You are going to read a lot of words if you read all the stories in this week’s Faribault County Register. And all of these words are pretty much locally created and all have to do with things of interest to people who live here in Faribault County.

Reporter Kevin Mertens and I spent an amazing amount of time creating news stories, feature stories and sports stories. You can see the results of our efforts all over this week’s issue.

There are other things to read besides the stories we wrote. There are also quite a few obituaries, which are sometimes people’s first things to read each week.

Then the staff have also created advertisements, and hopefully you take note and read those as well. We have a lot of public notices (or legals as we refer to them). They really should be on your reading list as well. There are some folks who tell me they read all the legals every week. They find them fascinating and informative.

There is also a person or two who tell me they read every single word in the Register every single week. One of those persons now lives far away in another state (where it is warmer than here) and he wants to know as much about his hometown as he can.

This week, he is going to be busy, because, as I mentioned, there are a lot of words in this issue.

And a few photos, too.

I like to think that our efforts each week are appreciated by many folks and that people are happy to have a newspaper in their town or county.

This coming week I will be thinking about newspapers a lot.

First off, I will be headed to the annual Minnesota Newspaper Association Annual Convention. The main topic there is, of course, newspapers. There are sessions where the past, present and future of our business will be discussed by experts and those of us working in the trenches.

Some of the topics have changed over the years. We certainly did not discuss artificial intelligence back in 1972 when I went to my first convention. But we probably did discuss how the coming of computers might affect the industry.

Some topics, such as Freedom of the Press, were talked about back then, and I am sure will be mentioned a few times again this year. Back then the newspaper world was worried about the incoming presidency, with Nixon, protests and Watergate all looming on the horizon.

Vice president Spiro Agnew back then called the press “nattering nabobs of negativism.” He was at an MNA Convention. I remember introducing Gov. Jesse Ventura at the convention the year I was president of MNA. He called the press “Jackals.” His visit to the convention was very interesting, to say the least.

This time I expect to hear some words about the incoming presidency of Donald Trump, who likes to rant about the “Fake News” people.

Luckily, for many of us small town newspaper editors, we don’t deal much in fake news or state news or national news. Unless it affects our local area in some way.

Also at this year’s MNA Convention the staff of the Register are going to receive some awards for their efforts. We don’t know exactly what we have won at the Better Newspaper Contest, but we will find out on Thursday. One thing I know is that we won an award in one of the most prestigious categories.

So stay tuned to next week’s issue of the Register and you will learn what awards we did get this year.

As I have often said, however, is that we strive to put out the best newspaper we can. Our staff is all dedicated to that goal. If we are recognized, that is great. But we don’t do what we do just to win an award or two. We do it so that you have a newspaper each week that has thousands of words in it which are all about things you want to find out about.

This week it may take you a little while to read the whole paper. But I think you may learn a lot about people you know and maybe some things about people you don’t know.

You can find out what some of your local government elected officials are doing, all about the Blue Earth Chamber’s award winners, local agriculture businesses, who passed away recently, and who won – or lost – in a whole lot of high school sporting contests.

I hope you find it all interesting.

The other reason I will be thinking about newspapers is that it is the time of year when we look at new ways to do our work of creating a newspaper every week.

That can involve how we develop stories, how we use our website and Facebook page, and other ways of doing what we want to accomplish. It can involve new technology and even some new tricks with old technology.

All that is with a main goal of bringing you the news, the local news, that is. That has been, and still is, our main job.

As always, thanks for reading us.