty grammar slip in the paper, but we're trying hard to eliminate the mistakes as we work to perfect the technology.

We are a community newspaper, owned and operated by local people. We like to hear when we've done a job well, but we also open our pages to public criticism, publishing comments in Speak Out, Letters to the Editor, and Be Our Guest columns. What other medium has such open lines of communication?

We also strive to be of good public service sponsoring Toybox, Christmas for the Elderly, Newspapers in Education, YELL, and many other programs to benefit the community. That community service applies to our news pages as well. The Zero Tolerance series earned this newspaper the most pretigious award possible for community service last weekend from the Missouri Press Association. Competing with other dailies across the state, including the metropolitan papers, this indepth look at drugs in our community and region took first place honors. We worked with competitor KFVS because we put the needs of the community at the forefront.

In today's bureaucratic world, people are often seen as numbers. But we try to bring the human element home -- to explain why the news matters to you and your next-door neighbor. We celebrate the heroism of a 11-year-old cancer survivor who visits hospitalized children; we sympathize with families who lost everything in the recent flood; we root for our favorite teams as they push their endurance to the limits. It's these stories of people that make this daily history book so cherished.

The changing technology has some people wondering if the pages of newspapers will follow us into the next century. We hope so. The printed page may be replaced one day by electronic words, but we feel confident newspapers will survive. There will always be new technology -- information will be cabled, faxed and audiotexted -- but the satisfaction of reading the printed word will remain.

Newspapers are a daily habit for more than 115 million Americans -- two thirds of the adult population on an average weekday. Through programs like NIE our children are also reading daily about the world around them.

Newspapers fill many roles: We are watchdogs, guardians of democracy and champions of the truth. We are educators, informers and investigators. We provide a forum for all sides of debates to put forth the facts. While we remain objective on our news pages, we speak our mind in editorials and columns.

Newspapers connect us to the world around us - from a community homecoming in Jackson to the war-torn streets of Sarajevo. It's all there on the pages of a newspaper. Our writers and columnists provide in-depth and even entertaining ways to look at our world ... and hopefully put it all in perspective.