Digging news out of frozen ground

The doldrums of winter are upon us, and they are keenly felt here at The Black Mountain News.

The spigot of news that starts to close before Thanksgiving nigh well freezes shut by News Year’s Day. The resulting trickle has thawed a bit now, and the expected forecast, based on many years of experience in the journalism biz, is that the weak flow will gather slowly strength as we head toward spring.

Once people start coming out of their warm homes, they start doing things. And things and people create news.

We here in the news tower are looking for stories throughout these chilly days, of course. We’re working tips we get, cultivating many of our own and generally looking for news everywhere in our unceasing quest to report what’s going on in the Valley.

The holidays, year-end vacations and a round of colds have left us at less than full staff for a couple of months now. And we’re still working through the colds (bet you are too).

But like you, we’re heartened by each minute of sunlight we gain as we approach spring. Each longer day gets us closer to the full flow of news (not to mention sinus-clearing warmth).

In the meantime, we’ve augmented our local coverage with stories from the Associated Press, Gannett news service and The Asheville Citizen-Times. The pressures to fill the paper every week when so little news is coming in can be great, so we’ve used this opportunity to provide Valley readers with content that we hope enriches your lives as regional and global citizens.

You can help us out by contacting us with your news ideas at news@blackmountain

news.com or 669-8727. Weddings, birth announcements, school news, ideas for stories, people who are doing unusual things in the Valley are all the kinds of things we, like you, like to read in the paper.

Does someone you know have an interesting project?

Is your neighbor working on a great idea in her basement?

Help us find the “hidden” stories in the Valley that you want to hear about.

And if you have any advice on how to knock out these colds, we’re all ears.