GUN BARREL CITY -- Athens Daily Review editor Jayson Larson characterized his newspaper as a "mouthpiece of the community" in a speech to the Cedar Creek Lake Rotary Club on Dec. 21. "If I'm doing my job right, the newspaper is reflective of the community," said Larson, who has worked at several small East Texas newspapers during the past 15 years. Larson said newspapers must be responsive to their readers' interests if they want to remain relevant in today's Internet world. The Internet has created a new "hunger" for news that requires a quicker response time, he added. "Obviously, the Internet has changed a lot of what we do," said Larson, whose own newspaper has enhanced its Internet website, www.athensreview.com, this year to provide more extensive coverage. The Monitor of Mabank, www.themonitor.net also has enhanced its website this year to offer the entire newspaper online. Social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter are helping drive the demand for information, and it is incumbent on editors and reporters to examine those sites to determine the accuracy and relevancy of the information being posted, Larson said. The basic tenants of reporting remain the same, but the the methods of collecting information has changed, he noted. Information from government agencies often can be found online now rather than by visiting offices or making phone calls. The shelf life of news has grown shorter because younger readers who are Internet-savvy have become accustomed to immediate access to what is happening, Larson said. At the same time they have become more skeptical about what they read and hear, he said. Larson said journalists must strive to provide material that is newsworthy, unbiased, reliable and reflective of all points of view, regardless of how great the demand for faster coverage becomes. "If we can't explain why we did something, we shouldn't have done it," Larson said. Larson said it is always a challenge to provide a balance between the amount of "good" and "bad" news that is presented in a newspaper. Some readers are more interested in reading stories that portray the community in a more positive light while others tend to be bad news junkies, he acknowledged. Larson is pictured below.