Our view - We want to help you

During the past two months, we’ve heard from a lot of you.

These comments, written by long-time readers and new residents, are appreciated. If you value local journalism, we need you more than ever.

If you’re reading this, you already understand this. But if you know somebody who hasn’t picked up the Thermopolis Independent Record in a while, we have a request — let them or her know that we’d love them buy a copy.

If you’re able, purchase goods or services from a small business that advertises with us or buy an annual IR subscription for a friend. If you have an announcement or a news story, give us a call. If you have an opinion, write us a letter to the editor. If you have something to sell, we can help you with a classified ad.

Our hard-working staff spends nights, weekends and holidays gathering stories, taking photographs, working with advertisers, designing pages and advertisements, and more. We regularly meet with local residents, community stakeholders and elected officials. We help businesses — small and large — with marketing. We live in Hot Springs County, and the actions of our community affect our lives too.

As the coronavirus has changed your daily life, we too have made tough decisions in order to keep our newspaper running during this difficult time. Like all small businesses, we’ve had to cut back on expenses and open office hours.

But we’ve also made exciting changes — some weeks we’ve been able to include fun pages, complete with games, puzzles and color activities for your children (or you). We’ve ramped up our news coverage to ensure that you’re getting up-to-date information on not only local issues but important state wide issues as well. We just changed our flag — the banner with our logo that runs across the front page — back to one that lets you know immediately you are picking up the Thermopolis Independent Record.

Hot Springs County needs a local newspaper. We provide an invaluable commodity for $1 each week. We hope that you’re able to round up four quarters and purchase one. If you don’t want to don a mask and drive to our office or a location that sells our newspaper, give us a call and we’ll set you up with a print and or digital subscription.

We’re here to keep readers informed and advertisers in business. We’ve been through economic hardships before — this newspaper has survived wars, economic downturns, local catastrophes and even national pandemics.

We want to help you, but we do ask that you help us too.