A Year To Remember - Editorial
Both in Bourne and in general, 2022 was quite the year. This week’s edition marks the final edition of my first calendar year as the news editor of The Bourne Enterprise, and I could not be more proud of the first six months of my tenure as your editor.
Coming from Falmouth, where I was a reporter for one year before being offered the opportunity to edit the Bourne edition, my biggest worry was having to start from scratch: a new town, new governing bodies with new people whom I had yet to meet, seven new villages to get to know and a slew of readers that I hoped would embrace me and my journalism. And embrace we did.
Since July I’ve had the opportunity to communicate with so many people in and around Bourne—residents, readers, board and committee members, news-tippers, history buffs, conservationists, educators, legislators, business owners, voters, and even students—and each and every interaction has been a learning experience. Bourne and its many faces have continued to impress me each and every week, and that is something I look forward to having more of in the new year.
Perhaps the biggest lesson I’ve learned is this: local newspapers are the crucial lifelines of a community. Where else can you find a melding of the minds met with factual, ethics-based reporting on the goings-on of a town? Larger regional or statewide newspapers might not care about a 40B application abutting an historic property or what the local board of health has to say about the state’s new septic regulations, but we do.
Social media and its countless forms of information exchange are not, and never will be, a match for real journalism done by real, trained professionals, especially when those professionals are residents who live, work, and thrive in the same communities they cover. And the reason for that is a simple one: we’re not just “the media”—we’re neighbors, we’re people you see at the grocery store and most importantly, we’re human.
During my first few weeks as editor, I published an editorial titled “Telling Bourne’s Stories.” My goal was to be hands-on in the community, to get to know its residents and tell your stories. Looking back, I realize now that that was never going to be a one-sided mission; I could not have done it without engagement and feedback from readers, but together, I think we’ve done that.
I could not be more proud of what we’ve done so far, the stories we’ve told, and The Bourne Enterprise as a whole. So here’s to 2023, a new year that I know will be full of more great opportunities for this town. I look forward to another year as your editor. Happy New Year, Bourne.