Thanks to all for reading this stuff over the years

After 500 or so columns and roughly 2,000 editorials over the past 10 years, you'd think I would have run out of things to say. In fact, many of you probably think I ran out of things to say quite some time back, yet I keep writing stuff every week and putting it in the newspaper.

Well, I haven't run out of things to say, but I have run out of space. Today is my last day at the Nevada Appeal before I take over as director of the Nevada Press Association, and this is my last column.

It's been thoroughly enjoyable, except for the times people called and yelled at me. That's part of the job of being editor of a newspaper. People are allowed - even encouraged - to call and yell at the editor, because it's part of a great American tradition.

I used to work for a newspaper that had on its masthead a 1917 quote from William Allen White: "There are three things that no one can do to the entire satisfaction of anyone else: make love, poke the fire and run a newspaper."

Yeah, but it sure is fun trying.

When I arrived in Carson City, Jeff Ackerman had been here a few months and was soon to take over as publisher of the Appeal. One thing we agreed on - this newspaper had been around since 1865, and it was our jobs not to screw it up too much.

What I've tried to do since then was produce a consistent quality that was representative of the capital city of Nevada. I went by the motto, "If it happens in Carson City, it ought to be in the Appeal."

That's our focus and one of the reasons more people read the Appeal every day now than any time in that 140-year history. Of course, it helps that more people live in Carson City (and Lyon County and Douglas County) than any time in history.

A newspaper has to be about the community in which it lives. People want to know what's going on, what their neighbors are thinking, what their elected officials are doing. They want to know what businesses moved in, who was born, who died, who got married and who got arrested.

They want to be entertained by their newspaper, and they want it to give them something to talk about when they go to the coffee shop or the hair dresser.

A daily newspaper tries to satisfy all kinds of people, because people pick it up for a thousand different reasons. Some turn to the crossword puzzle first, others to the sports scores. Many can't go a day without reading the letters to the editor, while some want to scan the classifieds for a car.

Editing a newspaper doesn't mean deciding what to put in nearly as much as it means deciding what to leave out. Every day, we get a certain number of pages determined by how much advertising was sold. (It's a business, after all, and the folks at the corporate office in Reno do like to see us turn a profit.)

Once we know how much space we have, we start making the choices. It's like stuffing 10 pounds of manure in a five-pound sack, as one of my former bosses was fond of saying. At the Appeal, we decide every day to put as much local news in the paper as we can muster. Then we look to the region - Lake Tahoe, Reno, the rest of the state - before deciding which national and international stories need to get in.

We do it that way for a straightforward reason. The national and international news you can get on the Internet or the television networks. By the time you get the Appeal in the morning, you may well already have seen those stories. But we can't just ignore it in the Appeal.

If you read much about the newspaper industry, you'll see a lot of gnashing of teeth about declining circulations and layoffs. It's a tough time, by many accounts. Yet newspapers continue to make money for their owners, and most of those woes can be found at metropolitan papers.

They have a more difficult time competing with the Internet because they have a more difficult time relating to their readers, and that comes down to the sense of community and local news.

Small papers like the Appeal continue to thrive. They can look at the Internet as a threat, or they can look at it as an opportunity.

The fact is, thousands of people read the Appeal online every day - many of whom wouldn't have been able to get it in the old days, unless they subscribed by mail and were satisfied reading four-day-old news. When you add it up, there are probably twice as many people reading the Appeal today as there were 10 years ago.

The key is to pay attention to what readers say, even when they're angry. Far worse is an editor who hears nothing, because that means people aren't reading the paper or, if they are, don't much care what's in it.

I'll leave you with another quote from William Allen White which has stood over the years and will hold truth whether a newspaper lands with a thud on your doorstep or pops up on the screen of your laptop.

"If, in the long run and in the main, day after day and year after year, a paper stands for decency, for honest thinking and clean living, if it speaks fair for those who are trying to do good, and condemns sneaks and cheats and low persons, this is a good newspaper."

The reporters, photographers and editors who work here understand this. The Appeal is in very capable hands. Thanks for reading.

n Starting Monday, Barry Smith will be executive director of the Nevada Press Association, which is based in Carson City and represents newspapers around the state.