From the Editor: Leeds hopes to continue tradition of getting out the news

I want to introduce myself, and my goals, to the readers of the Havre Daily News.

Some of you already know me. My name is Tim Leeds, a former reporter and assistant editor at the Havre Daily, and I took over as the head of the news department Aug. 5.

Before I say anything else, I wanted to thank and congratulate my predecessor, John Kelleher, for his more than four decades, including nearly a decade here at the Havre Daily, in getting out the news. His dedication and hard work is an inspiration for journalists and newspaper readers everywhere, and I hope he enjoys his well-earned retirement.

My goal as the new editor is the same: I want to get the news out to our readers.

I have deep roots in the area. On my mother's side, all of her grandparents were in this area by about the late 1880s. On my father's side, his mother, father and grandfather settled here about 1911.

I grew up on a ranch in the Bear Paw Mountains, graduated from Havre High School and have attended college in Missoula at the University of Montana and in Havre, both while the college was Northern Montana College and Montana State University-Northern.

But even with those roots, most of the history and current issues facing the region I learned after I started reporting for the Havre Daily in January 2000. It is funny how much you can take for granted and kind of ignore when you grow up in a region.

I hope to use my roots, knowledge and ties to the area to help us get out the news in the best way we can, hopefully for a long time - I ain't goin' nowhere.

We want our readers to know what is going on. For many stories, we will be using news service stories - what we still call "the wire" - and in the newsroom we will focus on local, local, local.

We will be interviewing everyone from local people about what they are doing right up to federal or international officials, but we will try to focus everything including interviews with the members of our congressional delegation on what it means for north-central Montana and the Hi-Line.

We will try to cover everthing, from the fun and exciting to what some people might think is boring to stories that might be disturbing.

And we need your help. We have excellent reporters and photographers working for us right now, but we have a small staff. We will do our best to know what is going on so we can report on it, but we want everyone - local residents, local businesses, local officials, local organizations and everyone else - to let us know what is happening.

We can't guarantee when a story will run, or even if it will run, but if we don't know about it, we can't report on it.

We also can't guarantee, even if we want to run something, that we can send our staff - but we welcome press releases and courtesy photos, and we will try to run items of interest whether we work it up or it is submitted.

People interested in writing columns also are more than welcome to contact me if you would like to start writing.

And if you don't like our reporting, please let us know. If you show us we made a mistake, we want to fix it. Hopefully, we will never make mistakes and have to run corrections - but we are human and mistakes happen. If we make a major mistake or miss something important, as well as a correction we might run a followup article.

But even if you just don't like a story, please feel free to let us know. It may give us more information to follow up, but even if we say, "sorry you feel that way, but we think the article needed to be written," feel free to let us know.

Here is to what I hope is a long journey helping provide the news to our readers.

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Tim Leeds is managing editor of the Havre Daily News