This week is National Newspaper Week in America, a time for newspapers to reflect on their roles in the community and to seek ways to improve.

We believe here at the Greenville Advocate, that we do that on a weekly basis.

A newspaper edition is a miracle unto itself.

Very often, the news staff will simply sit around a table and kick about story ideas.

Yes, there are plenty of those normal stories like city council meetings, crimes and other things, but there are also those stories where we seek to give you more information than usual.

In the last few weeks, our work here at the newspaper was tested with our coverage of Hurriance Ivan's approach, his cutting swath through the area and the destruction and recovery left in his wake.

It was an entire newspaper staff effort on the first edition following the storm.

Reporters, advertising representatives, circulation representatives, office personnel and the publisher were all out taking pictures and getting information that you could use in your own recovery efforts.

We're not trying to toot our own horns, far from it.

But we do want our readers to understand that we take our work here very seriously.

We may not make everyone happy each edition and our coverage may always not be what you expect or want to see.

When stories are chosen, we have to take everyone's consideration into account.

For more than 139 years, the Greenville Advocate has chronicled the lives of its readers.

People are amazed as they search our bound volumes to find their birth announcements or the birth announcements of their parents or even grandparents in those yellowed pages.

We report on the school highlights and accomplishments, engagements, weddings, birth annoucements and finally, we publish the obituaries of our dearly departed.

Along the way, we cover local government, law enforcement and the occasional hurricane that plunders through.

Through it all, we're here fulfilling a community trust for the words you see printed and pages are merely ours, the spirit behind each edition is the community's spirit.

So here's a tip of our hat to all the community newspapers across the country and a big thank you to you, our readers, who make up the pages

each week.

Without you, our job would have no meaning.

Thank you for reading the Greenville Advocate.