Stories straight from the source

What are you interested in?

Is politics your thing? Do you want to keep tabs on what your city council or the borough assembly is up to?

Are you looking for hot fishing spots or to find out who won last night’s game?

Perhaps you’re more interested in what’s hanging in local galleries and who’s playing at your favorite coffee shop this weekend?

Let us know.

The Clarion prides itself in being a community paper. That’s not to say we don’t care about what’s happening in the rest of the state, the nation or the world — or that we don’t think our readers care. On the contrary, we do our best to keep readers abreast of what’s going on beyond the Kenai Peninsula’s borders.

But what we devote the majority of our resources to is covering this community. To do that, we need your help.

We always strive to report on breaking news and the pressing issues of the day, as well as illuminate the slices of life that may not involve fire engines, millions of dollars or hundreds of jobs, but are interesting all the same.

But we can’t be in all places at all times, and we can’t presume to always know what our readers are interested in seeing in their paper.

That’s where you come in. The community relies on us to bring them information, and at the same time we rely on our community to give us information.

The Clarion has always had avenues for readers to submit information that’s important to them — like birth and wedding announcements, letters to the editor and information about upcoming events.

We also are open to readers calling, e-mailing or stopping by to let us know what they’d like to see us do stories on. But as much as we’d like to, we can’t cover them all.

So we’re creating opportunities for readers to tell their stories themselves. Starting this week, you’ll see announcements in several sections of our paper asking readers to submit information and photos on various topics through our Web site, www.peninsulaclarion.com.

In our Community page, which runs Mondays (except this week since we don’t have a paper on Labor Day, it will run Tuesday), we’ll select photos submitted on the Clarion’s online Spotted feature and run them in the paper.

In Thursday’s Pulse entertainment section, we’re asking readers to submit their take on movies so we can run their comments along with our weekly movie review (and while they’re at it, we hope they will submit an original poem, as well).

In Friday’s Outdoors section, we’re encouraging readers to tell us about their adventures in the great outdoors — whether it’s fishing, hunting, hiking, four-wheeling or anything else. We’ll pick selected stories — and don’t forget the photos — and print them in the paper each week.

In Sunday’s Peninsula Life section, pet owners can tell us about their best animal friends, and brides and grooms can detail their joyous, stressful, chaotic or as-smoothly-as-planned road to tying the knot.

So let’s hear it peninsula. This is your paper. Help us make it more about you.