Sharing from our proud partners

We have always taken pride in the fact that the vast majority of what you see in these pages was produced by the staff of the News Letter Journal. Unfortunately, a decade-long decline in newspaper revenue in this country has forced us to make a choice between the pride we take in the information we actually produce for you and the passion we have to provide our community with the most accurate and relevant information available.
The News Letter Journal truly believes that arming the citizens of Weston County with this knowledge is the best way we can fulfill our mission to promote our community and allow its residents to govern themselves successfully, so it really wasn’t much of a choice. We have been confronted with the very real possibility that financial support for newspapers will continue to decrease for the foreseeable future, and that has helped us realize that pride is far more expensive than passion — and serves far less purpose.
As a result, we have sought partnerships with a growing number of readers who represent our own home-grown version of citizen journalists, and in the future we hope to work with even more of the talented individuals who produce their own photographs and stories about our community. Our platforms - both in print and online - offer an opportunity for people to share their passion for Weston County with our audience, and we welcome the chance to introduce even more of you to readers moving forward.
While there is nothing more valuable to us than the partnerships we enjoy in our own community, our desire to make sure our readers have access to the information most valuable to them has also motivated us to form partnerships with other journalists in Wyoming. These partnerships allow us to use the work they produce when we believe it is relevant or important to the community we serve.
Our page one story, “Ambulance services are on life support across Wyoming,” is an example of these new types of industry partnerships as it was produced by WyoFile reporter Daniel Bendsten and shared with you through the News Letter Journal’s membership in the Wyoming News Exchange. 
The Wyoming News Exchange was created by former Wyoming Press Association Executive Director Jim Angell and his wife Mary as a means to compile and share the most important stories produced by the state’s top newspapers. 
(You may have met Jim and Mary before, as Jim traveled here occasionally to speak to various groups about open meetings and public records laws in Wyoming, and the talented couple also performed at street dances and other events the News Letter Journal sponsored in years past - including our eclipse celebration in August, 2017.)
WyoFile — a non-profit online news outlet that is an associate member of the Wyoming Press Association — was eagerly welcomed to participate in the News Exchange. They have produced a number of valuable statewide stories that we have shared with our readers on newslj.com, and we were more than happy to swallow our pride and put Bendsten’s excellent story on our front page this week because we think the information it contains is valuable to you — and we quite literally couldn’t have done it better ourselves.
We think it is important to let our readers know that the challenges surrounding the need to provide affordable ambulance service isn’t isolated to Weston County, and we hope our own decision-makers will see the benefit in examining what other communities are doing in the face of this struggle. Perhaps they may even reach out to share ideas and experiences in the hopes of identifying solutions.
We were also pleased that the owner of the local ambulance service was contacted by WyoFile and was willing to provide additional information and insights. He has largely declined the opportunity to comment on stories regarding the subject in this publication, and also reluctant to reveal information at public meetings where local officials have tried to address the uncertain future of ambulance service in Weston County, so we are pleased to offer the insight to our readers regardless of who did the work.
That’s what collaborative journalism is really all about — getting the best information to The People so they can best govern themselves — and we’re proud to share our talents and pool our own work with the state’s top newspapers and online news outlets. (In addition to WyoFile, we also collaborate with the Cowboy State Daily and its publisher, Bill Sniffin. You see Bill’s columns in this paper frequently, and NLJ stories have run on that website a number of times).
Our wounded pride has also been somewhat salvaged by the fact that our work is seen by more readers through the contributions we’ve made to other news outlets since the inception of the Wyoming News Exchange. We truly hope that our stories have benefitted other communities because the passion journalists have for the mission we share…has to be enough to overcome the challenges faced by our industry.
Collaborative journalism helps us ensure that we can insulate our readers and communities from the economic challenges faced by our industry because it means we can provide just as much information as we have in the past, and maybe more. For that we’re grateful to our partners, both within our community and without, and we invite our readers to take full advantage by checking in at newslj.com for more stories from our partners.