We are proud to call The Record an “award-winning” newspaper. We proved it again over the weekend.The Record brought home four awards, including an honorable mention in the General Excellence category in the 2013 Missouri Better Newspaper Contest sponsored by the Missouri Press Association (MPA) and the Missouri Press Foundation. The awards were presented at the 147th MPA convention held in Kansas City. We don’t publish a newspaper to win awards.We’ve made that point before. But these awards show the breadth of talent we have throughout our newsroom.The truth is we are immensely proud of our team. They work hard to inform, educate and entertain our readers each and every week. They take their responsibility as trustees for the public seriously. We have a great staff, which is something we forget to say often enough. That applies to all of the other members of our team. Anyone familiar with publishing a newspaper understands it is a team effort. That includes the front office, the designers, digital operators, pressroom, mail room, distribution and accounting. Without their contributions, we couldn’t distribute an award-winning newspaper each and every week. That’s a fact.And the reality is we couldn’t do any of this without our advertising professionals. No margin, no mission as the saying goes. We understand clearly that many people are more interested in the ads than the news content. We are the only medium that can say that. Were it not for all these people, neither you nor I would be able to enjoy a newspaper that records a community’s history each and every week.That history includes, unfortunately, covering crime stories.A reader questioned in a letter to the editor in this edition why we cover crime stories and our judgment in where they appear in our newspaper.With respect to where they appear, specifically whether they should or should not be placed on the front page, that decision is made by the editor or the publisher. Each story is judged on its own merits and its newsworthiness.If the letter writer is suggesting that we are trying to sensationalize crime stories to sell more papers, that is not our intent and never has been. We have always covered crime stories and, the fact is, crime stories have regularly appeared on our front pages. This isn’t anything new for this publication or for that matter, any good newspaper. Some issues of the paper have more crime stories than others. That is the case this week.You could argue that there is a disproportionate amount of crime in this area as the letter writer suggests. But you could also argue that our local law enforcement officers do a good job of catching criminals and publicizing that fact to the media. That is another aspect to covering crime. Any suggestion that we focus on the bad news and ignore the good news is simply not true.In fact, for the most part, we are the only newspaper covering the good or positive stories in the county. That’s not to say we couldn’t do better and that we don’t take the readers’ comments to heart. If you have an idea for a story contact us. While it’s always great to win awards, and we are very pleased that our professional peers have judged our work to be “award-winning,” it’s far more important that we provide a consistently reliable, useful, viable and informative product to our readers.In the end, the readers truly are the judges who have the final say on our product and its value to them.We are proud to be your local community newspaper. Thanks for reading.