Emerald G. Parsons
Here at Greene Publishing, Inc. (the Madison County Carrier and Madison Enterprise Recorder) we take pride in our work. We work hard to bring the citizens of Madison County the local news, to the best of our ability.
The purpose of a newspaper is to inform, interpret and entertain.
We try to keep you, our readers, informed by providing you with facts, statistics and feature stories. We report on stories that directly and indirectly affect all of us, here in Madison County, not always telling what you want to know, but what you might NEED to know. Within our pages, we also try to entertain with (the same) feature stories, occasional puzzles, opinionated columns, and “Did you know” and “Dumb Crook” stories. Classified ads and display ads also inform, you the readers, of what’s happening within your community and what sales are going on. It is our desire to keep everyone informed of events around the world as well as those in our own backyard.
The reporters here at Greene Publishing work long hours, carry an unpredictable schedule, attend events and meetings, continually search out new and exciting stories, and also continually try to follow up on leads to finish a story out to the end. Our journalists’ job description calls for hard work, good ethics, quality writing and, in his/her heart, the desire to tell the truth. It is a stressful job, but a very rewarding one, as well!
We try our best to cover all aspects of Madison County… school, sports, community, crime, business and municipality news. That is what we strive for, here at your local newspapers; to inform you of what is happening within your community. Often times this is a hard task. There are times we have to really put on our “thinking caps” and “dig” to find stories that are “new” and informative and/or fun to read. Other times we seem overwhelmed with things to write about, and just don’t have enough pages to fit all the news on. These are the times when certain stories end up running later than what we had hoped they would.
However, there are some times that we really try to cover certain stories/events but are not able to obtain all the information we need in order to write the story. As hard as we try; the countless phone calls and emails just never seem to net us “the” story.
Such is the case with some of the sports within our county. I have gotten several comments and “suggestions” about how we cover some sports but not all the sports. Or, we cover some schools better than we cover other schools.
Many years ago, I remember one of my reporters received numerous phone calls regarding the same exact problem so she just simply wrote a story that called out names of who would never return phone calls or send in stats. To say that she “upset” many coaches that week would be a total understatement; however, for the next several weeks/months we received our information on a much better time frame. I must say I contemplated using the same tactic, but considering that the sports season is now (basically) over, it would serve no other purpose than to just call names.
I will say however, that we tried covering every school in this county’s sports, this entire school year. If you did not see your child’s particular sport in our paper, please know it was not from the lack of trying on our part.
There were times we covered a sporting event, took pictures, and couldn’t even get the coach to identify the picture or give stats of that particular game. Numerous phone calls and numerous emails fell on deaf ears.
So, if you (as a parent or as a reader) ever noticed that some schools’ sports weren’t covered as well as other schools’ sports, please contact that particular school/coach and “encourage” them to help us next year in covering all sports equally. We (Greene Publishing) not only try to cover all the sports for you our readers’ enjoyment, but for the children as well. THEY would love to see their names and pictures in the newspaper.
To you, our patrons and our readers, we thank you for giving us the opportunity to serve you and this county. We have always, and will always, welcome any additional news items, thoughts, and ideas that you may have. Please, always feel free to call us at (850) 973-4141.