Welcome to Baldwin’s paper of record

Hi, Baldwin. I’m Chris Connolly, editor of the only newspaper focused entirely on you.

You know what I like about this job? All the people yelling at me. Does that sound weird? I’ll explain.

Before taking the helm at the Herald, I was a magazine writer. I wrote about travel, gadgetry, relationships and food for some of the most recognizable publications in the country. And in the 10 years I did that, do you know how many letters I got? How many emails I received responding to something I wrote? Fewer than a dozen. And these were stories that went out to millions of readers.

Now, I’ll grant you that my Cosmo story, “How to Impress Your Boyfriend’s Friends,” wasn’t exactly the most inspirational subject for meaningful dialogue. But the fact that my stories didn’t generate more back-and-forth was always a letdown for me. At the Herald, the amount of feedback we get from the community is much greater. Last year I got six emails taking me to task for misidentifying a quilt. (I should have known that quilters would be detail-oriented.) I was confronted by a reader at a school board meeting once who said he planned to demand my firing because I hadn’t adequately covered the installation of a new Welcome to Baldwin sign.

Now, quilt corrections and demands for your termination might not immediately strike you as a good thing. But in the newspaper game, they’re exactly what you want. In fact, as an editor, you get nervous if you go too long without anyone giving you the finger.

The level of community involvement in Baldwin is something a lot of towns would envy. People in Baldwin go to meetings. They attend reunions and football games and concerts and fundraisers. They read this newspaper, and they care about every word in it. That not only makes my job easier, it makes it a lot more interesting.

One thing I hear often is that Baldwin gets ignored. The night before I sat down to write this, I was at a Baldwin Civic Association meeting, and one man commented that “because we’re an unincorporated hamlet, we don’t get the attention that other towns receive.”