One of the things I enjoy about being a journalist is knowing that we help to inform the public. However, we do make mistakes. Last week we erroneously reported on the front page that the Kirkland City Council removed the North Kirkland Community Center from site consideration for the Aquatics Recreation Center (ARC). They did not. They did remove the Juanita Beach Park location from site consideration and voted to place the issue on the ballot to fund the project. Our story was inaccurate and I want to correct the record.

Our job to inform the public comes with a caveat: make a mistake and everyone will see it. We try to run a correction whenever we are alerted to a mistake and we can verify the right information.

When we make mistakes we hear about it. When I first started in journalism and had to run my first correction I was mortified. My editor at the time just looked at me and said, “This is a good thing. It means people are reading what you write.” Participation in city government and local media is important to a democracy.

There is no lack of participation with the Kirkland Reporter. We have a faithful and educated readership. Many papers struggle to get participation and fill their opinion page. We had 32 letters to the editor in February for four publication dates. That is a lot for a weekly newspaper. And for every person who takes the time to sit down and write a letter to the editor, there are hundreds more who don’t have the time, patience or care enough about a subject that week to do so. People also have to believe their letter is going to be read by others in the community in order to take the time out of their day to sit down and write.

I heard from a person once that our mistakes are irrelevant because no one reads our paper. I found that comment ironic. How did he know we made a mistake if he did not read the paper?

The idea that community newspapers are irrelevant is just ignorant and short sighted. Most of what we report on is important to the community and is never reported by more regional news outlets. Property tax increases, who is running for City Council, and road closures in Kirkland are not normally reported on by the big news outlets out of Seattle.

We do not get to all the stories in Kirkland. Covering a city of 80,000-plus residents with one reporter and one regional editor is not an easy task.

I received a call from a reader asking why we don’t cover more “happy” things. Trust me, we don’t like covering murders, rapes and burglaries. But those stories are important so people are aware of their surroundings and stay safe. I had another reader ask why we don’t cover events and have photos in the paper the next week. I believe it is more important for people to know about the event beforehand, so they might attend or avoid road closures, than a week and a half later tell them what they missed.

We love our jobs and we enjoy bringing you the news. We would not do this if we didn’t. We are also human but you can be assured we will correct the record when we make an error because we know you are reading.

Matt Phelps is the regional editor for the Kirkland and Bothell/Kenmore Reporter newspapers.