Changes coming to Village News, including new staff and national news

Providing real news vital to our local way of life has always been our top priority at Village News. We have always been proud of the fact that we covered local news exclusively and we were happy to support the national news outlets while they provided regional, state, national and international news.

We are changing course. As of Sept. 5, we will be featuring a National News section of the Village News. We will be using a variety of news sources, including Associated Press, for interesting and important stories.

We are very excited to offer more value to our readers and make this move into national news. “Connecting our Community” has been our tagline for decades, but as a company we’ve evolved into something more serious. It’s not enough to just connect people anymore. That can be done by any social media platform. What we do is much more by providing important, vetted information to the community. Some of it is provided by the community so we can make sure the community always has a voice and the rest is provided by interns and experienced writers and editors who take their journalism seriously.

We will still report on our local agencies and districts, county board of supervisors, etc., but we want to offer unbiased real national news as well.

Why are we doing this? Because the surveys we have done shows that our readers are as interested in regional and national news as much as they are in local news. We believe there is a crisis of real news and information right now when news is so important.

The world is increasingly interdependent and interconnected and local issues are more intimately related to state and federal issues, whether its immigration, free speech, education, health care or religious freedom.

State and national issues are dictating more local issues. And frankly, the cable news networks are not doing us justice. Cable news networks have turned into a ratings race and what we used to be able to trust as solid journalism, as the founding fathers intended, is now emotional, partisan and biased entertainment. A healthy democracy demands an educated electorate and a healthy community is a well-informed and connected community.

We are going to do something different. Our staff is not right or left. We are a diverse group that just wants to stand out from the noise and support the dissemination of unbiased quality journalism. While we may still do editorials and offer opinions, you won’t see opinion on the front page or in our stories. We will continue to provide award-winning balanced news.

Not everyone likes change but I am asking everyone to continue supporting us. We have hired another professional journalist who will be covering local stories beginning in September and we are launching an updated website which will be introduced next month as well as several other changes. We will have new racks delivered in a couple of months around town and we are also (after 20 years) finally raising the price of our single copy papers to a dollar.

Our promise to you is we will continue to watchdog local government and we will fight the national trend of shrinking newsrooms if you, our community, will support us. We are very excited to take this leap! Thank you for your support. If you haven’t subscribed, please consider doing so at http://www.villagenews.com/subscribe.