A couple of weeks ago, I saw “Spotlight,” a movie that depicts the true story of a group of investigative journalists at the Boston Globe who uncovered sexual abuse within the Catholic Church and the extensive effort to cover it up.

“Be careful,” a friend warned me when I told her I was seeing the film. “You’ll want to move to a big city and join an investigative team. It’s that good.”

And to be honest, it was that good. I left the theater with that “fire in my belly” Mike Wallace was always talking about in his glory days, ready to get out and dig deep into an issue.

This crisis of faith lasted about five minutes, because my next stop was a used book sale. As fate would have it, the library had specially featured a book by a Nebraska journalist who shares my own undying love for newspapers. Judy Muller’s “Emus Loose in Egnar: Big Stories from Small Towns” was exactly the message I needed to remind me that you don’t have to live in a big city to make a big impact with the news.

The author traveled the country talking to owners and publishers of weekly newspapers about their biggest stories and their beliefs on the future of journalism.

Of course, all of them have full faith that print journalism will persevere, and their reasons are the same as my own.

Nothing beats the feeling of seeing someone in the park with a newspaper in their hands, shaking their heads at the foolish decisions depicted in crime stories, or smiling at the picture of a loved one at a community event.

As long as there are parents, people won’t be able to resist picking up a product with their baby’s face inside. As long as there are politics, people will need some sort of outlet to keep those entities in check and to learn about the decisions made by those elected. As long as there are businesses, there will be a need for print advertising.

My point is, it doesn’t seem that newspapers will be going anywhere any time soon.

But that doesn’t mean that our newspapers can’t continue to grow and improve. We’re always looking for ways to provide a better product.

With that said, it’s important to realize that not all newspapers can unravel the same level of journalism as the reporters at the Boston Globe. Small newspapers like ours don’t have that level of staffing or that kind of time. With the exception of its coverage of Sept. 11, 2001, the Spotlight team — comprised of four reporters — worked on nothing other than the Catholic priest scandal for the better part of an entire year.

Our team of four works hard to report the stories that matter most to you, and filling four newspapers and an entertainment weekly, among other products, keeps us busy. We do our best to provide relevant and important information to our readers in a timely fashion, and we appreciate the help from citizen journalists submitting content and photos to help spread the word.

While we may never have the kind of staffing or time that the Spotlight team had, there is certainly more we can do to dig deep into issues that matter to our readership. Some examples of this in-depth reporting can be found in our annual Horizons edition next February, where you can find pieces our team will have been working on for as many as four months.

Additionally, be on the lookout for a Closer Look series in 2016, where our team will work to regularly provide stories that dive into a topic at a deeper level than our typical front-page news stories allow. I’ll provide more details about that when we get closer to unveiling it.

We may never unveil a national scandal like the Spotlight, but I promise we’ll do our very best to keep the people of southwest Michigan informed about the issues that matter to them.

 

Ambrosia Neldon is the managing editor at Leader Publications. She can be reached by phone at (269) 687-7713, or by email at ambrosia.neldon@leaderpub.com.