THIS week is Local Newspaper Week but in truth every week should be Local Newspaper Week.

Yes, I know you think I might be biased but hear me out.

We live in an age where news flashes on to the screens of our phones barely before the wheels have stopped spinning. No one needs to wait until the presses roll to find out how their team got on or how a major court case ended because it is all available online straight away.

News is instant, it is fast and it is accessible everywhere (okay, everywhere we have a mobile signal or wifi) and we consume it just as fast.

But where does that news come from? Who sets the agenda? Who cultivates the contacts that provide it? And, come to think of it, who trains those who seek it out?

Local newspapers like the Swindon Advertiser, the Gazette & Herald and the Wiltshire Times are where all that originates.

The years of experience in our newsrooms guide our journalists, bolster them up when they get discouraged and fire them up when a story needs to be told.

We, like hundreds of other well-established newspapers both daily and weekly across the country, are the place politicians, businesses, charities and those with a tale to tell come to get their message out.

Our titles have been in Wiltshire a long while – the Adver and the Wiltshire Times since 1854, the Gazette & Herald since 1816.

They pre-date all of our councils, the police, our sports teams and even the railway. Kings and queens have been and gone, political movements risen and fallen away, businesses found, thrived and died again and we have been here reporting on all of it.

The Swindon Advertiser is as important in its community now as it was when William Morris published his first copy 163 years ago.

What we write might be consumed in a different way but our audience and our influence, as well as our responsibility, is as wide as ever. More than 62,000 read the Adver’s output online and in print every day, while 78,000 see the Gazette and almost 65,000 the Wiltshire Times. That is a sizeable chunk of Wiltshire’s population.

Our newspapers live or die by our good name. We can’t behave like the national tabloids and ride roughshod over a community’s feelings. We are judged by the way we cover the news and if we upset our readers they simply won’t buy our papers. Never mind a press regulator, that is a very powerful check and balance.

Everyone who works on our titles carries that knowledge with them and it informs and inspires the way they write their stories, the care and creativity they put into designing pages and the artistry of the pictures they take.

I’ve been lucky to work in this industry for almost 30 years now and in that time I’ve been privileged to work alongside some wonderful journalists who care deeply about the communities they cover.

The best have been driven by a deep desire to see their byline on great stories that entertain, horrify, inspire and evoke change. But never at the expense the truth.

I’ve greatly enjoyed being involved in campaigns and appeals that have changed peoples’ lives. I think back to the Adver’s £160,000 appeal for Prospect Hospice, the Gazette’s £100,000 fund for Julia’s House Children’s Hospice or the £40,000 the Wiltshire Times raised for Dorothy House – not just because of the money our readers made but because of the platform we were able to give the charities to tell their story.

This year all three titles have got behind the £1.2m Wiltshire Air Ambulance Airbase Appeal.

Over the course of this week the Adver will be looking at the stories and campaigns that have made a difference; the people who work so incredibly hard to bring you the news and the ever-changing world we work in.

I hope it gives you an insight into why I, and those who work alongside me, love it so much.