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The newsroom of the Williamsport Sun-Gazette recently won more than a dozen Keystone Media Awards -- bringing the Sun-Gazette's total above 50 for the past five years.
As we reported in Monday's edition, we are proud of the work our reporters and staff perform to keep our communities informed with comprehensive coverage of our region's news.
To reiterate what our publisher, John Leeser, observed: "Winning 14 Keystone Media Awards is a tremendous honor. It's well-deserved recognition of the dedication and professionalism our editorial staff brings to work every day."
In those past five years we've won awards for sports reporting, investigative reporting, news features, headline writing and graphic design, amond other categories. We're proud of the scope and range of our coverage as well.
Our goal, however, is not to win awards.
It's to provide our region with fair, comprehensive coverage of the news and of the people making that news.
Our coverage of police investigations and court proceedings attempts to give our audience the most even-handed coverage of public safety -- so residents and voters can make informed decisions about the direction in which their communities are headed.
We don't cherry-pick crimes and allegations from across the state, looking for salacious details we can sensationalize. We want our reporting to be informative as to what life and public safety here in Lycoming County look like.
We report, through feature reporting, on the people and events that make life in our region more enjoyable -- we believe it is a vital part of reflecting the richness of life in our communities.
We cover the municipal governments -- councils, school boards, county commissioners and township supervisors and other commissions alike -- because their decisions have a greater impact on our region's economy, workplaces, neighborhoods and families than whatever pundits on cable TV are talking about this week. Sometimes our local governments can be fascinating and carry higher stakes for our communities and sometimes they can be dull.
But even when local issues fail to excite or inflame the region's residents, it remains important -- in a nation designed to empower local government first and foremost and in a region where alternatives to our newspaper and online platforms frankly frequently neglect this kind of coverage because it isn't "clickbait" enough for them -- to ensure that local governments are accountable to their constituents.
Because, beyond the awards, we are proud to play this critical role in ensuring accountability and reporting the entire array of news -- happy and infuriating, dull and exciting -- so that people in our communities have the fullest sense of what is happening in their corner of the country and world.