As a journalist I’m no stranger to criticism.

People complain about what I report. People complain about how I report. People complain about what I don’t report.

People complain about typos.

People complain about bias.

Sometimes, the criticisms have their merits. Unfortunately, we have a very small staff that covers a very large area and in the age of the internet, we have news cycles that blow the traditional daily papers out of the water.

For the mistakes I make, I apologize and do my best to see they are corrected as quickly as possible.

But one of the more frequent criticisms I’ve received over the years, and one I’ve often found ironic, are those who say we “only report on negative things” happening in our community.

You may or may not have noticed that we update the news on the homepage of NorthCountryNow.com at least four times per day, but often more.

In general, at each of those updates we have at least one staff-reported byline story, two community events, a story about a local achievement, two news stories one of which may or may not be a police or fire story, an opinion story and an external link to another news source.

We see the number of clicks any given story gets and as someone who spends a lot of time interviewing, researching and writing, it can be a little underwhelming.

Don’t worry, I’m not upset or offended about the realities of my job. I think the work we do is important and I like doing it.

But, what you’ll find if you look at the numbers, is the most-viewed articles on our website tend to be police or emergency related news and obituaries.

A well-researched news story with multiple sources and significant time and effort spent by a reporter is lucky to be read by 1,000 people online, though there are exceptions for sure.

A police or emergency story of much lower significance will easily garner many more views than that, while a tragic story can easily pull 10,000. Some serious news stories have achieved that many views, but they are few and far between.

I’m in no way angry about what stories readers choose to view on our website. I appreciate everyone who takes the time to visit NorthCountryNow.com or read North Country This Week. So do my co-workers and my children who you support when read our work.

I’m simply pointing out to the people who’ve complained that we “sensationalize” stories or only report the “bad news,” that we do a whole lot more.

And most of the serious reporting requires significantly more time and effort than “sensational” stories.

I think the work is important. Many people wouldn’t know about events taking place in the community, about donations to local charities, or achievements of community members if we didn’t report on them.

We spend a lot of time and effort covering government meetings and following up on tips and rumors about community issues in an attempt to answer questions. Most of the work we do is geared toward community improvement.

What I’m saying is the perception that we report bad news is really a false narrative which stems from what people choose to read, rather than what we actually report.

For those who don’t believe me, I challenge you to count the number of stories on our homepage on any given day and separate them by whether they are about bad things happening or positive things happening and let me know what you see.

Likewise, I invite those of you who want to read more positive stories to share them with us. We like writing them. We like displaying them and we’d like to see more people read them.

Jimmy Lawton is news editor of North Country This Week and NorthCountryNow.com.