Please let me say, right here at the beginning of this week’s scribbling, that in no way am I being disingenuous, or falsely modest, when I assess the

“value” of this column.

My honest appraisal is that “Write Again” is, at best, only marginally important and of minimal significance.

Put another way, most folks would probably “little note nor long remember” much of anything I’ve ever written.

Now, having offered this personal evaluation, let me move on to the Washington Daily News. That is, just what are my feelings about our paper.

First, however, one needs to know that newspapers, everywhere, have been in a state of flux over the past few years. The printed word in a newspaper is relatively unimportant to a huge demographic slice of our country. Most young people simply do not make reading a newspaper on a regular basis a part of their lives. Many, if not most, rarely read a newspaper at all.

For a dwindling number of us, reading the paper every day is a genuinely important part of our lives.

So, it is for those of us who love to read a newspaper that I offer my personal observations about the Daily News.

The focus has shifted dramatically to local and area news, events, happenings. News of the country and the world may be easily attained by and from a diverse range of other sources.

The editorial page adheres to this paradigm as well. The focus is local. 

This is good.

The sports section is heavily focused on local and area scholastic and recreation events, games, meets, matches, and the young athletes who are a part of that world. This is a positive coverage effort. I would submit, respectfully, that a bit too much coverage is given to schools located outside Beaufort and Hyde counties. That’s just one man’s opinion. Two-day and, sometimes, three-day lags on game reports (mostly ECU) are not good. Better nothing than very late news, especially when other media have already covered it in a much more timely manner.

The “Daily News” has competent writers, and they are prodigious in providing coverage and features almost every day. They do a very good job.

Because I’m cursed with punctuation and word usage sensitivity, I am very much aware of comma faults, comma splices, apostrophe and word usage errors. The main one being that most people, even writers, struggle with what is and what is not an appositive and the proper use and nonuse of commas in this regard.

And so on.

This is enough — probably too much — of Bartow’s subjective assessment. As in, who really cares what he thinks, anyway.

My personal hope is that I remain a part, albeit a very small part, of our paper.

And it is “our paper.” Yours and mine.

A cup of good coffee, and the paper, are a splendid way to begin one’s day.

May it continue to be so.