EDITORIAL: You can help us cover the community

Published 4:17 pm Tuesday, February 18, 2020

The Moultrie Observer has been your local newspaper for more than 125 years. We’re working hard to live up to the ideal of your local news source —  and you’ve probably noticed some success. For years local news dominated our front page but trailed off the farther you read into the paper. Since the hiring of two new reporters last summer, we’ve been more successful at filling inside pages with local news too.

In today’s world, if you want national news, you have a hundred places to get it: nightly news on major TV networks, a variety of 24-hour news stations, a multitude of online news sites, newspapers that focus on national news, news magazines, newsletters emailed to your inbox … Your choices may not be endless, but they are extensive.

If you want news about Moultrie and Colquitt County, your options are more limited. Our job is to fill that need and to do it better than anyone else who tries.

But we can’t do it alone. Our reporters can’t be everywhere, and there are only so many stories one can write in a day.

Help us.

Much of the increase you’ve seen in our news coverage has come from members of the community submitting photos or releases about news in their organizations. We need more of them.

Some schools have been enthusiastic about sharing activities their students are involved in, events that are coming up or awards the students have received. We hope other schools will join us in the effort to highlight all the children of Colquitt County. In addition to the public schools, we’d like to receive more submissions from Colquitt Christian Academy and local homeschool groups.

Pruitt Health Sunrise has submitted several photos recently, and Pruitt Health Moultrie provided the photo that appears on Page 2A of today’s edition. We’d like to hear from all of the local adult facilities. When someone comes to entertain the seniors or when a group goes out on a field trip, snap a photo. We’ll be glad to run it.

The same offer extends to youth groups, like the Boys and Girls Club, Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and FFA, as well as to church groups, including youth groups, senior groups and Sunday school classes. If you do something special, we’re happy to share it with the community.

Colquitt County has a number of civic groups: Kiwanis, Rotary, Moose Lodge, Masons, Lions, Civitan and so many more. Some routinely submit photos from their events, others submit maybe once or twice a year, and some haven’t been in the newspaper in ages. You’re all welcome here.

Many photo submissions are of sizable groups of people, and that’s fine — it shows how many local people were involved in an event. But we also like photos that focus on a smaller number of people actually participating in the activity; think of them as representatives of everyone else who was there, but when only a few people are in a photo, we ask that you provide their names.

One area in which we have a particular need for local voices is on our opinions page. Please send letters to the editor on any subject you’d like. Letters must include your name and a phone number. We won’t publish your number, but we do want to be able to get in touch with you if we have a question about your letter.

If you think you’d be interested in writing a weekly or monthly column, write up a couple of samples and send them to us along with contact information. A column is a commitment some people aren’t prepared to undertake, but we would much prefer to provide space for a local writer than a Washington columnist.

Send your news items to Managing Editor Kevin Hall at The Observer. The easiest way is by email, kevin.hall@gaflnews.com. If you’d prefer to mail it, the address is The Observer, P.O. Box 2349, Moultrie, Ga. 31776. Or find us on Facebook and send us a message.

We’d love to hear from you.