Proud to offer you our daily newspaper

These days, the concept of a newspaper that actually grows its readership is considered almost impossible. Yet here we are.

I HAVE just returned from an editors' and general managers' forum on something of a high.

It's easy to be so when you are among editors whose papers are growing their circulation. These days, the concept of a newspaper that actually grows its readership is considered almost impossible. Yet here we are.

The Wairarapa Times-Age is doing it, and doing it significantly. In a week's time, we'll be able to announce our circulation for the 2014 year, and while I can't reveal it now, suffice to say the team and I have never been prouder to serve a readership that supports its paper so strongly.

This is a community well served by media, print and radio, and I believe Wairarapa people are proud to say a daily newspaper thrives in their community. It is certainly true the decades-old days of a press thundering in the back, vibrating and clinking the whisky bottles in the editor's cupboard, are long gone, as are the substantial work force it took in those days to produce a sizeable broadsheet.

Today, the team is thin, as automation and computer programmes streamline the process.

Yet one thing has never changed.

A reporter with a notebook, sitting with you, giving you their full attention, then sitting down at a keyboard, reading their shorthand and writing the story while an editor looks at the clock.

This year, we rate our product highly enough to submit ourselves as an entry for Newspaper of the Year (under 30,000 circulation) in the Canon Media Awards. And sure, a team of elite people will pore over them and come to a conclusion. But, for us, the ultimate judge for any provincial newspaper is the readership. Readers relate to their own people, and their own stories, with a depth that an Auckland judge can't (and that's no fault of theirs, of course).

Communities are vibrant, lively and robust. A newspaper has to be exactly that as well. People have different views in a community. They don't always agree with each other. Which means they don't always agree with the stories we write. And that is as it should be. Wairarapa is diverse, talented and colourful - and has lots of pride. Our team is much the same.