Before its debut in December 2020, we wrote that the “Characters of the County” column was meant to spotlight some of the people who call Lincoln County home.
As the column has grown, it’s become one of, if not our most, read columns. The excitement we see building around celebrating the people of this area has been a wonderful reminder of how we cherish the people that make this place so special.
With its rise in popularity, we thought it important to further illustrate the decision-making process behind who qualifies as a “Character.”
The only hard rule is that the person currently lives within Lincoln County. Aside from that, we rely on suggestions.
When we’re sorting through these suggestions and those we know in the community, we try to look at what people are doing, how they engage with others, the time of year, and how best to celebrate those you, the community, would like to see above the fold.
The truth is that everyone is a character of the county, but writing a piece for everyone, at 52 a year and 42,000 people in the county, would take a little while, perhaps a century or eight.
While giving everyone their due is not tenable, we try to celebrate the people who you want to celebrate and make this place the home it is. You don’t have to have lived in the county your whole life, and you don’t have to have been born at Miles, but you do have to live here, and you do have to contribute.
There are some folks we’ve asked to interview, but they’ve politely declined, which reminds us of the old adage about how the best leaders are reluctant ones. This is sometimes true for the column: some of the people who most deserve celebrating don’t want to have an article written about them, which is just fine.
Whoever we get the chance to write about, we think of the column as if we were introducing our readers to a friend of ours, and by the end of the introduction, you should know why we wanted you to meet them.
We believe most of us deserve celebrating, but we need your help in finding interesting people for the column. Introduce us to the characters you want to see written about by sending your suggestions to info@lcnme.com.
