Here’s a complaint we in The Winchester Sun newsroom hear often: “The newspaper only prints bad news; you never do stories on the good things going on.”

Sometimes, that criticism is leveled at the media in general; sometimes, it’s directed squarely at this community newspaper. We hear it from people who come into the office, from people we bump into out in the community, from elected officials, from random internet commenters … it’s safe to say the idea is pervasive, even among those who know better.

This “media only reports bad news” meme is not generally accurate when leveled at the journalism industry as a whole. In the case of a minority of news outlets that really do just peddle in negativity and fear, it’s a completely fair criticism. In the case of The Winchester Sun, it is an utterly absurd and false accusation.

When people claim The Sun doesn’t report enough on good news, we almost have to assume they must not read the newspaper. We believe you’d be hard-pressed to find another paper in Kentucky that pursues positive news about its community as relentlessly as we do.

If you’re a regular reader, some of the positive stories you’ve seen in just the last week include the dedication of the community’s first African-American Heritage Trail, the announcement of the unveiling of a groundbreaking art project called “Of Thee, I Sing,” a new pilot program offering transportation assistant to people in recovery, St. Agatha Academy celebrating 100 years of education in Clark County, another Honor Flight recognizing area veterans with a trip to Washington, D.C., the community gathered over the weekend for the annual Rally4Recovery and the Just One More walk for recovery, 152 children were served through the Kiwanis Walk With A Child event and the Campbell Junior High School golf team placed first and third in the regional tournament.

That list isn’t complete, nor is the past week an outlier — you can read that much or more positive news every week in The Sun. It’s been that way for years and it will remain that way for years to come. Telling our community’s positive stories is one of the most important jobs we have as community journalists, and we take that job seriously.

Do we report bad news, too? Definitely. That’s because it’s also a newspaper’s job to make readers aware of bad things that are going on. You cannot fix a problem if you don’t know that it exists.

The Sun covers problems like poverty, drug abuse, food insecurity, crime, criminal justice problems and the behavior and policies of elected officials. We do it not because we want to broadcast bad news, but because it is a necessary step toward making things better.

If you sweep your problems under the rug, they will only ever get worse. If you stare them in the face and deal with them realistically, you can at least try to make them better.

Even our reporting on bad news is intended to help the community deal with its problems and make more good news in the future. Without a community newspaper around to do that tough reporting, many problems would persist silently and no one would take action to fix them. The end result would be a community with more bad news, not less.

Editorials represent the opinion of the newspaper’s editorial board. The board is comprised of publisher Michael Caldwell and Bluegrass Newsmedia editors Whitney Leggett and Ben Kleppinger. To inquire about a meeting with the board, contact Caldwell at 759-0095.