When folks in my generation were younger, life was much simpler.

There were 13 channels on television. There was one HBO.

Commercials couldn’t be longer than a few minutes in length.

Gas was either regular or unleaded, and water was free from the tap.

Ah, those were the days.

Now, there are several hundred channels of cable to choose from, different octanes of gasoline, infomercials and countless brands of bottled water.

If someone would have told me to invest in bottled water 20 years ago, I would have told that person to hit the road.

Not only are there many more choices today in the products we can buy, there are also more choices in where we receive our information and news.

When we were younger, you only got your news at noon, 6 and 11 p.m. Now, you can turn on your TV at any random moment in a 24-hour period and catch the latest happenings worldwide.

Or, you can log on to just about any of a gazillion news Web sites and get the news 24/7

as well, all of which makes working in the newspaper business that much more difficult, but easier at the same time.

How can that be?

Well, it’s much more difficult in the fact that there is so much more competition these day — not just from local media outlets, but from a million different Internet sites throughout the world as well as the myriad cable channels.

However, it makes things easier for us in that we know where our priorities are, and we know what we need to do to stay competitive: Give the reader what the others guys can’t — local news, and lots of it.

It doesn’t matter how many times you log onto the Internet or flip through digital cable channels, you’re not going to find Lawrence County news six-days-a-week like you can find it here.

And that’s what we’re focused on. Sure, we’ll still give you national, state and world news that we believe is important to everyone, but we’re dedicated to the task of providing one-of-a-kind coverage that nobody can touch — and that, we promise.

As the top item in our mission statement on this page states, our main goal is: to produce exciting, top-quality news publications focusing on people and events that affect the Tri-State.

And though we realize that not everyone is going to like every story in our paper, it’s our job to offer a diverse, but accurate view of Lawrence County and the Tri-State.

We’d love to see you choose to come along for the ride.

Don Willis is managing editor of the Ironton Tribune. He can be reached at (740) 532-1445, ext. 12 or don.willis@irontontribune.com.