Ken Graham: FROM THE PUBLISHER

“Hyperlocal” has become a popular term to describe the kind of news that newspapers like The Times present to our readers. Here’s a definition of the word from Wikipeda:

Hyperlocal connotes information oriented around a well-defined community with its primary focus directed toward the concerns of the population in that community. The term can be used as a noun in isolation or as a modifier of some other term (e.g. news).

The “well-defined community” that The Times serves is actually a group of communities we call the Touchet Valley.

We take great pleasure in getting to know the people of Waitsburg, Prescott and Dayton and the rural areas around them, and sharing their stories with our readers. But we believe the “concerns” of our readers encompass more than just local news.

We’ve recently begun presenting opinion pieces and interesting stories (or at least ones we find interesting) from the Washington Post on this page. We do this, in part, because we think there are a lot of stories on national, and even international, topics that are of “concern” to our readers.

We also do it because the Post, under its new ownership by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, had created a cost-effective and user-friendly way for newspapers like ours to easily peruse and download a huge amount of quality content. Heck, we could fill this newspaper three times over or more, just with their stuff. And it would probably be pretty interesting.

Of course that wouldn’t be “hyperlocal.”

Our plan is to choose a couple of stories a week. One will usually provide an interesting take on a current political topic, and the other may be of more general interest.

This week we include a short opinion piece on some of the successes and failures of congress this year, as well as the results of a study showing that people who take a more positive view of aging show fewer signs of mental deterioration. (Have I mentioned how much I love getting older?)

I invite our readers to tell us what they think of the stories we present from the Post and, of course, anything else you like or dislike about what you read on these pages.