The first week of October is National Newspaper Week. It’s a week when readers are encouraged to celebrate the role that newspapers play in creating an informed, active citizenry. It’s also traditionally a time when newspapers run editorials highlighting what they do.

The Lenawee Voice is going to observe National Newspaper Week with a slightly different twist. After all, you’re already reading our paper. What we want to do in this editorial is urge you to read another newspaper. Maybe more than one.

When we started the Lenawee Voice, we decided to publish a digest of community news once a month, and we invested in the idea of free distribution to as many people as possible. We believe that this model allows us to play a valuable role in informing our community and bringing people together. But when it comes to detailed, week-to-week coverage of local news — particularly in the Lenawee County communities outside Adrian — if you rely exclusively on the Voice for news, you’ll be missing a lot. With no full-time staff and 32 to 40 pages a month, there’s only so much we can do.

Lenawee County is fortunate to have several locally owned weekly newspapers serving different corners of the county. If you live in a community served by one of these papers, we hope you will subscribe to it.

The Tecumseh area is ably served by the Tecumseh Herald. If you were interested in the Tecumseh school district’s superintendent search, we told you that interviews were about to happen and we told you who was hired — but the Herald walked you step-by-step through the entire process. If you live in Raisin Township, a fast-growing area with lots of development, you should know that the Herald provides excellent coverage of the township planning commission, where important decisions about those developments are made. And if you see a story about a new Tecumseh business in this paper, there’s a good chance that we found out about it by reading the Herald.

If you live in the Blissfield area, nobody can compete with The Advance for coverage of local government meetings and community events. The same is true of The Exponent in Brooklyn, whose coverage area includes the Irish Hills. And lest anyone think that local weeklies are entirely the province of legacy owners, we should note that two of Lenawee County’s newspapers — the Clinton Local and the Hudson Post-Gazette — have relatively new owners who are carrying the local news legacy forward.

Finally, we believe that there is still plenty of value in reading The Daily Telegram. It’s no secret that we started the Lenawee Voice because of discontent with the cutbacks made by the Telegram’s corporate owners, but reporters who work for the Telegram continue to do good work, and there are many stories that they are able to cover in more detail than we are.

A strong community needs a strong local news ecosystem with many different voices. We’re glad you’re reading the Lenawee Voice, but we hope you’ll read other papers too.